nstlaurent / DoomLauncher

Doom Launcher is a doom launching utility and database for custom wads and pk3s
GNU General Public License v3.0
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[Feature Request] Doom 64 support #314

Open kenbot opened 1 month ago

kenbot commented 1 month ago

Doom 64 is not as popular as Ultimate Doom & Doom II, but there is still a Doomworld modding community around it. A handful of Doom 64 mods have won Cacowards, like Dreamblood https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/144234-wip-dreamblood-64-dreams-for-doom-64-episode-1-updated-v12/

Let's support it in Doom Launcher!

This should be surprisingly straightforward; you can already do this in DoomLauncher, sort of:

How:

kenbot commented 1 month ago

Ohhh.... -iwad is not a thing for Doom 64. The exe file already knows how to find doom64.wad, and you can choose, say Doom2 as an IWAD in DoomLauncher and Doom64 will ignore it and run fine.

Probably best that Doom64 gets treated as its own thing then, separate from Source Ports and IWADs.

kenbot commented 1 month ago

It's a bit more interesting than I thought!

Doom64 mods are sometimes just a WAD file with a properly formatted text file, but sometimes they come with BAT files to install / uninstall the mod. The BATs don't all work the same, but they often replace doom64.kpf with a different file to allow patches, then replace it again with the original file in the UNINSTALL.BAT.

For example, while you can run the Dreamblood mod in DoomLauncher, it won't show the Dreamblood title or background images. If you run the BAT files that swap in the right KPF file, it will.

Good support for Doom64 probably requires a software implementation of the BAT file - I think directly running random BAT files from the internet is unacceptable, and the code in them is pretty simple.