Got through E1 on the latest build. Thoughts:
- First of all, huge respect for getting Freedoom's music and SFX on the GBA. It sounds wonderful with the right sound in place. The between-levels tune is still the original chiptune Doom one but that's minor.
- E1M4: I noticed the boxes at the top of the elevator were gone, maybe some other boxes. I get this was for performance or memory savings, but that spot feels really... bare now. Could you cut detail elsewhere to keep a few boxes up there, or maybe replace them with barrels?
- E1M5: I forgot what a labyrinth this was... I'm impressed that it's working but it's also where I have the most nitpicks.
--- At the start, the pair of pistol zombies on the elevator floor don't come up. You could get rid of the pit in the floor and just spawn the zombies with everything else, maybe facing away from the player.
--- The staircases on the sides of the start area have their windows filled in, but now the textures are misaligned.
--- Some of the switches don't change texture on activation - there's a skull switch on a blue wall, and a lever switch near the teleporters near the end
--- Like E1M4, the edited areas at the end look bare. Biggest offender is a green room with tech pipes and slime pits getting reduced to... just a big green room. Same thing as E1M4, could you cut detail elsewhere to add the tech pipes and maybe simplified slime puddles? Another room that contained a switch and windows looking out had the windows replaced with a grey wall. Maybe you could replace the grey wall with computer display textures?
- E1M6: Well, it chugs, but it runs. I wouldn't mind if you blocked out some windows to save on performance and also to keep me from getting sniped by imps and shotgunners.
- E1M7: I had quite a bit of trouble getting to this one. For some reason, the save I dropped here vanished. I'm using an EZ Flash Omega which does have a history of savegame troubles, but usually it behaves itself... I came back using the level skip cheat, but the first time I tried that it crashed, failing a memory allocation. Second level skip worked, I punched in the IDKFA code and started exploring.
--- This map seemed to perform quite well outside of that. The close quarters and whatever other optimizations you did work to its advantage. I took a different route then when I played Freedoom on my PC, even finding a secret area I had no idea about before, not sure if that was due to your tweaks or IDKFA
- For some reason, the map names shown in the automap and the ending texts are from Doom 2, not Freedoom. Some other strings might be from Doom 2 as well, but I know some were from Freedoom, like the weapon pickups... I don't know what's up with that or how you might fix it.
- When you get a moment, could you push these latest changes to Github? I like playing Freedoom with some pickup and object sprites replaced with older versions, like health/armor pickups, barrels, ammo boxes... I'm curious to see if some of these older sprites might show up better on the GBA's screen.
My apologies if I come off overly negative here, I am really impressed and I love that Freedoom is almost working properly in this port now. And with the music too! Mad respect.