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DUGL and FreeDoom (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 15.09.2009, 10:48

Sorry for not replying to this post directly, I must've missed it!!

> > I've been playing a lot of FreeDoom
> > lately, and all the DOS ports of Boom-compatible engines are old and
> > bitrotted, hard to compile, buggy, etc. They all use Allegro (except
> one),
> > and Allegro 4.22 (last DOS version before DOS support was dropped) is
> buggy
> > as hell, many regressions (pat2dat, packed files, SB 2.0 mixing). Most
> of
> > them use older Allegro 3.12, which works okay (patches.dat, vbeaf.drv),
> > e.g. on my P166 (ATI Mach64 1 MB VRAM, AWE64) or DOSBox.
> >
> > In short, DUGL is a games lib, no? So it could probably be used
> instead.
> > Not that I'm volunteering, mind you, but it should be possible and
> > probably is a good idea. I mean, it can't be that hard. :-)
>
> Yes DUGL is a games lib, but no game was released yet using it :-D
> I started working on a 2D game, but it will take time as i don't want to
> reproduce what was already done on the past.
Perhaps something simple at first?

> I made look to the source code of FreeDoom yesterday, and i think that we
> need
> a volunteer that have good knowledge of the source code. And he will be
> helped by me.

James "Quasar" Haley (Eternity co-maintainer) would probably help, but he rewrote the backend, so it hasn't compiled on DOS/Allegro since r94? (2006?) or so.

> We need a list of graphic functions needed by FreeDoom and
> see if DUGL is able to provide them all.
> By first look DUGL is missing :
> - Perspective corrected texture mapping : solution is to split near/big
> triangles into several triangles to reduce the bad effect.
> - Texture wrapping : we have two solutions, make bigger textures with
> replicated image, or again detect texture wrapping and split the triangle
> into several triangles.
> - VGA : not all VESA give access to low resolution graphic mode
> (320x200..)
Really? :no:

> I'm not sure if freedom require low res mode, but if so we need to emulate
> them, by rendering to small RAM Surf and then resizing into 640x400 or so.
I don't know exactly if original Doom was 320x200 only, but almost all the modified Doom ports support higher resolutions (e.g. Eternity 640x400, even pageflipped) but only with VBEAF.DRV on my Mach64 (probably due to old VESA 1.2 support only).

> - Sound : What are the sound requirement of FreeDoom ? Currently only SB16
> and SBPro are supported, does this cover enough PC ? each driver has an
> internal mixer capable of mixing up to 32 voice, i guess enough ?
Yes, that should be plenty good enough. Doom was originally able to even run on old 386s, I think, so it should support old hardware. (CDoom is really fast but seems 320x200 only, no Allegro, uses MusLib.) Of course, FreeDoom needs a Boom-compatible port, most of which are buggy, hence I suggest Eternity although 3.31b7 still used old Allegro 3.0 (patches.dat only, no vbeaf.drv support, needs recompile with 3.12).

> Now come the legal issue. As DUGL is a free but not GPL and closed source.
> Can we use it into a GPL software ? maybe it's covered by the the system
> library exception ?

Yes, I forgot about that, but actually the "original" (pre-1999 re-release) of DOOM was non-commercial only, not GPL, and I think some rare projects (ZDoom???) still use that (for whatever reason).

> By the way i'm curious to know how much fps you get with "fog16" demo on
> your P166 (ATI Mach64 1 MB VRAM, AWE64) :-D does the sound work for you ?
I think I tried and failed due to no MMX. Adlib seems to require some initialization but pure wave sounds work fine. For FreeDoom I think I get about 20 fps on average. (Although ironically I still don't get full speed of Atari800 [recently updated] but fairly close with "improved Pokey sound" turned off. Annoying that I can't even emulate such a weak cpu on such a "powerful" machine as a P166, oh well. :rotfl: ).

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