ID24: A new Doom mapping standard

Sheesh it wasn't imposing enough to rerelease doom. Bethesda has infiltrated and turned the community against itself with co-opting community members to define an 'official' mapping format that half the people are gonna honor and the other half won't, complicating everything for source port creators and mappers alike. As if the community isn't fatigued enough. This shit sucks.

Agreed.  What a short-sighted, out-of-touch move on their part.  There's no way they even attempted to think that through before doing it.  My basic understanding is that in order to play content which is mapped in the ID24 standard, you have to own the copyrighted id24res.wad, so that it can be run when you run the user-created content.  Presumably, this was done so that it would encourage people to purchase the Doom + Doom II package.  But people who have already owned Doom for 30 years and still use the wad files from their original CDs or floppy disks, or perhaps versions of the wads from GOG or some such site, now cannot run the new content created in the ID24 standard unless they either buy the game again or break the law buy pirating the id24res.wad file.  Why do this to a game which has had an insanely active modding community for 30 years?  And not to mention what you said about source port creators.  Good grief.

Grats to the devs for getting picked up, but as for everyone else yeah what a mess xd. I'll stick to only acknowledging limit-removing and GZDoom formats.

only bethesda's 2024 doom rerelease is closed source?
The open source stuff can't be closed (unless it's bsd, mit or something)

Its not like everybody ditched Boom/MBF the moment MBF21 appeared, people still make limit-removing and vanilla maps, its not like those are going away.

There is something else, though: as the new "upload/share your mods" feature is governed by bethesda's EULA (as it requires a bethesda.net account), the implication seems to be that you need to own the rights to every single bit of custom content you might put into a map. This obviously isn't being enforced yet because they're probably too busy cleaning up the mess of people uploading other people's wads first. So unless you can use Sekaiju (which is like pulling teeth, to be honest) and make all your own textures, if you want to share maps on the new port, legally speaking you're stuck to the standard Doom II textures and music + the new resource.

Am I correct here, and if so, how does that not fly in the face of 30 years of community modding? Why should anybody shackle themselves to that? Moreover, what potential ramifications exist for community content going forward, under this precedent?

I think wads like BTSX and anything that uses ukotex have preemptively accounted for that. It seemed like all those original textures were a lot of pointless legalese-dodging effort to me for a community system that seemed like it will always be by-the-players for-the-players.

The upload system as i understand it seemingly utilizes doomworld's wishy-washy 'dont be an asshole' policy which is to say the doomworld users employed/contracted by bethesda will respond to reports based on how they 'feel' the uploaded content or its uploader is presenting.

If it was honored to the full extent, everything outside of wads that use strictly iwad resources, or 100% verified originals would likely get the shaft, which is a lot of things. But what will probably actually happen is anytime a dbp gets uploaded, some doomworld/bethesda simp will get their friends to mass report it and they will get in the habit of taking down dbps without even checking to see whats wrong because the entire brand is 'verified assholes.' (im saying dbps, but i loosely mean any banned doomworld mappers and perceived trolls that make anything short of 100% original content)

The good news is I think bethesda has to pay people to monitor/maintain this and i dont think bethesda has any financial incentive to keep this running forever, so most of the wads that get uploaded are probably all gonna get canned eventually anyway. I would not treat a for-profit service to the community with any kind of permanence.

This new release and the way people are responding to it also adds a little weight to a suspicion ive had for a pretty long time. One thing I realize that is in common with most people in the doom community that have a problem with me and the doomer boards brand, or deliberately choose not to associate with me or doomer boards is they either have, are in the process of, or aspire to monetize their doom hobby.

For me, Doomer Boards has kinda always been founded on the principle of making maps only for the community's genuine shared enjoyment of doom in spite of what reputation we have. The projects are liked and enjoyed by many, but we dont have to look good to do stuff that the casual doom-enjoyer would genuinely like and want to play and/or see succeed.

I think the unspoken significance of the doomworld vs. doomer boards feud has much less to do with confusing politics (woke vs. fascism) and instead has to much more to do with "Is this good for your career?"

People who are more career doom mappers/modders have to be more careful about what they say at the risk of obtaining a doom-adjacent career path that could potentially be cancelled. Doomer boards spits in the face of that culture and just makes good doom maps anyway for free.

Doomer boards project cant win a cacoward not because of the reputation we have, but because it shouldnt be allowed to contribute to our marketable Doom resumés, especially in spite of other less successful people who are really trying to make it in the business.

Am i wrong that all these people have, or seem to have genuine aspirations to make money off of the doom and doom-adjacent content they create?

Scuba Steve (action doom 2)
Bridgeburner + the hellforge (age of hell)
MajorArlene (age of hell)
insanegazebo (age of hell)
Xaser (legacy or rust, adventures of square)
Jimmy (adventures of square)
Mtrop (adventures of square)
Mechadon (Supplice)
Grazza (Selaco, Supplice, and dozens of other monetized doom projects)
Andrew Hulshult (monetized doom music/remixes)
Esselfortium (monetized doom music/remixes)

Theres a bunch of other people i can list that, while not having any official credits, I think at least have prospects to work on for-profit doom projects, I'm sure, and would serve their interest to network with these people.

Does doomer boards have any accounts from any dev that has ever worked on the explosion of modern boomer shooters in recent years? Would they not benefit from mapping for doom in a "mapping gym" and reading useful testing feedback and good design tutorials that are posted here?

The reason all of them dont have an account here is because of "hate speech?”

I think the doomer boards attitude about not giving a shit about what you write in public is not as big of a problem of politics as having a professional attitude towards Doom mapping because having no intentions to make money off this in any way is bad for business.

Lol no wonder they hate you thelokk, you figured out their game in like 9 minutes.

In my opinion: Ostensibly, this is because it's much simpler to publish console games and bind to their SDK without open-source code (which many console SDKs outright forbid).

In reality, I think (my opinion only of course) it's that closed-source protects "Doom24" from both copycatting and claims of community open-source reuse showing up in their code (which might subject the whole codebase to be licensed as open-source, and cause a major problem for them, due to the above). Note I have no doubt they did everything possible to prevent open-source appearing in their code; I'm merely saying the suggestions could lead to potential litigation which would be expensive, time-consuming, and never guaranteed to reach any particular conclusion, which might subject them to risk. Keeping it closed-source reduces that risk simply by reducing exposure.




Correct, but this new release is Doom now. What we call "Doom" is not a distinct thing from the release in a commercial/product sense. I know many will revolt and hate this idea but it's a straight fact and says so in the release.

You can reject the framing of course but as time goes on the plan according to the released documents is to continue to extend "Doom" (the commercial product) using ID24 as the framework. Their expectation is that new community maps will adhere to the ID24 standard the same way they adopted Boom, MBF, MBF21, etc. And they are providing a community release area as a sort of incentive to do so: suddenly, your maps are playable on consoles too.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your outlook; the only thing guaranteed is strong feelings strongly worded from all sides.

Who registered to make a single venting post. Don't mean to raise the bar, but does it truly qualify?

More on topic, JadingTsunami since you seem to have it figured, can you explain what this new format in practice means to me, potentially daft meat-and-potatoes mapper? Will I one day open UDB and suddenly there will be a "id24(Doom 2)" option when choosing a map format?

This thread opened my eyes. thelokk and 40oz I think if you keep making these amazing maps and people enjoy them, that's the most important thing. The quality of these projects is really fantastic and your maps are always standouts. I thank you guys for your work and this place.

I really do appreciate the feeling but, at this point, I see fewer and fewer reasons to publish anything. Spending hours on a map or more for a project, to see it posted on a forum whose owners literally told us to fuck off, and all this just to be overshadowed in a matter of hours by some 60 half-hour maps project; or some palette puke, "ironically" HoM-laden aberration which lives off unwarranted traction by virtue of having an entire discord cabal behind it?

No, thanks. Fighting in this rat race now feels at best like a fool's errand; at worst like giving pearl to swine. I don't want to learn a new map format, I don't want to build stuff so it can be "palatable to casual players", and I don't want to shove the fruit of my labor into the black hole of today's Doom community. It's just not fun anymore, and I think I'm really done this time.