Difference between Strife VE and original

[Casualfan]

I bought strife and wanted to play it through gzdoom but noticed that the strife veteran edition wad was a lot bigger than the strife1 original wad. My question is, what are the differences between these two iwads? And does one of them work better with gzdoom than the other?

[leileilol]

IIRC, mostly lightmaps as there's a new, vavoomish lighting model for the new VE engine's hardware renderer. GZDoom doesn't care about this pre-calculated lighting data AFAIK.

[RKD]

You can play both versions (OG and VE) with GZDoom just fine. VE adds a new secret level, a new secret unlockable power-up and, iirc, a handful of bugfixes and stuff like that. Definitely worth to play VE.

I think you would go with OG if you wanted to play the few mods available made for Strife but I may be not entirely right and perhaps it's possible to play those with VE too, not sure.

[Gez]

I bought strife and wanted to play it through gzdoom but noticed that the strife veteran edition wad was a lot bigger than the strife1 original wad. My question is, what are the differences between these two iwads? And does one of them work better with gzdoom than the other?

There are updated graphics (they went and did kind of the equivalent of the Sprite Fix project, but also for textures), widescreen graphics (the same as GZDoom's actually, from Nash's WidePix project), a few new levels (a new secret level, and three multiplayer CTF levels), updated/bugfixed stock levels (they removed a few deadlocks and restored the demo levels to a playable alternate campaign) and that lightmap feature.

GZDoom supports most of that, the only exceptions being the lightmaps and the CTF levels (there's no CTF mode in GZDoom after all).

[Casualfan]

Thanks for your help everyone!

[Panzermann11]

I also noticed in the Veteran Edition, whenever Blackbird was to comment on a dialogue, a notification saying "Blackbird is listening..." will appear to let you know so you don't accidentally click on the next dialogue and miss out on what she has to say. I don't see this in any non-Veteran Edition gameplay videos I've seen, though.

[Redneckerz]

Strife VE uses lightmaps based off DLight from Kaiser.
Lightmaps are currently in development for GZDoom as ZDRay, and the Disdain game has a engine fork which enables lightmaps.

Safe to say, it looks great. Its especially an achievement considering we are still talking Doom tech here. Where lightmaps are the most normal thing in the world for Quake (Heck, it shipped with light.exe!) it is completely unique to Doom which uses a sector-based lighting model.