Doomsday version 1.9.0-beta-6  
Sunday, March 1, 2009, 01:31 AM - Rants, ZOMBIES!!, PC
I am a huge fan of Doom. It came out at a time in which most people I knew couldn't afford a computer, and as such has always felt like it was some unobtainable goal for me. Since then I've become not only a bit of a fanboy, but a collector of various ports of the game and I constantly seek out media and information regarding the series going to the extreme of collecting and reading all the novels, the movie, and yes even the laughably bad comic book.

One of my favorite versions of Doom is the Doomsday Engine. An advanced port of the game made by the people at Doomsday HQ which allows for all sorts of upgrades and updates that with enough time and patience to set it up can easily rival most modern first person shooters while still retaining the feel of the original game.

When Snowberry came out (the engine's current front end) I was skeptical. But making good on it's promise it's allowed users to run the Doomsday Engine faster and easier with minimum fuss. However, since it's come out it feels like the quality of the engine itself has deteriorated. With the latest build support for external sound files seems to be completely shot to hell with a post on their own forums advising "DDay Beta 6 crashes with external music files."

Let's see what the official known bugs and issues thread has to say on the subject: "Status: Will not be fixed for Beta6. The Music code in beta5.x is completely broken and will only read Mus (the format the original Doom/Heretic/HeXen music tracks are in) files reliably. Any other format will very likely not work." Completely broken? Is this really something you want people to see in an UPDATE to the software you've been developing? Keep in mind that this is beta 6, not beta 5 making me wonder just how long the issue will go unresolved.

To make matters worse, upon installing it to my Vista laptop, I found an overwhelming drop in performance over the previous versions. In fact, it would seem to be so bad that the lag alone has me slamming into walls abruptly ON THE LOWEST SETTINGS MY COMPUTER WILL SUPPORT. On the whole, NOTHING seems to be updated at all in the newest release. I don't see any improvements over beta 5 and the already bad problems seem to have gotten WORSE. Only bitter, angry people who enjoy making others suffer would let out an UPDATE that didn't actually do anything but make matters worse. This is why people don't like using America Online.

Remember, newer isn't always better. Never update to a new version unless you have the previous one backed up. Hopefully the NEXT version might be worth all the hassles. At this rate, rolling back to a prior version might be a better step in the right direction...

fujikoma3x222 
Sunday, March 1, 2009, 02:13 AM
"Only bitter, angry people who enjoy making others suffer would let out an UPDATE that didn't actually do anything but make matters worse."

You just summed up my feelings on windows in one sentence, congratulations.

Doom was awesome for its time... But, there is only so much polish you can put on a road apple before it stops being shiny... Still, I admire your dedication.

Vista doesn't support DOS, rather emulates it, right? Does windowsXP or 98 support DOS? If I remember correctly, Doom was DOS, not Windows... Might be a part of the problem, vista that is. Also, laptops tend to be a little bit skimpier with the resources, and easier to damage, harder to fix... But hey, it's PORTABLE! Sometimes, that makes ALL the difference. :pacman:

Sounds like a cool application... I miss Marathon and the map editors for it... Now that bungie split with microshaft (they didn't go crawling back, did they?!) they might actually work on a new marathon game (partly because the rights to Halo are owned by microsoft, I think...).

marr0w 
Sunday, March 1, 2009, 02:20 AM
Part of the reason why engines like Doomsday where built where to bring it onto Windows and Mac from the old forgotten days of DOS. You don't recall me playing JDoom on the computer I had back in Louisville? JDoom is a part of Doomsday.

...Bungie's supposed to be creating SOMETHING new that relates to an older project. Everyone's thinking Marathon but all we've seen is Halo 3:Recon. Maybe we'll find out something new when Recon comes out officially.

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