Fixed: Bugs with gothic2.wad

[Carnevil]

Hi. Two bugs I've ran into with gothic2.wad using 50.cab:

1). For all the flats, I get a checkerboard pattern, as if the flats are missing.

2). At the intermission, instead of the custom level title gfx, I just get "ENTRYWAY", like it would if I exited the normal map01 in doom2.wad, except it doesn't display "FINISHED".

Just wanted to point those out. Thanks!

[SargeBaldy]

confirmed. it took someone this long to discover that? looks pretty bad.

edit: both errors remain on 51.cab

[Biff]

Notes:

1. Gothicdm.wad looks OK.

2. When you load gothictx.wad with gothic2.wad, it's OK.

3. Edit: Gothic2 patch and flat markers are "wrong", they are all at the end of the wad. Gothicdm markers are correct. Gohictx markers are correct.

Did gothic2.wad ever look OK as-is, without gothictx?

[SargeBaldy]

Did gothic2.wad ever look OK as-is, without gothictx?

yep. looks just fine in vanilla doom without gothictx. is the problem because it uses FF_START instead of F_START? doom.exe reads them the same way for some reason, but maybe zdoom doesn't now?

[randi]

Fixed. The problem with gothic2's flats is that it has no FF_START marker to indicate where the flats begin. All it has is an F_END marker to indicate where they end. This will cause problems with any Doom port using the BOOM lump management routines. I had previously written some code to detect this problem and fix it, but it seems to have broken somehow.

[randi]

I want to clarify this, too:

is the problem because it uses FF_START instead of F_START? doom.exe reads them the same way for some reason

Doom completely ignores FF_START. All it cares about is F_START and F_END. FF_START and/or FF_END are only used by wad management utilities.

[Biff]

Fixed. The problem with gothic2's flats is that it has no FF_START marker to indicate where the flats begin. All it has is an F_END marker to indicate where they end. This will cause problems with any Doom port using the BOOM lump management routines. I had previously written some code to detect this problem and fix it, but it seems to have broken somehow.

Probably what you meant, there is actually a FF_START marker, it's just in the wrong place (it's not at the start of flats). That marker is at the very end of the wad. I guess that zdoom has never displayed gothic2.wad correctly, never tried it myself. Had a lot of fun in gothicdm though.

[Cyb]

I just tried gothicdm2 in the latest version of prboom and it bombed with an error: 'S_START not found' at startup. Eternity crashes with the same exact error at the exact same time (neither ever get to the titlescreen).

I honestly can't recall if I ever played gdm2 in a source port, though I do remember when it was released (back when I had a 486 with no soundcard), when I still used doom2.exe, but I dunno. kinda a sloppy error really, but it works perfectly fine in doom2.exe (just tried that as well) so go figure

[Graf Zahl]

This WAD just isn't compatible with Boom's enhanced namespace handling for sprites and flats. Without some wotkaround nothing based on Boom will be able to load it.
At least ZDoom can use it now but without fixing it this will cause problems for a lot of users.

[Lexus Alyus]

But I've played it on Zdaemon before and didn't get any problems...

[SargeBaldy]

yeah it always worked fine in zdaemon, so this couldn't have always been a problem in zdoom.

[Graf Zahl]

It probably was a side effect of the new texture management system. ZDoom had a hack to handle this before the change but apparently it broke due to the changes.