Rise of the Triad source ports

[SamVision]

Has there ever been a good ROTT port? The only one I have tried is WinROTT and it was pretty terrible. It was buggy, and crashed often and there was some weird jank to it that I never got by playing it in DosBox.

[leileilol]

Has there ever been a good ROTT port?

Nope.

WinRott is allegedly the "pure one" but that's really crufty and screwy and doesn't even fully abide by the GPL regarding source availability. I think it even had VisualBasic dependencies, of all things....

There is no Chocorott. Probably the best pure source port is that SDL port rush job from 2002 hosted on icculus.org (and not the newer versions that have winrott's horrible 'high resolution support' that doesn't understand the concept of pixel aspects).

ECWolf was planning ROTT support at one point.

[el zee]

Unfortunately there's no good source ports. I usually play with dosbox or an old pc.

Literally one of the reasons I made Return of the Triad was because of that, and to make more interesting levels. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Rachael]

3DGE was going to add ROTT support at some point but I am not sure how far along it is. The loader is definitely there, but I don't know how much of the actual game is.

[NeuralStunner]

WinROTT is playable, if you don't mind a few bizarre glitches. The one that bugs me the most is directional sound not working right. (Hearing a guard to your left, so you turn left, and he's now shooting you in the back.) Once you get to harder maps with more enemies, this starts to be a huge problem. There's also an uncommon glitch I've seen with pickups that can't be picked up, requiring a program restart.

ECWolf was planning ROTT support at one point.

It's on the roadmap and definitely somewhat of a priority, though MacWolf and Blake Stone support are ahead of it. (There's no Blake ports at all, so this is fine.)

3DGE was going to add ROTT support at some point but I am not sure how far along it is.

It sounds like it's not far off, actually!

[leileilol]

There's no Blake ports at all, so this is fine.

there's this and it's a better port than anything rott ever had

[NeuralStunner]

... So there is. I wonder why I've never heard of this in the ECWolf circle?

Tried it out. What a smooth, no-frills port.

[Dark-Assassin]

I'm working on a faithful ROTT port to GZDoom and Zandronum to as best as the engines can handle.
Already got most actors coded in, got a WIP map conversion script and all assets are reimported from darkwar.wad (need to write a script for that though).
It's all currently private on Dropbox, so there's no repo for it right now.

Some methods are unorthodox to conform to vanilla methods, like:
* Using special path arrows for moving objects
* Have moving walls follow an actor to try and keep them in sync as GZDoom and Zandronum can't have solid polyobjects that pass through unkillable blocking actors.
* Catwalks and walls with variable heights (catwalk marker) use 3d floors instead of 3d midtext.

Some things I still need to figure out is:
* Make the enemies not shoot if their LOS is blocked by windows and other actors (may have a non damaging hitscan checker).
* Make the GAD's more reliable. They currently use Warp to attach players to them and it works well, however faster speeds may make players fall off.
* Come up with an algorithm to determine the required velocity to reach the ceiling without actually hitting it that'll work in ACS. Currently I used a program to calculate most after manually finding ones needed using power of 2 heights and added the calculated results in steps of 64 units.
* Have enemies move using velocities rather than A_Chase to help them use jump pads more reliably.
* Make Split Missile split after releasing fire rather than after a few ticks
* Make Crushers work properly and try and squish the player view height
* Make pit traps work that also lowers the player view height
* Make the dog weapon cause the player to jump when pressing use
* Have variable pitches for the charge up of the dog howl.
* Completely remove player Pain states but allow their sound to still play. (Currently pain keeps resetting their animations)
* Add the intro and slideshow screens
* Make it so the player can only hold one large weapon.
* Shrooms and Elasto powerdowns

Other WIP things:
* Have the map conversion script add timed events, fog, line properties like switches and make elevators work. Also spread out some coop starts from the single player starting point.
* Put the exported TEXTMAP into a WAD file.
* All bosses.
* Multiplayer stuff like Collector items and other gamemodes.
* Finishing the reworked HUD.
* Score system, which is also scoreboard friendly in Zandronum.
* Redo the font system myself rather than using Return of the Triad's fonts.
* Make GZDoom not treat the mod as Doom

Noticeable differences:
* Excalibat's offsets are adjusted for widescreen
* Excalibat can be swung from the left side right after a right side swing (no gameplay change, just visual)
* HUD reworked from vanilla. Mostly due to chat area messages overlapping the top bar, and also it was ugly overall.
* Lives system has been removed. Instead, 1-up and 3-up items give full or super health respectively
* Max life is increaseable by 1 when collecting 100 life points
* Knife is now useable as a weapon in slot 1
* Pistol changed to the Dual Pistols right hand sprite
* Dual Pistols use the regular Pistol firing sound
* Getting Dual Pistols will remove the single pistol
* Single pistol slot changed to 2
* Female and Darker (for Doug Wendt) skin tones for the knife and god hand
* Various dog colours based on gender or race (Male: Brown, Female: White, Doug Wendt: Black)
* Dynamic Lights
* GLDEFS based brightmaps
* All HuntBegin, Darkwar and most additional levels will be added as all in one. HuntBegin starts as E0Ax to not conflict with Darkwar's maps, All non single/coop maps will use a different naming style.

Planned differences:
* Smoother muzzle flash animations
* Add some various gameplay options, like what the ROTT 2012 mod changes, and the ROTT 2013 game changes
* Strife style brightmaps rather than using GLDEFS textures
* Complete support for Return of the Triad's maps
* Support for playing through Doom maps using ROTT actors (if loaded with Doom IWAD and patch).
* Support for playing through ROTT maps using Doom actors (if loaded with Doom IWAD and patch).

[SamVision]

I, a genius, will craft the greatest creation known to mankind.

Wow this all sound wonderful. Do you have a development blog or something for this?

[Dark-Assassin]

No, I don't, however I could start one on my website.

Edit: Created a blog https://x1.rfc1337.net/zrott/

[leileilol]

I'm working on a faithful ROTT port to GZDoom and Zandronum to as best as the engines can handle.
Already got most actors coded in, got a WIP map conversion script and all assets are reimported from darkwar.wad (need to write a script for that though).

That unfortunately won't help the no-good-source-ports dilemma. Think in the long term.

[Dark-Assassin]

I know, however this is the best I can do. We're most likely best off waiting for ECWolf to support it than waiting for another source port to appear.

[leileilol]

Starting from the ye old 2002 port would have a significantly smaller roadmap....

- Stretchable 320x200 buffer
- NukedOPL3 for the OPL2 ASS midi playback (NukeYKT already did make an Apogee windows synth driver for this purpose) but with selectable timbres as ROTT changed them since 1.2
- Graphical setup program also ported
- Resampled+lowpassfiltered 10989hz sound playback
- Multiplayer via TCP/IP (of course)
- make Debian happy
- (extra fun) ROTT 1.0 data and features (footsteps, opl3 etc) support

It's probably possible to toss money at Icculus' patreon to fix the bad ROTT port situation...

[PlayerLin]

I know, however this is the best I can do. We're most likely best off waiting for ECWolf to support it than waiting for another source port to appear.

Just do whatever you want on the mod, honestly.
Not everyone can code a sourceport without burned out or too busy with Real-Life(TM) or other shit make them give up.

3DGE and ECWolf looks like still lot of way to go but still hope.

[Dark-Assassin]

I have the time to work on something like this, but absolutely next to no experience with actual engines, let alone the languages used for them.