Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

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RazurZDooM
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Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by RazurZDooM »

Before I start this, I want to say I have no idea where this should go, so I'm just gonna stick this here for now.

So, a while back there was this open source GZDooM-based sourceport called GLOOME, more info about it here for anyone interested although development on it has ceased: viewtopic.php?t=48994

Pretty much I need to modify the engine's maximum possible players so that I have more room to work with some crazy ideas of mine that just wouldn't work with the default, unless what I've seen all over the place saying the max for GZDooM is 8 is a load of shite. So is there anyway to do this, and what would I need to do?

EDIT: Wasn't thinking right when I made this post, I was really tired, my bad about the general idiocy and lack of research here, whoops! : :?
Last edited by RazurZDooM on Fri May 25, 2018 4:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by wildweasel »

Is there any particular reason you need GLOOME? GZDoom nowadays is fully GPL-licensed, so it can now be used in the same situations that GLOOME would.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by Graf Zahl »

Why do you need more players in the first place. Don't forget that in order to use them you basically need a network connection between n computers if you have n players, each of those n computers commnunicating data to each other one.
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by Matt »

The only reason for that many players I can imagine in the absense of a big LAN party is the need to spawn things from bots at deathmatch starts, in which case G_PickDeathmatchStart() would be a much better alternative.

(meanwhile there really isn't much that the bots can do that you can't do better with a custom actor, besides maybe really quickly testing some multiplayer stuff without having to think too much about it)
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TDRR
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by TDRR »

I'm still wondering, is there really a limitation that makes it not possible to support over 8 players? I'm doing a multiplayer-focused standalone game using the GZDoom engine but i think that 8 players really isn't enough. 16 would be perfect and 32 would maybe be too much but still nice to have support for it.

I assume a reason to use GLOOME over the latest GZDoom is that frankly, performace sucks, and i'm too aiming for low-end computers which GZDoom 3.x really doesn't like so in the end i will have to use GLOOME (I am going to miss that beautiful model light-n-shadow code added in the later builds)
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by Graf Zahl »

TDRR wrote:and i'm too aiming for low-end computers which GZDoom 3.x really doesn't like
May I ask why?
I can understand that sometimes money may be a bit tight to buy new hardware but the survey we ran last year showed that all those low end systems barely make up 3% of the available market. On Steam their market share is far less than 1%.

If you want to do a standalone release you really won't get much out of this - in this scenario it is far, far more important to offer the ones with good systems the best experience, particularly if you want to do something commercial, because these people do have money - the ones with low end systems are unlikely to - there's reasons after all why they still run old computers - and most of the time they are money related.
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TDRR
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by TDRR »

Graf Zahl wrote:May I ask why?
I can understand that sometimes money may be a bit tight to buy new hardware but the survey we ran last year showed that all those low end systems barely make up 3% of the available market. On Steam their market share is far less than 1%.

If you want to do a standalone release you really won't get much out of this - in this scenario it is far, far more important to offer the ones with good systems the best experience, particularly if you want to do something commercial, because these people do have money - the ones with low end systems are unlikely to - there's reasons after all why they still run old computers - and most of the time they are money related.
Because i am too using low end systems :P (A PC with a decent CPU but trash GPU and a laptop with a little bit decent GPU but a complete trash CPU) How (and why) would i make a game that me and 95% of my friends can't run decently?

I'm also going to put attention into the graphics and stuff, because yes i know a massive amount of people have these computers.
(and the graphic effects you can achieve with GLOOME are extremely cheap on hardware and still look fairly good, maybe partly emulating some Source engine game)

Unfortunately that's not the case around here in Venezuela, things have been going a bit lighter for us but we still can't afford these modern-day computers, i definitely plan on doing more games but without more money to get a semi-decent computer i can't.
The most powerful computer of all my friends is literally from 2012 when stuff wasn't that bad around here, if i made my game with GZDoom 3.6.0 he would be basically the only one who could run this game around here, and that's no good.

However nothing is really stopping me from just including GZDoom 3.6.0 as an option in the launcher or even somewhere else, i can test it at around 25fps with all the stuff i have currently put in so it's good enough for testing how it looks.

I know GZDoom has pretty much stopped caring for low-end hardware (and for good reason) but when there's no other option i have to take the only way out, i don't like it either but it's about as far as i can go. (literally 95% of the features from current GZDoom i'm using in my game are render stuff, and that 95% is just the spotlight and new model dynamic lightning which i will sorely miss and instead have to cope with these flat-looking models)

But whatever, i just came to ask this:
I'm still wondering, is there really a limitation that makes it not possible to support over 8 players? I'm doing a multiplayer-focused standalone game using the GZDoom engine but i think that 8 players really isn't enough. 16 would be perfect and 32 would maybe be too much but still nice to have support for it.
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by TDRR »

Whoever is still interested in this, change MAXNETNODES from 8 to 16 in d_net.h and MAXPLAYERS from 8 to 16 in doomdef.h. You can try to go higher, but it's unlikely to work without modifications to some structures.

Anything using the AAPTR_PLAYER1-8 pointers will not work as intended with 9 players or more, but i never used that anyways so in my case it doesn't matter. (And you can interact the very same way using ZScript and ACS built-in functions anyways)

This is in a LZDoom build, but i'm pretty sure it should be the exact same in GLOOME and current GZDoom.
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by drfrag »

Then MP it's obviuously broken, it's clear that at least you need more pointers.
I see you've managed to compile it.
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TDRR
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Re: Change engine's maximum player count for GLOOME?

Post by TDRR »

drfrag wrote:Then MP it's obviuously broken, it's clear that at least you need more pointers.
I see you've managed to compile it.
It's not, you just can't access them directly via pointers, but it seems everything works fine.

For instance, if you were to use A_TransferPointer to take a pointer from a specific player, you don't have access to players 1-8, but you can use the player this actor is currently targeting, so it's still easily workable.
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