Bad Mood : Falcon030 'Doom'

[dml]

The YT encoding looks pretty accurate and no borders, nice

I didn't have time to do much with the vid, or even record a decent looking one - so I didn't go near YT this time.

I will try to convert the next one properly though before uploading to YT

[dml]

Most of what needed done for Beta is now finished - the majority of remaining work is content related (making it look/sound nicer than DosDoom where possible).

There are still some bugs and annoyances left but most of them are minor. The 4Mb version still needs work to make it run at acceptable speed without so much disk access. Support for extended resources direct from the WAD file is also still a bit lacking, but won't take much effort to complete. Direct MIDI replay is apparently well on the way. There is no native music support yet, but some options being looked at (not sure if this will make Beta!). Most of the ingame graphics effects are working now except scrolling textures (still todo).

So a Beta release seems to be on the horizon once the content problems are sorted out.

The content itself may need trimmed / carried over to 'Final' to make a Beta release more practical, because some of it depends on the Doom II level structure (like JagDoom) plus a custom PWAD - and therefore a lot of level editing and WAD work. I'd rather release Beta sooner, and spend the remaining time working on that stuff for Final - which could definitely take a while!

[DarkLord]

Great work - really looking forward to playing with the beta!

Thanks Doug (and anyone else involved).

[FedePede04]

The YT encoding looks pretty accurate and no borders, nice

I didn't have time to do much with the vid, or even record a decent looking one - so I didn't go near YT this time.

I will try to convert the next one properly though before uploading to YT

Thx,
i am sorry that i do not have a creative mind when it come to making videos, or i would have offered to make it for you.
but if you need any tips (hint) on converting videos, then please feel free to PM me, and i will try to help

[dml]

but if you need any tips (hint) on converting videos, then please feel free to PM me, and i will try to help

I'll ping you before the next 'big vid'

Unfortunately my DVR imploded last week and is not only chewing tapes but also fails to convert analog signals. I'll need to replace it before I make another one.

[dml]

Last night I returned to the SFX system and made some modifications.

It now supports ASR (Attack,Sustain,Release) looping patterns for sound samples, which let me port the Quake II chaingun sounds into BadMood.

Code: Select all

	// pos----------->alen
	//      spos----->slen
	//      spos----->slen
	//      spos----->slen
	//      spos------------->dlen

The chaingun now has a spinup cycle, a running cycle, and spindown - in parallel with the firing sounds. This required a few other changes because normally each player supports only one sound at a time.

This also implies that custom sounds can now be used from a PWAD, which I will be making use of

[dml]

Tonight I added direct support for WAV files in WADs.

I then used this to add a wide selection of ricochet/bullet-ping sounds for the pistol, chaingun and shotguns. It's waay more fun!



haha

[EDIT]

And a few more tweaks allow the chaingun spinup/spindown noise to be symmetric, so if it only spins up 25% before you stop shooting, it spins down immediately from there instead of having to complete the attack or sustain cycle. The chaingun stuff seems minor but overall it involved a lot of fixing and debugging of the sound interface which didn't report failures to lock/modify active sounds (which happens a lot since it is all time critical async/pending state one level below that). Result is much better sound capabilities...

[dhedberg]

Tonight I added direct support for WAV files in WADs.

I then used this to add a wide selection of ricochet/bullet-ping sounds for the pistol, chaingun and shotguns. It's waay more fun!

Sounds like a lot of fun! Can't wait for the beta to be released!

--Daniel

[dml]

Sounds like a lot of fun! Can't wait for the beta to be released!
--Daniel

I don't think it will be too long now - still got a few things to do and tidy up but it's looking ok.

Today I got a little time to finish the 'freelook' code, so the player has to actually aim the weapon at enemies - in classic Doom the vertical aiming is done for you and you just need to manage the left/right part. With freelook the auto-aim was really wrong because you could be looking up while your missiles etc. were flying downwards.

Fixing this has one extra benefit (apart from making the game a bit more interesting, increasing difficulty and the need for additional kit and secrets in the maps) - which is that auto-aiming was really expensive!

Auto-aim fires rays across the map to find the nearest contact and determine if it is an enemy, and then has to do it again to actually shoot at it (with some D&D style error rolled in on the second attempt). This has really helped the performance of the chaingun and plasma gun where it was increasing the setup cost for each shot. (Not so much the shotguns because there is one aim ray, followed by 7-20 pellet rays but firing rate is low)

There are still a couple of weird things like not being able to shoot at the roof properly and make puffs of smoke on the roof or floor, but those things are minor.

Have also reduced the probability of puff sprites which suck CPU time, and of ricochet sounds etc.

Still some performance work needed on weapons but its much better now than it has been in the past.


It's nice to be working on game and audio/visual stuff for a change and less on optimizations. That went on too long

[dhedberg]

Today I got a little time to finish the 'freelook' code, so the player has to actually aim the weapon at enemies - in classic Doom the vertical aiming is done for you and you just need to manage the left/right part. With freelook the auto-aim was really wrong because you could be looking up while your missiles etc. were flying downwards.

Fixing this has one extra benefit (apart from making the game a bit more interesting, increasing difficulty and the need for additional kit and secrets in the maps) - which is that auto-aiming was really expensive!

Great! Sounds like a win-win case. More interesting/challenging game play - improved performance. That's not a too common situation!

Auto-aim fires rays across the map to find the nearest contact and determine if it is an enemy, and then has to do it again to actually shoot at it (with some D&D style error rolled in on the second attempt). This has really helped the performance of the chaingun and plasma gun where it was increasing the setup cost for each shot. (Not so much the shotguns because there is one aim ray, followed by 7-20 pellet rays but firing rate is low)

I'm in favor of all changes benefiting the performance of the the chain gun!

There are still a couple of weird things like not being able to shoot at the roof properly and make puffs of smoke on the roof or floor, but those things are minor.
Have also reduced the probability of puff sprites which suck CPU time, and of ricochet sounds etc.
Still some performance work needed on weapons but its much better now than it has been in the past.

So how's the frame-rate holding up compared to the alpha?

It's nice to be working on game and audio/visual stuff for a change and less on optimizations. That went on too long

I bet! I've always found it easier to keep the motivation up if you have decent number of varied tasks to choose to from, rather than completing all the fun stuff in the beginning, and then at the end, get bored and give it all up.

--Daniel

[dml]

Great! Sounds like a win-win case. More interesting/challenging game play - improved performance. That's not a too common situation!

I'm always happy to find freebies

I'm in favor of all changes benefiting the performance of the the chain gun!

Hopefully the new sounds will add a bit to the experience. The shotguns were always great, and plasmagun/bfg sfx were ok, but the others IMO not so much.

I've now discovered another 'bonus' - with the weapons respecting freelook properly it's now possible to aim rockets at the floor/roof to cause splashdamage, like Quake!

This wasn't really possible with Doom because the rockets went straight to the target, if anywhere useful at all.

So how's the frame-rate holding up compared to the alpha?

It's hard to measure 'properly' because the tests needed are not equivalent (incompatibility of recorded demos, saved games etc.). Measuring fixed views does work but will typically be missing game/AI costs. While there have been some small speed improvements to drawing, the biggest speedups are in the game code.

Based on playing it, I'd say the best case FPS is around the same as that for alpha - but worst case is much improved. I can tell because it's now possible to play many (if not all) of the Doom II maps without turning it off in disgust. That wasn't really the case for alpha - only a few were tolerable.

I bet! I've always found it easier to keep the motivation up if you have decent number of varied tasks to choose to from, rather than completing all the fun stuff in the beginning, and then at the end, get bored and give it all up.

Yep, doing all the fun stuff at the start is definitely a good way to give up in the middle It's quite good if you can find an order where early boring stuff unlocks fun stuff to do later

[dhedberg]

I've now discovered another 'bonus' - with the weapons respecting freelook properly it's now possible to aim rockets at the floor/roof to cause splashdamage, like Quake! This wasn't really possible with Doom because the rockets went straight to the target, if anywhere useful at all.

Haha, awesome! Sounds like you're having fun!
I remember it was a pretty efficient technique to do damage to your friends when networking Quake. Really cool that it's now available in Bad Mood as well!

So how's the frame-rate holding up compared to the alpha?

Based on playing it, I'd say the best case FPS is around the same as that for alpha - but worst case is much improved. I can tell because it's now possible to play many (if not all) of the Doom II maps without turning it off in disgust. That wasn't really the case for alpha - only a few were tolerable.

That's great! I'm glad to hear that your hard work is paying off! Has anyone looked into the possibility of adding multi-player/network support in Bad Mood?

--Daniel

[dml]

That's great! I'm glad to hear that your hard work is paying off! Has anyone looked into the possibility of adding multi-player/network support in Bad Mood?

No - there have been some discussions about it, including MIDI ring and TCP/IP. However I don't know if/when anyone will consider adopting the job

MIDI ring obviously means 'multiple machines in a room' which probably isn't easy to arrange with Falcons And TCP/IP involves ... extra libs, code and addon hardware.

I kinda like the MIDI idea because the Falcon is equipped with it, and it brings back memories of MidiMaze.

[Eero Tamminen]

MIDI ring obviously means 'multiple machines in a room' which probably isn't easy to arrange with Falcons

You could play with Hatari emulator and re-direct MIDI traffic over internet using e.g. socat.

[dml]

You could play with Hatari emulator and re-direct MIDI traffic over internet using e.g. socat.

It's certainly a good way to test it while writing it.

[dml]

The game now has Quake-style rockets with persistent smoketrails.

Couldn't get a satisfactory screenshot but you can get the rough idea from this (fired at the roof then turn + step back to watch the smoke).

[dml]

Here's a strange thing.

While working on the audio/sfx code I switched back to a real F030 to test changes. For the most part everything works ok - but I got some alarming (and very loud) clicking sounds, randomly spaced at around 1-2 clicks per second on the title/menu screens. This went away once ingame.

This puzzled me for a bit, because there's nothing really special about the titlescreen vs ingame - the audio system keeps running throughout and occasionally gets sound events from the menus as it would from the game.

There is one difference though - it was displaying a truecolour image as a title screen, using a horizontally extended (416x240) video resolution on VGA. The audio clicks only occur when that video mode is active.

When this mode is used, it seems like the audio DMA is not getting all the slots it wants from the bus, and clicks like a geiger counter.

Has anyone noticed anything like this before while messing with boosted TC video modes? It seems only to be one stereo channel affected which is also strange.

It's also possible the Falcon mainboard is dying, which would be bad

[ctirad]

It sounds to me like you need a clockpatch

[dhedberg]

Doug, how's it going? Several days since your last update, makes me worried!
Don't tell me that your Falcon main board actually did die!

[dml]

Doug, how's it going? Several days since your last update, makes me worried!
Don't tell me that your Falcon main board actually did die!

I was in the US for a week and didn't get much free time (or sleep) while away - but I'm back now so there's a chance I can get a new release together soon.

The main stuff happening just now:

- direct MIDI output - progress here is very good!
- getting intermission screens working with Doom I game structure (have decided not to rebase for Doom II right now - will take too long and hold things up)
- finish SFX improvements
- finish player weapons improvements
- do something with ingame objects (flying debris)
- texture repainting continues (slowly)
- do a bit more work for 4MB systems (likely, limited to shareware WAD)

[dhedberg]

Ah, my better half is from the U.S. so I have to go there once in a while as well.
It always take me a while to adjust to the change of time zones though, especially when going from the U.S. to Europe. So I'm usually very unproductive for a few days after coming back.

Sounds like you're back on track however! Great!
Fun, with so many things going on on the Atari again. Just had a great time playing the improved Giana Sisters on the STe.

[dml]

Ah, my better half is from the U.S. so I have to go there once in a while as well.
It always take me a while to adjust to the change of time zones though, especially when going from the U.S. to Europe. So I'm usually very unproductive for a few days after coming back.

You're right - I'm still in a bit of a daze. Gone for 5 days, 2 of them completely consumed by travel (trip to CA, stopping at NY). Should back to normal soon though.

Sounds like you're back on track however! Great!

Not quite there yet but recovering

Fun, with so many things going on on the Atari again. Just had a great time playing the improved Giana Sisters on the STe.

Yeah its very nice, Zamuel has been ultra productive, and no sign of slowing down Plenty of others doing cool stuff too - quite hard to keep up

[Zamuel_a]

I'm looking forward to the next release of DOOM

[Dal]

Just a quick question. I like the idea of multiplayer over MIDI - does this mean we lose MIDI music during multi-player death matches or has this been accounted for?

[dml]

Just a quick question. I like the idea of multiplayer over MIDI - does this mean we lose MIDI music during multi-player death matches or has this been accounted for?

I expect that it won't be possible to drive external MIDI hardware and do MIDI ring networking at the same time - it would be one or the other. The program could still support both but not simultaneously.

I suppose in theory it would be possible to find some 'reserved' functionality in MIDI protocol which the music hardware might ignore, while the networking bit could still pick it up, but it seems a bit far-fetched. Not to mention uncomfortable wiring all that stuff in the same room


Using the MIDI music as a source for native music replay is another matter, but so far does not have a solution. By this I mean coupling the MIDI tracks to a MODplayer mixer or fixed synth, implemented for the Falcon. I will probably play around with that once the MIDI driver is fully integrated but native MIDI replay is one of those things which doesn't come with a good chance of success. Experiments will just be for fun really.

Some other solution for music replay will probably be chosen. Either YM, compressed microblock streaming or something else. Will see what happens.