GZDoom needs a new programmer

[Sussudio]

In retrospective, I think GZDoom was more of an experiment which turned out to be largely positive in many ways, but disastrous in others due to virtually nobody helping him plus an apparent lack of well defined goals and sense of aesthetics, the later being quite common among programmers. This is an example of something that should have been thought of when he started programming the render that unfortunately makes the graphics a lil less appealing than they could have been.

The lighting system, that I would not touch with a ten foot pole, and here's the reason for that.

Nevermind the complains, GZDoom remains the best GL render for ZDoom, and not "best" as in "the lesser of various evils" but as in really good and efficient, provided you're only using texture filtering. In fact, GZDoom proved somewhat faster than Risen3D on my computer under identical settings.

He's also getting a lot of unfounded whinery for incompatibility with ATI cards, but truth is, ATI drivers are a complete piece of garbage wasting a lot of the potential the hardware actually possesses. This thing is highly incompatible with pretty much everything developed before the card itself and that's not news. If you can afford a NVIDIA card yet you choose to stick to your ATI crap, you have it coming.

GZDoom is my GL port of choice, I've wholly enjoyed everything it gets right, like 3D floors and rendering wads with extensive, complex architecture, and at the end of the day, all I have for Graf Zahl (despite that sometimes talking to him is a bit like tasing a mule, with all due respect) is a sentiment of gratitude for his free and committed contribution to ZDoom and the Doom community in general.

[Rachael]

If I see one more post with ATI FUD, I'm permanently locking this.

ATI's drivers aren't the greatest in the world - they never were - but that does NOT automatically make ATI garbage. ATI is very solid hardware, and good for what it does. The crap that people post about ATI is uninformed, biased, and pretty much screams "I'M A NVIDIA FAN BOI AND I AM GOING TO PUT DOWN ATI BECAUSE I AM IGNORANT AND I DO NOT KNOW ANY BETTER!" I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that's what you're coming across to me as. It's no different than in school, one person in your clique hates this one outcast kid, so everyone in your clique hates him, just because you want to fit in. It's utterly ridiculous and stupid, and cannot be justified.

I've seen an equal - if not more - amount of problems with nVidia cards and drivers - it's just that nVidia tends to fix them faster.

[Daniele C.]

If I see one more post with ATI FUD, I'm permanently locking this.

ATI's drivers aren't the greatest in the world - they never were - but that does NOT automatically make ATI garbage. ATI is very solid hardware, and good for what it does. The crap that people post about ATI is uninformed, biased, and pretty much screams "I'M A NVIDIA FAN BOI AND I AM GOING TO PUT DOWN ATI BECAUSE I AM IGNORANT AND I DO NOT KNOW ANY BETTER!" I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that's what you're coming across to me as. It's no different than in school, one person in your clique hates this one outcast kid, so everyone in your clique hates him, just because you want to fit in. It's utterly ridiculous and stupid, and cannot be justified.

I've seen an equal - if not more - amount of problems with nVidia cards and drivers - it's just that nVidia tends to fix them faster.

Just my 2cents, without entering into the details: I think that the programmer's duty ends where the OpenGL API is not met or acts glitchy because not implemented correctly. If this was/is the case with ATI drivers, then blame the driver's author; otherwise it's really FUD.

[wildweasel]

At this point I think the thread ought to be preemptively locked. Regardless of what opinions are being thrown around, this is pretty much a sore subject around here and we ought to give it some distance for a while.