Selaco - A Doom engine FPS inspired by FEAR and the classics - now available on Early Access

[Morenatsu.]

Imagine putting civvie in your game

 

[toughasnails]

This is not the first of these retro shooters to feature him. He was in Postal 4 and there is a tribute to him in Nightmare Reaper. I could swear that another one that I've played had a secret dedicated to him.
I more or less like the guy so it doesn't bother me if the game is fine and Selaco is shaping p nicely so far. One problem with these games paying tributes to popular influencers from the boomer shooter scene, or the devs being close to them in one way or another, is that they might go easy on the games in question if they don't cut the mustard in the end. Which is what seems to have happened with Postal 4 tbh.

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

Another gayme with faggy retro style graphics. Disgusting. I will never stop shitting on these lazy pieces of shit.

 

[Hace El Oso]

How about that FEAR AI, is it 'inspired' enough to include that?

 

[Tacgnol]

Another gayme with faggy retro style graphics. Disgusting. I will never stop shitting on these lazy pieces of shit.

Why would you care anyway? You don't even have a PC so it's not like you'll ever be playing any of these games.

 

[toughasnails]

Another gayme with faggy retro style graphics. Disgusting. I will never stop shitting on these lazy pieces of shit.

This one features a waifu though so I would expect you to be more forgiving.

 

[HansDampf]

The demo is out. I get stable 144 fps outside of combat with everything set to max. During combat, it tends to drop below 100. But I haven't seen it go below 60. This is fine.
i9-10850K + RTX2060

What isn't fine is the anti-aliasing. The only thing worse than no AA is FXAA, which is the only option right now. If I set the scale factor to 2x (without FXAA), it looks much better. But that's, of course, bad for the framerate (around 50 fps during combat). Where is my multisampling?

 

[soulburner]

The demo is pretty great. I only noticed the weapon sounds are much too soft and should be louder. Like much, much louder. Unless this is a bug I encountered, too low weapon fire volume makes them sound less powerful than they are.
Also, I did not find a "walk" button. I understand it's a fast paced shooter, but I like to walk when exploring. Maybe I'm blind, but where do I change the blood color to proper red?

Got scared the highest detail settings are pretty hardware demanding, so I tuned down what I could to Ultra. On my Ryzen 3600 and RTX 3060 I get 60 fps stable with vsync @ 1920x1200. There's only an occasional stutter sometimes but nothing major.

 

[JDR13]

Got scared the highest detail settings are pretty hardware demanding, so I tuned down what I could to Ultra. On my Ryzen 3600 and RTX 3060 I get 60 fps stable with vsync @ 1920x1200. There's only an occasional stutter sometimes but nothing major.

Ultra is the highest setting.

I liked what I played of it except the enemy soldiers exploding into purple goop. Enemies shouldn't gib from normal gunfire.

 

[Berekän]

Been having fun with the demo, but I feel enemy visibility needs to be improved a bit, I had trouble seeing enemies at times (and that's even before bullets start flying)

 

[Curratum]

Performance is pretty bad, not just for what's going on on the screen but in terms of framelag spikes too. Everything that happens due to a scripted event or minor interaction causes dips. Overall, it's definitely a lot better than what you would get in stock GZDoom with that much fx and dynamic lights on, but it's still far from what I'd call "good".

Apart from technical issues, the movement feels incredibly bad for a GZDoom engine game, to the point where I'm not sure what the design process behind it all was. You have one constant movement speed, which seems to be somewhere just above Doom 2's default "walk" speed. You get caught on world / sector geometry a lot, more than I'd be comfortable with.

Just the lack of a sprint button / speed boost modifier in a retro FPS makes it feel off to me. Hated Doom 2016 and Eternal for the same reason. Boost / slide / dodge buttons are no substitute for a sprint modifier. Even if you have to have a stamina bar tied to it, just have it in there.

Honestly, didn't spend too much time with the demo, played it through what looks like the halfway point, watching the whole thing on YT. The feeling of it was off, which is a shame, because the sector work and visual design are immaculate, but for some reason the game purposefully goes against the gameplay and engine it uses and goes for slow player movement to accommodate for its cramped level design with tons of things to bump into and get stuck on.

Not a fan of a Doom-engine game relying on headshots either, and even on the middle difficulty, enemies felt too spongy if downed with bodyshots.

 

[soulburner]

Ultra is the highest setting.

There are some settings that go up to "ridiculous" level.

 

[toughasnails]

What isn't fine is the anti-aliasing. The only thing worse than no AA is FXAA, which is the only option right now. If I set the scale factor to 2x (without FXAA), it looks much better. But that's, of course, bad for the framerate (around 50 fps during combat). Where is my multisampling?

Yeah, GZDoom has p fine AA options so it's disappointing to have them gone here as the game's visuals really need decent AA.
On the other hand the performance is is p good so whatever tinkering with the engine they did on their side paid off there.

The lack of decent AA options is one of my pet peeves with modern games btw, you are mostly left with a choice between downscaling and some sort of blur-o-vision shader AA. Maybe someone like Bad Sector has some idea what it is with modern engines and AA and why that option tends to be lacking these days.

 

[soulburner]

The best way to do antialiasing is to use higher than native resolution. Both AMD and Nvidia have such options, with Nvidia having DLDSR which looks pretty great. I run many games one or two notches above my display's native res and disable but in AA in games. Unless my RTX 3060 can't handle the load. This method keeps the sharpness (and you can control it in the driver) unlike TAA and other shit.

 

[HansDampf]

My initial impression was also that the running speed feels more like walking speed. You can't play this like Doom. If you want to get from one cover spot to the next, you have to use the dash/slide. I'm not sure if increasing the running speed would make the game too easy in this regard. Maybe this is just something I'll get used to, eventually. I don't know.
But I disagree with enemies being too spongy, even on Captain. I think they're just right and will die to a single burst with the pistol, if you hit them in the head.
The game is also frigging hard on Captain.

 

[Alienman]

Thought the demo looked good, but for some reason the shooting felt unsatisfactory to me. It just doesn't have the oomph or coolness factor. Which is a bit weird, considering how everything else seems great. Another thing, is that when playing, I kinda wish the engine, setting, and visual style was for something else - maybe a stealth RPG in the style of Deus Ex. Feels a bit wasted, but then again I'm not the biggest boomer shooter fan.

 

[Bad Sector]

I finished the demo, this is a game i'll certainly buy at some point as it seems to be one of the best retro FPS in recent development. I love the -sometimes elaborate- secrets in several places (with a couple of "interesting" ones :-P), looking around for stuff, etc. Though according to the end stats i only managed to find 10 out of 20 secrets (it is nice that there isn't only a single "type" of secret too).

It isn't really Doom, if you go to it expecting something that has Doom-style gameplay you'll be disappointed - while it isn't slow, it is a bit slower paced than Doom. If anything considering how much you are expected to look around the environments and how closed the spaces are (at least in the demo), the character's speed might be a bit too fast. Perhaps a slightly slower speed but with a "sprint" button might work better, though it most likely is too late for that. Regardless i never found speed to be an issue.

The music is great and the sounds are nice. I love how "explosive" the shotgun is and feel though i never really ended up using the magnum and i found the rifle (or whatever that is) "ok" despite using it most of the time (because there was barely any ammo for the shotgun). But in general shooting felt nice and squishy, though the boss at the end was a bit too much of a bulletsponge (the normal enemies were fine though). His "homing jump" was annoying too especially since he also caused damage. I ended up

Spoiler

killing him with a grenade, followed by some shotgun shots and then... shooting him from inside a box :-P

One thing i noticed is this placeholder text above the character's reflection which shows up only when you walk :-P

I guess the model is a bit placeholder too since Dawn's face looks a bit off compared to the rest of the game. Same with the ending screen, she looks a bit different than, e.g., in the menu screen.

Performance-wise the game was perfectly fine, with everything at its maximum (including decals to "ridiculous" setting) most of the time it was hovering around 80-120 fps at 1440p. Sometimes it fell below 80fps but it never noticed it going below 70. This is under Linux without any compositor, running the Vulkan version of the game on a Ryzen 3700X and an RX 5700 XT.

I didn't bother paying any attention to the story, etc since the game mentioned it isn't done and some aspects aren't there. Perhaps it'd explain why the enemies have purple blood, in one message they're referred to as aliens and yet communicate with each other in perfect English :-P.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Another gayme with faggy retro style graphics. Disgusting. I will never stop shitting on these lazy pieces of shit.

The graphics in this one are not as offensive as some other retro boomer shitters.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It isn't really Doom, if you go to it expecting something that has Doom-style gameplay you'll be disappointed - while it isn't slow, it is a bit slower paced than Doom.

It's supposed to be based on Fear, not Doom, so i don't see why anybody would expect a Doom clone.

 

[Bad Sector]

The lack of decent AA options is one of my pet peeves with modern games btw, you are mostly left with a choice between downscaling and some sort of blur-o-vision shader AA. Maybe someone like @Bad Sector has some idea what it is with modern engines and AA and why that option tends to be lacking these days.

There are basically three types of AA: post-process (e.g. FXAA), sample-based (e.g. MSAA) and temporal (e.g. TAA), each one having their own pros and cons. In general:

• post-process can give you the best performance with the least resources, but they often don't really know much about the actual geometry being rendered. On the other hand they'll work on anything, e.g. textures and shaders
• sample-based will take one or more samples per pixel and they tend to provide a consistent quality over time, but they only work with individual frames and they tend to be the most computationally expensive. MSAA is the most common by far and supported by the hardware but also has its own limitations (later on that). SSAA is the oldest but also the most expensive as it always uses the same number of pixels (in a way rendering at 200% width and height and downscaling is like doing 4x SSAA since it'd be like taking four samples per pixel).
• temporal will use data from multiple previous frames to try and provide high quality antialiasing and also handle aliasing over time (e.g. detail "popping", like specular lighting aliasing as the camera or objects move), however this relies on the assumption that the previous frames are mostly the same and the renderer provides correct motion data to avoid creating ghosting/smearing (which can be easy to screw up). The end result is basically that in good conditions (mostly static scenes) it can produce results that approach SSAA with a high number of samples, but on the other hand in bad conditions (quick motion) it can produce bad or even "wrong" results - thus giving a very inconsistent output (something which is also exacerbated by potential engine issues).

TAA also has two (mostly unrelated) benefits going for it, one being that solving the "perfect" frame over time can also be used to implement some rendering techniques stochastically (i.e. techniques that instead of always being pixel perfect, they only calculate some or most of the samples while randomly ignoring others) that itself allows for faster rendering (or, from another perspective, being able to do things that would otherwise be too slow to do) - this is basically what happens when in some games that are designed with TAA in mind you turn off TAA and get noisy results (commonly seen with transparencies, hair, shadows and now raytracing), it might have been too costly (performance-wise) to get a smoother result.

The other benefit is that as engines are trying to put heavier effects in there (raytracing is a common target now, though TBH i expect in the future this to be less of an issue since current hardware is barely designed for it), they rely on reconstuction techniques like DLSS, FSR 2.0 and Intel's XeSS - or whatever they call it - which use the same input data as TAA to produce results. So if an engine has one it might as well get the other and since if an engine's developers want to implement advanced raytracing effects like realtime global illumination, they'll need DLSS/FSR2/etc to get usable performance in non-enthusiast hardware, so might as well use TAA too and get all the other benefits.

MSAA and FXAA are the other two AA methods you might find, though they're both becoming less common (especially FXAA). MSAA has the main drawback that -aside from being heavy- it only works with polygon edges and so the more a scene relies on shaders to produce detail (even something as mundane as a normal map and/or a specular map would apply here), the more likely it is to not work. One now extreme -but most likely more common as time goes by- case is Unreal Engine 5's Nanite that doesn't use polygons (at least polygons the GPU knows about) at all and so MSAA wouldn't work on it at all. Another drawback, mainly for developers, is that depending on how it is used MSAA requires special shaders for it. If it is the only AA it might be worth it, but as TAA also needs special care, developers may decide that they do not want to bother with MSAA - especially if it doesn't fit their rendering pipeline (see the polygon limitation i mentioned) or rendering budget.

(as a sidenote, pretty much all modern GPUs from Nvidia and AMD that can do MSAA, can have their minimum number of samples per pixel adjusted, thus improving MSAA's visual quality at the cost of worse render performance - but AFAIK for some reason this functionality is not available in Direct3D and since most engines are designed with D3D in mind, they never seem to implement an option for it even when they have OpenGL or Vulkan support despite both of them supporting it)

So anyway, as mentioned above by soulburner the best approach - if your GPU can handle it - is to render the game at higher-than-normal resolutions (on Linux you can use gamescope or xrandr for that - the former will work on any game with almost any resolution but might have some input lag, the latter will have no input lag but will resize your entire desktop, choose your poison :-P) to get some form of simple SSAA and -IMO- if available also use TAA for that to get temporal aliasing (either because the engine was designed for it so all effects work properly or just to avoid temporal aliasing). Some games might support using a render scale above 100% which should give you pretty much the same result, though with slightly less resource usage and slightly better UI handling, so if the game has that use that option instead.

 

[HansDampf]

The boss is pretty easy, and also lame tbh. Just take cover, wait for him to stop shooting, then hit him with a meaty shotgun shot. Repeat. He signals his jump way in advance for you to slide away.
Btw, try jumping out of the slide.

Fighting the regular soldiers is great though.

 

[Curratum]

It's supposed to be based on Fear, not Doom, so i don't see why anybody would expect a Doom clone.

Because Fear doesn't work in that engine?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Because Fear doesn't work in that engine?

I don't see what the engine has anything to do with anything.

 

[Bad Sector]

The boss is pretty easy, and also lame tbh. Just take cover, wait for him to stop shooting, then hit him with a meaty shotgun shot. Repeat. He signals his jump way in advance for you to slide away.

I had ran out of shotgun ammo by that time, the shotgun was too good to not use it :-P. The other guns seemed to barely do a scratch and there wasn't any feedback - i think i did most of the damage with a (single) grenade i had. I tried to take cover but he always jumped next to me almost instantly when i did that :-/. At the end i only beat it from inside the box where i would get little damage. Regardless i can't say i liked the boss fight much either.

Because Fear doesn't work in that engine?

It is supposed to be inspired by the game FEAR, not the engine FEAR used. While the engine can affect some things, at the end of the day games can change it since it is open source (and GZDoom is very customizable without modifying it) - i hope you don't expect to shoot demons in Sonic Robo Blast 2 because it also uses a modified Doom engine :-P.

Though i can't really see the FEAR inspiration myself, aside from the demo map being a bunch of offices (and considering how high tech and sci-fi everything is, even that is stretched). Perhaps when the project started it was closer and the "inspired by" stuck with it.

 

[Berg DK]

I couldn't force myself to play past the first combat scenario, worst feeling combat I've experienced in a doom engine game
and the protagonist feels so out of place I cant take the game seriously.