ZDoom

Enjay wrote: In other news, I tried to fill my internal combustion engine car with electricity last night but it just didn't run. Surely the fuel manufacturers need to come up with a way of me using electricity in my old car without me having to change anything about my car?

Yeah, something like that.And then you hear them talk about GZDoom being 'unoptimized' because it does not run well on 15 year old hardware...

I have to admit that the attitude of "I want to keep my really old hardware, but I want to run the latest software on it" has confused me for a long time. With old hardware, sooner or later, you are just not going to be able to run the new versions of any software, be it GZDoom, the operating system or whatever.

So, equally, if you won't or can't update your hardware for whatever reason (and I'm not trying to suggest that the reason's aren't good ones) then there has to come a point of acceptance where you acknowledge "my computer was never intended to run that kind of software because the hardware required wasn't even thought of when my machine was new". The conclusion, surely, has to be "I'll run the old version of the software, because it works fine on my machine" and (specifically to GZDoom) "I guess I can't run mods that require new features because my hardware isn't up to it".

I genuinely don't understand why this is a debate, or why people with the older hardware expect anything else. I have several older computers lying around, I wouldn't expect any of them to run the current GZDoom well. Most of them have GZDoom on them though - and the version that they have works just fine on them.

I also feel that it is particularly important to recognise (as discussion in this thread and the survey has shown) that the people who really can't run what is being regarded as the newest features (and many are not really bleeding edge, next gen features, but something quite well established in general gaming circles already) are running very old machines (older than some of our younger users!) and are a tiny, tiny proportion of the people using GZDoom. Why should the devs have a harder life, and the vast majority of the users have a compromised experience for such a tiny percentage of users? If you can't update your machine, I have sympathy (really, I do) but the version of GZDoom that runs best on your machine already exists and isn't going to vanish - it just won't be the newer versions.


In other news, I tried to fill my internal combustion engine car with electricity last night but it just didn't run. Surely the fuel manufacturers need to come up with a way of me using electricity in my old car without me having to change anything about my car?

It was never my intent to induce any inconvenience for working on multiple backends and I always knew that any support for non-Vulkan renderers would be removed eventually, anyhow. This was something that's been stated very early on, ever since the Vulkan renderer was first introduced, and even before that. So please don't mistake my interest in them as a requirement to keep them. The latest survey makes it clear that the number of people who actually need this support is very very small.

I actually do not have any interest in potato related PC's, my only interest in the GLES backend is "wow, this is cool, I can't believe this is still GZDoom".

For what it's worth, the potato backends (softpoly/GLES) are an inconvenience for mod authors, as well, since they cannot run the more modern features of GZDoom - particularly custom shaders. Also for what it's worth - phones and tablets these days are being introduced with Vulkan support right out of the box. Vulkan is the future. Even the Android port of GZDoom I suspect, will be moving forward with that as well, as time goes on. While Vulkan on these devices might not nearly be as fast as it would be on desktop devices, it's still a lot faster than the real "potatoes" that a small percentage of people are running, and will only get better as time goes on anyhow.

So yeah - I am interested in GZDoom moving forward, as well.

Pretty much in agreement with Graf and dpJudas. Softpoly is still useful for the Carmack renderer. But otherwise, GZDoom should keep going forward. There are plenty of other source ports that cater to low end equipment.

(While working to resurrect the lightmaps branch, it just dawned on me how much of an inconvenience it is to do the same work 3 - 4 times...)

Phredreeke wrote:Yeah, this would be better relegated to LZDoom if it was actually beneficial to performance, which from the sound of it it's not.

LZDoom has reached the end of the line in its current incarnation. Should this really happen I'd rename the nee port, not the existing one.

I'd keep softpoly as a fallback for the software renderer but probably disable 3D on it. It is too slow anyway for serious use.
In Raze I already dropped it because it did not work right there and serves no purpose without a software renderer.

As I see it, the Vulkan renderer is heavily restrained by having to work on a setup that also needs to support OpenGL, this prohibits a lot of things that'd allow to speed it up.

For what it's worth, my stance on this is in alignment with what Graf said. There are certain things that gets a lot more complicated to do once you have to support multiple backends. In some test branches of mine I already first dropped all the other backends just to avoid having to do everything three times (four times now with the GLES backend).

Anything related to the hardware renderer interface is pretty much locked in stone. When the time comes to needing to upgrade that I suggest dropping everything than vulkan and then if it matters enough some developers can port over the other backends (possibly as sister projects to GZDoom itself). If no developers jump in to do that then IMO there wasn't enough interest. As for softpoly, I had my fun with that thing so if it causes any problems for future hardware renderer changes I'm all for dropping it.

Yeah, this would be better relegated to LZDoom if it was actually beneficial to performance, which from the sound of it it's not.

My vision of GZDoom's feature means eventual removal of all backends aside from Vulkan.

Remember: This currently would mean serving 85% of the existing users, and those last 15% will only decline as time goes on - especially now with Windows 11 on the horizon, I'd expect it to accelerate.
Our current hardware support means that the most recent hardware that is not supported fully is the Intel HD3000 from 2011. And the most recent discrete graphics cards no longer supported are from 2005/2006! Do we really need those last few users on hardware so old that it's a miracle it still works? Once we got support in, the code needs to be maintained. I won't do it.

Even with the GLES backend I only see it as something temporary that will eventually fall off the support roster once mobile GPUs stop being shit. THe entire thing is very unconductive toward new feature implementations and will very likely be treated as thre ugly step child nobody likes but has to treat nicely. Much the same for Softpoly. It's also some heavy Millstone around the neck that complicates matters for very little gain. It is fine for presenting the software renderer's output, but again we got a full additional backend just for a single percent of users.

If this trend of adding even more dead end support continues I may just consider forking the project, clean out the cruft and do a forward looking port unencumbered by the needs of dying hardware.

At that point you might as well use Softpoly

drfrag wrote:But have you compiled the application with ANGLE support?

Go even weirder and try compiling GZDoom with TinyGLES support.

This would actually make up for a similar concept seen in the Engoo source port - Purely software rendered with tons of eye candy, designed for pure CPU grunt.

But have you compiled the application with ANGLE support?

I really wish that some of all this potato-related work was invested in something useful for owners of modern hardware...

Well - it can't hurt to try. Knowing it's going to be painfully slow and seeing it be painfully slow are two different things.

Nevertheless I scrapped these two .dll files up from my Google Chrome installation. I had troubles compiling Angle myself - the instructions are confusing and whatever I was able to follow simply didn't work. It didn't really seem worth my time trying much more of it. But since Chrome uses Angle anyhow, I figured I could harvest the .dll's straight from it.

I am not sure if this even works with GZDoom - I didn't notice a difference having them there.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bZRMB2 ... sp=sharing

It won't do much good. Pre-GL3 hardware's shaders are simply far too weak.