Quality of Life Patches for various WADs [Updates and Reorganisation on hold]

On 9/5/2023 at 3:18 AM, Firebert said:

Valiant

 

xINFO lumps, more widescreen assets by Quill and NightFright, Sawdust added as a selectable episode

 

let me know if I totally screwed anything up

Big problem with MAP39 for Valiant. You forgot to add the MAP07Special in MAP39. Also in the ZMAPINFO, the final maps of each episode, you forgot to put endgame in them, but did so in the MAPINFO.

Moreover, Sunlust's ZMAPINFO had a lot of issues, I've attached a fixed version here.

ZMAPINFO.rar

Ive just finished a first pass of a patch for @valkiriforce's Doom Core Trilogy, the ZDoom-only combination of Doom Core Delta, Reverie, Eternally Yours, and Terrace View. Ive added it to the existing download, but heres the link again: Doom Core Trilogy

This patch frees it from ZDoom exclusivity by making it playable in full in Eternity and Woof. DSDA Doom and its predecessor PrBoom Plus have a big issue with it however, which seems to be caused by the massive map count. In these ports, it IS fully playable, but past Eternally Yours' first text screen, no more will appear, and the game will not end at Map 77; instead it rolls over into the three bonus maps I added from Doom Core's original release. In addition, since UMAPINFO cannot define custom intermission music, Reverie's intermission music will play in all three episodes when playing on a UMAPINFO port. Aside from those issues, it SEEMS to work fully everywhere else.

In addition to the UMAPINFO, ive cleaned up Valk's original MAPINFO, which had some leftovers from Doom Core in the map names, added a ZMAPINFO and GAMEINFO, generated new CWILV graphics for most of the Eternally Yours levels so that the names in the MAPINFO match the graphics, added Stormfall, Anastas' Pledge and Military Strength from Doom Core as MAP78, 79 and 80 (Accessible from Map 32; beating the superhard supersecret level now rewards you with three extra levels to play) and added a graphic from Doom Core Delta to display in the text screen when accessing said bonus maps. As a stop-gap, ive also reverted D_RUNNIN to its Doom Core version; the DCD/DCT version doesn't loop at all, while the original fades out then restarts. Neither is optimal, but having the music suddenly stop and never resume is worse. Can anyone fix the midi for a 'proper' fix?

In addition, Valkiriforce has stated he's open to address any other issues in the Trilogy itself, so if theres any bugs in the maps themselves, let him know! (Also yes, hes totally free to officially integrate the patch and edit it to his liking :p)

In the future, I will release a patch for the original Realm of Chaos (I submitted a UMAPINFO and updated Dehacked to the 25th Anniversary edition already) and for the unfinished Stomper/R-One to make it a bit more playable in its 'final' state. I was one of its testers in the past, before I had to leave to focus on my new job at Re-Logic, so that one is a slightly personal patch, as well as the already mentioned upcoming ones.

2 minutes ago, Devalaous said:

As a stop-gap, ive also reverted D_RUNNIN to its Doom Core version; the DCD/DCT version doesn't loop at all, while the original fades out then restarts. Neither is optimal, but having the music suddenly stop and never resume is worse. Can anyone fix the midi for a 'proper' fix?

Oh, are you referring to the BattleToads track?

It does bother me too, so on my end, I took the liberty to replace the track with "Facing The Spider".

4 minutes ago, Devalaous said:

In the future, I will release a patch for the original Realm of Chaos

Is it going to address MAP04's invisible wall?

10 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Oh, are you referring to the BattleToads track?

 

It does bother me too, so on my end, I took the liberty to replace the track with "Facing The Spider".

 

Is it going to address MAP04's invisible wall?

Yeah, the track for Stratos One. It has issues in all versions of Doom Core in one way or another, getting it fixed for good would be great. What ive done here is a bandaid that has the track play in at least the UMAPINFO ports, but now im getting issues with it in GZDoom, argh. BUT its restarting now at least. Definitely need a more solid fix. The three bonus levels all use the exact music lump they used in the original Doom Core btw, just renamed for easy assignment in the xINFO

And yeah, I plan on fixing any reported issues with the original RoC, but thats the only one I know of. With Cammy's permission, it'll also have the new soundtrack, so the original can be played with all the new version's QoL extras.

@Devalaous can I make an easy suggestion for fixing all those impassable walls without editing any of the maps? I think all you'd need to do is force the correct compatibility on whichever ports you want to support. For GZDoom I think all you need to do is add nombf21 to a defaultmap section in ZMAPINFO. For DSDA-Doom and Woof, just add a lump called COMPLVL and put the word vanilla in it (nothing else). I think Nugget Doom and Doom With Love also support COMPLVL, so between this lump and the ZMAPINFO addition you'll cover pretty much all the ports that could be affected, with minimal effort, and like I said without any map editing.

Thanks, that's a lot better than sifting through and fixing maps, because the more maps I add to the wads, the more people are like 'why not just distribute a fixed wad itself?' which is something I generally don't want to do unless there's no other way (see: Unity port), as I feel that disrespects the authour, as most of these fixes are for old stuff where the authour isn't around to fix things, etc.

RoC's Hellmaker-induced problems are severe enough that my usual 'let people play how they want' philosophy needs an override here

Updated Sunlust and Valiant. Thanks @RichardDS90

I haven't worked on this in a while but here are a couple that I hadn't gotten around to releasing

Eviternity

Maskim Xul

Thanks to all for the great work. Is there any chance for the patches to be somehow pinned in the thread? It's a bit clumsy to move through every page.

I could probably edit the first post to have all of them, its going to end up a VERY long post though

3 minutes ago, Devalaous said:

I could probably edit the first post to have all of them, its going to end up a VERY long post though

Up to you, if it's too much effort I can manage.

16 hours ago, Firebert said:

Updated Sunlust and Valiant.

 

The Sunlust link says "This item was deleted".

1 hour ago, Ginji23 said:

The Sunlust link says "This item was deleted".

my bad. fixed

Hey @Firebert, thought you might want to know that the Valiant WS patch did not include the widescreen ending image for Episode 4. I managed to track it down from the Widescreen Assets and Appreciation Thread on page 7 (also made by Quill), and integrated it myself through SLADE.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/121385-widescreen-assets-pack-and-appreciation-thread/?page=7 

 

16 hours ago, Devalaous said:

I could probably edit the first post to have all of them, its going to end up a VERY long post though

Spoiler tag it and maybe make divisions by range of first letters? Like A-D, E-H, I-N, etc.

I'd love to see that because scrambling for patches here is kind of a hassle.

tbh I didnt expect this thread to take off at all for patch hunting to even BE an issue :D Thanks for your interest in it you guys.

Lets see, to organise myself here, I need to finish up and post Dimensions of Time, Morior Invictus, Pandora, Bedlam, Stomper, Concerned, and apparently I forgot all about Incineration. Once that lot is done, alongside anything else people request, I'll see about revamping that opening post.

2 hours ago, Devalaous said:

tbh I didnt expect this thread to take off at all for patch hunting to even BE an issue :D Thanks for your interest in it you guys.

 

Lets see, to organise myself here, I need to finish up and post Dimensions of Time, Morior Invictus, Pandora, Bedlam, Stomper, Concerned, and apparently I forgot all about Incineration. Once that lot is done, alongside anything else people request, I'll see about revamping that opening post.

I think a big aspect is the way in which ports have modernized and have adapted to widescreen graphics, which are pretty much the standard now. As a consequence, the demand for this kind of content grows in order to make Doom look as slick and as clean as possible but without sacrificing the feel of vanilla. That + the flexibility and convenience of a format like UMAPINFO. Eternity is the odd one out here, I am quite frustrated that it still doesn't have widescreen graphics support, but I hope they will be implemented soon, together with UMAPINFO capabilities.

24 minutes ago, DreadWanderer said:

Eternity is the odd one out here, I am quite frustrated that it still doesn't have widescreen graphics support, but I hope they will be implemented soon, together with UMAPINFO capabilities.

Eternity has UMAPINFO support in devbuilds at least (Its why ive mostly stopped providing an EMAPINFO), as well as widescreen statusbars, but yeah, the almost total lack of 16:9 is frustrating, the game will render to the sides of a 16:9 or higher monitor, but things like CWILV graphics, level names, text screens, all that HUD stuff, its all still 4:3 only. Its a shame, because if that issue could be solved, as well as providing stat tracking like DSDA/Woof/Crispy/GZDoom, I'd use Eternity a lot more. Its the ONLY port with good controller vibration too!

It would be nice if all these patches had widescreen graphics and things like demos for the demoless wads/pre 1.9 wads, but im not really capable of doing either on my own.

3 hours ago, Devalaous said:

 

Eternity has UMAPINFO support in devbuilds at least (Its why ive mostly stopped providing an EMAPINFO), as well as widescreen statusbars, but yeah, the almost total lack of 16:9 is frustrating, the game will render to the sides of a 16:9 or higher monitor, but things like CWILV graphics, level names, text screens, all that HUD stuff, its all still 4:3 only. Its a shame, because if that issue could be solved, as well as providing stat tracking like DSDA/Woof/Crispy/GZDoom, I'd use Eternity a lot more. Its the ONLY port with good controller vibration too!

 

It would be nice if all these patches had widescreen graphics and things like demos for the demoless wads/pre 1.9 wads, but im not really capable of doing either on my own.

Yeah I know about the dev builds, I don't even remember if I have the dev build or not on my PC since I rarely use Eternity. There are a few nitpicks I still have that are actually quite important for me as a UV max player, including, but not limited to:

- Frame rate when compared to DSDA;

- How kills are counted;

- Lack of robust complevel support;

- Odd choices when using IDDT such as alive and dead monsters showing up in the same color. This one's a real nightmare in maps with high monster counts where you have to scour the automap like a damn detective looking for anything that moves;

Aside from that, there simply isn't enough content made specifically for Eternity, apart from wads like Heartland and the recent MAYhem 2023. It's got a lot of potential with the portal stuff but I feel it has a long way to go until people get interested in creating wads for it.

On 11/24/2023 at 3:12 PM, Devalaous said:

tbh I didnt expect this thread to take off at all for patch hunting to even BE an issue :D Thanks for your interest in it you guys.

 

Lets see, to organise myself here, I need to finish up and post Dimensions of Time, Morior Invictus, Pandora, Bedlam, Stomper, Concerned, and apparently I forgot all about Incineration. Once that lot is done, alongside anything else people request, I'll see about revamping that opening post.

Might prove useful to host the whole set of patches in the same cloud folder, if all of the authors allow it, together with a credits.txt, of course. That way people could simply download the whole batch of goodies at once if they so choose. I know I would. 

I finished off the WadPak series I started on a while back, thanks to @Doomlover77 tracking down the semi-lost original fourth entry in the series. These four are some of the earliest megawads out there, and a fun little collection of 1994 'trash and treasure. All four are on Maximum Doom in some form too, the third entry appears unaltered in the Doom section, while the first, second and fourth are all converted to Doom 2 in the Doom 2 section, and rife with bugs. I have accounted for the Doom 2 versions; you'll see a folder with patches for those versions, which applies missing Doom 1 textures as well as the usual xINFO stuff.

I highly recommend playing the original Doom versions though. For flavour, just like with Lost Episodes, ive added the old pre-Ultimate Doom graphics for the titlepic, credits and help screens, but only for the original Doom versions. Since I had to write 6 patches in a row for this, plus go over the existing WadPak 3 patch, I am now utterly exhausted.

I tested out the Author field in UMAPINFO for this too, with unfortunate results; DSDA Doom prints the contents of this field upon entering a level, but doesnt have enough room to always print out all of it. As this is a DSDA problem, not much I can do to mitigate it, so I wont use that field in future patches nor retrofit older ones unless this gets fixed.

Hopefully I don't annoy you folks with this question again, but what tools do you use for creating widescreen assets? I've only experimented a bit with making a few widescreen status bars in a very beginner kind of way, i.e. using Paint and copying and pasting pieces of simple textures. Pretty sure this isn't the way for more elaborate status bars with lots of decorative stuff and/or background titles and all that.

Here's a recompilation Doom Christmas: Enhanced Edition by Arsinikk and co. to work with wads that were made with the original Doom Christmas such as PUSS' Christmas speedmaps and Andrea Rovenski's A War on Christmas series

Included is the main wad XMAS-FIXED.WAD which mainly has textures and flats with improved alignment and sprites with added detail, aswell as a multitude of other wads in the "addon_add-ons" that have more subjective changes and additions like new christmas monsters, new sounds, and alternate sprites among many other changes

Xmas-Doom patches + DBP Xmas patches

Included is also patches specifically for the Doomer Boards Projects Christmas Specials

I might as well share my repository of similar things.

https://github.com/bangstk/doom-wad-autoloads

Some content you might be interested in inside:

-Plutonia 2 episode/bonus selection using proper Plutonia 2 font graphics and not using Doom 2 bigfont.

-Original story text for Memento Mori II

-Episode selection for Scythe I, and there could be no more aptly fitting name for Episode 3 than "Despair"

-Original story text for Scythe II which absolutely does not end with a title pun in its map30 finale text

-Valiant: replace some episode title graphics & some map title graphics so they don't cut off on 4:3 screens

-Widescreen menu pics & bars for some wads that have not previously been covered in the myriad widescreen stuff threads

-Replace Doom 2 default story text with generic progress reports for wads that have nothing to do with doom 2's story that weren't worth having their own new story. Also changes background tiles for the story screens in other cases to be more thematically fitting to the wad.

Misc thoughts:

-The best width to use for Ultrawide content is 576 px. Why? Most people previously made 21:9 content at 560px wide. You'd think that's the correct width if you do the math. Unfortunately, it is not correct, because actual 21:9 monitors are not exactly 21:9. 2560x1080 for instance is actually slightly wider than 21:9, and 3440x1440 even moreso. So, 560px graphics leave gaps on real 21:9 monitors. 574px should cover most real 21:9 screens. But, if we go a little bit wider to 576 px it also covers 24:10 displays which are somewhat common in the workstation space.

I'm also of the opinion that with UMAPINFO there should be no reason to be making eternity/zdoom mapinfos for everything unless a map actually needs a specific feature from them. If people are playing older versions of engines that don't support UMAPINFO properly then they are wrong and it is their fault.

My standard has been to do mapnames with DEHACKED, and make UMAPINFO to make tweaks to only the maps that need it, such as episode definitions or defining bonus levels. Of course, for wads which only run on boom compatible engines, there would be no reason to do it via dehacked.

On 12/9/2023 at 4:32 AM, No-Man Baugh said:

...

Xmas-Doom patches + DBP Xmas patches

 

...

Link is restricted

5 hours ago, VVL said:

Link is restricted

Thanks for letting me know, should be public now

On 11/22/2023 at 10:01 PM, Firebert said:

Updated Sunlust and Valiant. Thanks @RichardDS90

I haven't worked on this in a while but here are a couple that I hadn't gotten around to releasing

 

Eviternity

Hey Firebert, I was playing through your QoL Patch for Eviternity I and I noticed that your DeHackEd on the Intermission Text does not work properly, and is showing the debug text (e.g. it says in-game "In the farthest reaches, a Light \nawoke", where it should say "In the farthest reaches, a Light awoke". Text is not aligned correctly. What happened

On 8/27/2023 at 8:13 AM, Devalaous said:

If anyone can fix [Equinox] Map 4's midi, please do so so we don't have to hear star wars-like music for a few minutes then near endless silence :p

Maybe this will suffice?
 

D_BETWEE.zip

On 12/12/2023 at 9:21 PM, ConMan3222 said:

Hey Firebert, I was playing through your QoL Patch for Eviternity I and I noticed that your DeHackEd on the Intermission Text does not work properly, and is showing the debug text (e.g. it says in-game "In the farthest reaches, a Light \nawoke", where it should say "In the farthest reaches, a Light awoke". Text is not aligned correctly. What happened

I think I am generally pretty upset with my own work and at the moment don't really recommend any of it outside of the widescreen patches (which quite a few weren't even made by me mind you). Doing thorough testing to clean up sloppy errors I have made would take a lot of work, especially for a project I've lost interest in.

On 12/8/2023 at 10:35 PM, Trov said:

I might as well share my repository of similar things.

https://github.com/bangstk/doom-wad-autoloads

Nice, thank you!

2 questions:

1) What's the difference between the files in this thread and these files?

2) Is there a reason you didn't upload to your GitHub repo all the ones found in this thread?

*Ancient Aliens is called aaliens_v1_2.wad.

I assume these supersede similar fixes by NightFright?