Idea: something like Retroachievements for doom wads

That sounds really cool. I'd really like to have a doomer boards 'thing' that would incentivize people to play doom more often. Something like dw megawad club or ironman challenges but our own.

I really like the idea of having an achievements list.

I can think of a few different ways this could be fun. I could add a custom page to this forum to view the achievememt list.

Maybe there could be a master list of like a few hundred different achievements, and every month, a random generator will shuffle out 10 achievements for the month for people to try and attain? Maybe it could be a cooperative thing where only one person has to do each achievement and the objective is everyone has to help eliminate every item on the checklist before the month is over...?

I'm just spitballing here -- i havent heard of retroachievements but i imagine the biggest challenge would be the verification of accomplishing said achievements without the requirement of a dedicated source port or frontend launcher.

If anyone has any interest in taking the lead on a doomer boards achievements list/project/event id love to support you any way I can. I just cant do it myself because Doomer Boards Project, Doom news, and moderating this forum dominates all of my time.

if you can think out some way to turn them into algorithmic checks, i could make a special k8vavoom version with support for that. the problem is that recording demos in k8v is not only partially broken, but demo format is not stable (it also depends of client FPS), and you cannot easily verify demos without full k8v playsim. so we need a way to check things in runtime, when playing.

to (somewhat) avoid cheating, we may have an "officially approved" binary and base packs. the upcoming k8v already support Ed25519 signatures for base files, and we can invent some way to use signatures to authenticate things. of course, it won't rule away a dedicated cheater, and properly verifying such achievements will be very hard, but we can have them in a different "achievement class", or something.

My idea was more like having achievements pop up in real time while you play (just like "real" achievements in modern games). That would of course demand a source-port with the required modifications and a dedicated server. But I suppose the demos idea could work too.
That's the RA page for PSX Doom retroachievements.org/game/11256

it would be quite useless to implement hardcore anticheating considering that the engine code is GPLed. ;-) i see those measures more like something to turn away k00lhax0rz.

i mean, 'cmon, if somebody wants to get all achievements by cheating… so be it. but they at least should know how to rebuild the thing from sources, with all checks turned off.

of course, i can mark various console vars as "cheating", and turn off achievement engine when they are changed, check signatures and such… but there is another problem: k8vavoom is not Vanilla. while it is close to Vanilla, it differs in some important things, like physics and collision detection, for example. and some Vanilla exploits are simply impossible to perform in k8v (or they are unreliable; wall running doesn't work, for example; item grabbing is FPS dependent; and so on).

that's also why i proposed a different class for such achievements, it won't be fair to mix them with pure Vanilla engines.

I think until someone is willing to put in a serious effort, this is a cool idea but will not go anywhere. I can explain what one would need to do but in honesty there's probably a good reason no one has done it so far despite having all the necessary information required to do so.

I was thinking about this thread recently, and while I don't have much to add as far as achievements go, I'm still kinda perplexed about how much content there is for Doom plus so many die-hard fans, but the socialization around it still seems very lacking. There's so much to do in Doom and so many people playing it, yet very few are doing the same things. (i.e. some are mapping, some are making graphics or music, others are writing scripts, some are speedrunning a particular wad, another is testing a gameplay mod, another is just playing what's on the front page of doomworld's Wads & mods, another is streaming and making youtube videos, etc.)

I don't know what Doom needs, but Doom has an enormous excess of content that most other new games and properties can only dream of. It seems like with all the content we have, it should be really easy to have some kind of a "Wad of the week" or something to keep people playing this game together

I've had my eye on what the video game industry is doing right in order to keep their games relevant. I see that some multiplayer shooters have matchmaking which automatically assigns players to servers rather than them browsing a through a server browser to find something to play, which is, first, a convenience, but I also think this has a bit of a slot-machine addictive pull, because sometimes the server hosts can control the flow of players towards particular things, where some seasons can be focused on a particular game mode, or a new map that came out, which keeps the practice of playing their games fresh when you're enjoying with other players who are also pulled with the moving trends.

In comparison to this, playing Doom has a lot of 'work' to be done manually. Yes you get more personal freedom with this, but also probably comes with a lot of decision paralysis about what to do and what to play, and effectively keeps you disconnected with other users. It feels like the process of playing Doom would benefit from some form of automation.

I'm just kinda thinking out loud here but I wonder how Doom would fare if there was like a source port that connected to a central hub, that would automatically download this months 'wad of the week' and generate social media posts like "hey did you know everyone is playing Deadwing's Moonblood right now?" + screenshots, and all you would need to do is open the source port and from the start menu you could given the option to play what's currently trending. Then it would automatically load Moonblood. If a lot of people used it, it might be possible for the source port to collect data on wads like how many players reach the exit, how many complete all the levels, average time spent per map, how many times players died, how many times players load a save per map, etc, and then all wads could be separated into skill calibers and recommended to you based on the experiences of other players with your same skill level. I feel like this would work to bring players of similar interests together.

if anything the quality of some of the wads that are effectively getting ignored would make anyone give up on doom mapping altogether. there's enough people playin the same "well known mappers" stuff already