ID24: A new Doom mapping standard

Not to mention thrift stores can be a surprisingly cheap and easy way of stumbling upon older games, and the same places often have external USB CD/DVD drives to connect to your PC and rip them with.

i wonder what happened to Gez. he was a sane person, but now he's drifting dangerously close to the common DW denominator. is it some secret psychotronic weapon brainwashing everybody with active DW account?

No, he (like many others) just witnessed firsthand a real world example that, with enough nagging and boot licking, anyone can rise from the nameless community soup and become a Paid Career Creative!  Just have to scream loud, long enough, and in the right direction. 

Gez sucks. There was like a hundred ways to get doom between 1994 mail orders and the unity port. I use the IWADs that I got from my Doom Collector's Edition CD that I bought in 2004. I duplicated them a hundred times in different source port folders, across external hard drives, thumbdrives, and cloud drives. Even on my phone. Basically anything in my possession that holds memory gets Doom on it one way or another. Preserving it thereafter really doesn't require any effort.

Been lurking a few years or so, and wanted to chime in a little on this. This is a bit reminiscent of MS's embrace-extend-extinguish behaviors in the past. I can also see it being the springboard for a future attempt at somehow forcing a CoC(k) on the doom modding sphere, down the road.

I don't think it's worth engaging with consoles and locked-down storefronts; new blood in this age will much more likely be drawn to engines like Godot, Unreal, etc. It's taken a long time, but it's now arguably easier (or at least, probably more compelling) to put together games in these packages than it is to mod Doom. Not saying Doom will die, but the relevance of hyper-moddability will likely wane, with those attracted to Doom looking for a more authentic experience. Vanilla and Boom will always be there as long as someone's porting stuff forward and releasing builds. This isn't to crap on modding and fancy ports, it's just considering long-term prospects and maintainability for ports that get super-elaborate and complex in a scenario of decreasing mindshare and relevance (thanks, DW.)

Nothing good can come from playing a standards game with an org with decades of history when it comes to posturing, rigging, and ignoring standards as it suits them.

While I'm here, though, you know what kills me? Lack of fog in most ports. Universal fog should have been a thing ages ago. Always loved it in Hexen and ROTT.

My understanding is the focus on hw accel killed palette effects for a good while until Chocolate Doom came around and people realized they missed light diminishing, leading to the reinvigoration of software-rendered Doom and hw accel ports later approximating some palette effects via pixel shaders. Would be neat if there were generalized sector flags like 10,25,50% fog with implementation left up to the port, but I guess the same could be said for any number of things.

That's because everyone has to do something for the sake of being different, even if it's just syntax and not the creativity of the actual maps and mods for it. Which is why we have five or six different mapinfo formats, and dumb ones like umapinfo and dmapinfo that have less features than Hexen's original mapinfo from 1995, and Eternity Engine's decorate-like implementation which is roughly the same syntax but with some weird <~__~~@( kind of syntax preceding it just to be different.

because using DEHACKED is So Vanilla! it is the magic thing that keeps any port on the True Doom Side.

and of course, True Ports still have that hardcoded state table and other data structures which DEHACKED meant to change. no stinky external DECORATE actors and other non-hardcoded descriptions. because it would be a blasphemy!

i wonder how many decades should pass until Doom community will adopt Opus for music and sounds. requiring Opus support might been one good thing in that new "standard", but they fucked it up, as everything else.

STOP FUCKING DEHACKED CORPSE ALREADY! here, i am loud about it.

JadingTsunami

I see the spec as something that was proposed (with a sample implementation) by a bunch of guys, some of which may be on a payroll. They have some ideas on how certain technical aspects may be addressed, in a way that can lead to creating something of value, and they hope that their organization will be one of those creating things of value, selling them and making profit.

As someone who has had some experience both actively working on specs, and following their history - this is almost always how standards evolve. USB, C++, you name it - it's always driven by big corporations with vested interest in making things a certain way. In some cases it even starts as a completely proprietary thing that is then opened up and released to the public. Think x86, or even the original Doom specification.

It is not imposed on anyone, so I don't think anyone's permission is required to publish it, as you seem to imply.

If you think it sucks - don't use it, don't implement it in your source port and don't build maps to it. It's not like anything currently available in the community is going to break or go away. I suppose your biggest concern is that enough people will adopt it, and you will be left behind if you choose not to. That's a valid concern, with technology in general, but it will only happen if there is some merit there to begin with.

Would it be better if instead of "dumping" it like a Christmas surprise, there was some process where all the vested parties would announce "Hey guys, we are drafting a spec, come join the workgroup and help us define it"? Probably. Would you join such an effort? I think you would, since you seem to care. Would the end result be different? Probably not. Some ideas would get accepted, others would not, and in the end someone would have to say "Look, this is what we're going with", and a bunch of folks would end up upset (not necessarily the same ones that are now). It would also take longer.

I can understand the claim that all this was unnecessary now, as MBF21 is already good enough. Maybe it is. So, again, stick to it. You don't have to "accept" that spec. You don't even have to read it. It is simply there. But you do have an opportunity to read it and maybe make it better, if you care.

dr_st

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I think we simply see the situation too differently to come to any common resolution. I do like reading others' perspectives though.