Comparing gzdoom to nowadays game engine

[Apeirogon]

So, I think nobody would argue that gzdoom stands behind nowadays game engine.
I mean, it would be VERY STRANGE if almost 30 old engine would have some major advantage over nowadays engine, except "can run in 4k 144 fps on toaster".

Question is, how far it behind from godot, unity, cry engine, UE4, source, frostbite, I dont know.....mugen?
Do someone here have any experience of using such engines and gzdoom and can name advantages and disadvantages of such engines comparing to gzdoom?
Because I myself mostly work with gzdoom, and engines for actual games in RTS/TBS genre.

[wildweasel]

It really depends on what you want to make with it. A cop-out answer, to be sure, but if you're making a Doom-style FPS, it'd make sense to use a Doom-style engine. Conversely, if you're making an RTS game, Doom seems like a poor fit for it.

[Darkcrafter]

GZDoom is the best source port of doom ever but despite my deep respect to its developer I think it suffers from some limitations that (yet) disable it from being in one line with such engines like source, unreal or frostbite. I would REALLY like for the developer to halt the support of what I think useless software and polymost renderers and get lots of code from modern engines to allow doom to develop into larger maps with real 3d geometry without lags and mysterious errors and that sort of stuff BUT who cares what I want lol, it's all in the hands of the developers here. Somebody just wants to play doom like in old times with 4k mode engaged and see these shitty filtered xbrz sprites and textures smeared all over the screen, and I'm actually starting to think it's the original purpose of what GZDoom is intended to be and there is a lot of people that like this idea. So GZDoom is the engine that brings good old Doom to 21st century by also allowing to go a little bit beyond the original game capabilities, most importantly for free.

[Nash]

"How far behind" is not really a good question here, because, for example - if what you wanted is a first person shooter that works out of the box with save states, networking, actor system, easy moddability - I can answer to you that Unreal Engine 4 is waaaaaaay far behind in that regard, because UE4 gives you nothing (you have to do it all yourself). ;)

My personal stance has always been this - GZDoom is a great engine for making first person retro-style shooters. If you want SOME modern graphic effects, GZDoom can deliver too.

If you're looking to make a triple-A (visually) shooter with large levels and millions of polygons worth of geometry, GZDoom is not the engine for you.

If you are not interested in making shooters, GZDoom DEFINITELY isn't the engine for you. ;) Sure, you can hack around with ZScript or whatever but you will find in the end that it's more trouble than its worth, and your hacks will scale very POORLY for a full production (that is maintainable)... and there are better tools out there to specifically make whatever project it is you're aiming to make.

[Enjay]

How far behind my apples are these oranges?

[leileilol]

It's all in the passion, direction, competence and effort.

Unity and UE4's extensive modern impressive super modern awesome actually good feature list can't fix garbage input.

OA used to get random "advice" demands to switch engines to something newer because of some kind of "need to keep up", where the real priority should be in that not looking and sounding like a duct-tape design world.

[Graf Zahl]

GZDoom is the best source port of doom ever but despite my deep respect to its developer I think it suffers from some limitations that (yet) disable it from being in one line with such engines like source, unreal or frostbite.

The bogus assumption here is to think that this is a worthwile goal. The engine is and will forever be defined by Doom's wonky "physics" model which make it impossible to bring in line with those modern engines.

I would REALLY like for the developer to halt the support of what I think useless software and polymost renderers

Polymost has been gone for many years now. Considering the software renderer I'd be more than happy to toss it out - and all the other backwards thinking cruft and solely focus on the hardware renderer. You can also be sure that a small but very vocal minority would not like that. TBH, the software renderer's presence in the engine is mainly for historical purposes - there's currently nobody maintaining it. Concerning the in-development software rendered backend, I'm also not really convinced that this will bring any genuine benefit to the engine. The target audience of such a backend is ridiculously small, and shrinking.
But as things stand, the community demands the software renderer not to be removed so it will stay and rot away - and block the odd feature once in a while.

and get lots of code from modern engines to allow doom to develop into larger maps with real 3d geometry without lags and mysterious errors and that sort of stuff BUT who cares what I want lol, it's all in the hands of the developers here.

Modern engines are so different from Doom that it simply won't work. One important thing is that modern engines work with a static mesh and that all moveable entities are not part of it. In such an engine it is very easy to pregenerate the geometry and save rendering time. In Doom this cannot be done. Doom works by moving sector planes, i.e. the actual level geometry, which renders any approach that tries to optimize this ineffective. It'd require a completely different mapping approach that's incompatible with everything Doom stands for.

Somebody just wants to play doom like in old times with 4k mode engaged and see these shitty filtered xbrz sprites and textures smeared all over the screen, and I'm actually starting to think it's the original purpose of what GZDoom is intended to be and there is a lot of people that like this idea. So GZDoom is the engine that brings good old Doom to 21st century by also allowing to go a little bit beyond the original game capabilities, most importantly for free.

If you strike out that xbrz thing, I think we can agree. Those texture scalers are only there because some people seem to desperately need them - I find them ugly as shit and wouldn't waste a thought removing them. But like the software renderer above, this won't get a positive reception.

[Nash]

TBH, the software renderer's presence in the engine is mainly for historical purposes
...
But as things stand, the community demands the software renderer not to be removed so it will stay and rot away - and block the odd feature once in a while.

While I agree with you about the old software renderer being obsolete (although I say this with a bias towards hardware rendering in general) - there is one feature of the software renderer that current hardware renderers simply haven't successfully emulated 100%, and therefore gives the old software renderers their value still - and that is the sprite clipping. Sprites are such an important factor in giving Doom its famous visuals... those billboards sinking into the level geo, and the vertical sprite offset compensation are both hardly good solutions.

Even Strife VE's depth buffer tricks don't really cut it 100% - there are ways to glitch the rendering, causing the sprite to appear in the wrong order.

[Graf Zahl]

The sprite rendering cannot be done reliably without a depth buffer. Even the software renderer can glitch horribly if you look at the sprites in the wrong place from the wrong angle. This is unfortunately one problem that's simply unsolvable.

[Rachael]

This is unfortunately one problem that's simply unsolvable.

And yet, much of Doom engine art depends very heavily upon it, especially Strife.

The only way to fix this would be to use model or voxel replacements in order to give the objects using them a more realistic look. But otherwise - even if it's kind of crappy, this is how the illusion of depth was achieved with those engines.

[Enjay]

Although, a lot of the time, sprites clipping into the floor just looks weird to me. Every time I start MAP02 and see those health bottles and the zombie's feet it weirds me out if I'm using software (which is hardly ever to be fair).

[Graf Zahl]

Agreed, the bugs this often creates can be worse than the hardware renderer.

[NeuralStunner]

How far behind my apples are these oranges?

This sounds like the premise for a British comedy skit.

[Enjay]

This sounds like the premise for a British comedy skit.

[Kappes Buur]

This sounds like the premise for a British comedy skit.

---

[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/mSSCEpb.jpg[/imgur]

Just to carry on with that thought, I wonder how many do get the reference with that picture.