Doomsday version 1.9.0-beta-6  
Sunday, March 1, 2009, 01:31 AM - Rants, ZOMBIES!!, PC
Posted by marr0w
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...
view entry ( 7770 views )   |  permalink   |   ( 3 / 4606 )


<Back | 1 | 2 | Next> Last>>