The /newstuff Chronicles #239

if funduke uploads the shit wads I assume he plays the shit wads. so how come he doesn't give a quick synopsis of the map that can be inserted into the newstuff update as 'funduke's house of festering wankwads' or something, thus saving the newstuff reviewers from crapping their collective pants in rage and also giving grazza and the other completeists their happiness as well.

I speak sense and great justice. if funduke wants to upload these things then he should be honour bound to provide this service.

I could offer the honorary service of burying my foot in his ass for filling the archives to the brim with crap.

kristus said:

Well, Horse shit is something that comes out of the horsies behind when it has to go poo-poo. And that other thing, I dunno. Sounds to me, like a word you made up.

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

haw.
and You do know what I meant :P

kristus said:

I could offer the honorary service of burying my foot in his ass for filling the archives to the brim with crap.

I like that picture... ;)

90% of everything in the archive is crap anyway.

I think the 94 wads should be uploaded, I can see why it is a pain in the ass for reviewers but the maps are part of Dooms history.

Maybe funduke could inform the reviwer team of wads which are not really worthy of a review????

just my opinion..........

by the way funduke....if there are any wads/texts that you need let me know and i will have a look through my collection of old ass wads.........

History is cheap, look ahead.

Hey guys? Remember 1994? Doom maps sure was shitty back then. Good thing we keep them around because they are a valuable part of our history. You know, cause if we forget our history, it's bound to repeat itself, and then we'd be making all those crappy maps all over again.

Fredrik said:

90% of everything in the archive is crap anyway.

So let's keep it at 90% and not bump it to 95.

He did it again... :(

As much as my point was to cricize TomD's reviews and not put a debate about 94 styled wads (which eventually I had done :/ )

I'm with those that say we don't need oldwads to be reviewed.

Should they be uploaded? I'm not quite sure. Maybe if we'd put up year folders on the archives, with shit from 94 stored in 1994 folder, stuff from 98 and so on it would be easier to navigate and omitting the old crap.

mallis said:

and also giving grazza and the other completeists their happiness as well.

The reason I feel Funduke is doing valuable work is not due to any particular desire for "completeness". It's because a lot of genuinely good old wads (including ones by some well-known mappers from that time) are missing from the archive, and not available anywhere online*. He is making some of these available (together with others that are not so good and/or that are already available online elsewhere).

<small>* In the early days, cdrom.com was far from the only major place to upload wads, and many of the other libraries got axed at some point (and weren't resurrected).</small>

hey guys there's a difference between GOOD '94 maps and CRAP '94 maps

amberleaf said:

I think the 94 wads should be uploaded, I can see why it is a pain in the ass for reviewers but the maps are part of Dooms history.

The contents of Henry VIII's chamber pot are also part of history, but do we really want to see them?

ravage said:

hey guys there's a difference between GOOD '94 maps and CRAP '94 maps

Exactly! So why is the crap being uploaded and the good WADs aren't?

No Linguica was right. Who cares if they're uploaded, but why fricken do it it 10 wads a day. Upload all the shit at once and get it over with.

Again, my comment about the uploader being a brain damaged imbecile stand.

I like Nmn's idea of puttin em into date folders.........

BTW Nightmare is that horace of horace goes skking fame on your avatar?????

How about a /newstuff for actual new stuff, and make a separate /oldstuff for anything uploaded from the '94 era? Because the mountains of random, ghastly '94 WADs are drowning out the actual new stuff, but still deserve some recognition of their own. Maybe make people who upload old WADs also upload a .txt file with brief descriptions of the files uploaded, and append that to the end of each /newstuff in a Museum of Unnatural History minisection or something.

There has to be some way to balance out the two, considering there's two major demands here that cannot adequately be met through the single channel of /newstuff as it exists.

This is a bit long but it makes up for the fact that I only post every 6 months...

Okay, you've all got a point except for whoever's saying "all 1994 wads suck" because that's not true. However you need to remember a few things, especially you who were in diapers then (and weren't just being kinky). In 1994 we barely understood the wad format and didn't have tools like you have today. In fact some of the earliest wads were hex-hacked files that changed the names of textures to names of other textures in the IWAD. Talk about crap. It's hard, even with no design talent, to come up with something that looks as amateurish as 1994 wads, because we were all rank amateurs by definition then.

But the archives on Compuserve and AOL and some Fido BBS's were the only place wads existed until the Internet archives were born, originally at Washington University (remember infant2?) and then gradually moved to the commercial site at cdrom.com, which became too commercial one day, and now at 3dgamers. But there was never an effort to move the privately stored files into the main archive before, and Compuserve and other archives just shut the door one day making it impossible to do so later. Many of those files have been salvaged and can be identified today because the names are 6 characters and start with DM for DOOM and D2 for DOOM2. Those are the kind of files Funduke's bringing into the archive. I was a sysop of the Games forum on CIS and grew to know the other folks such as David (and Cathy) Bruni, who made that a nurturing environment in which works like Eternal DOOM were created. But there was a lot of crap then too.

Anyway back to today. I appreciate having a more complete archive, and have told Funduke so. He spends the time necessary to create a standard template text file so I can easily tell where in the archive to put the file, and it'll work with the database parser here. He is cooperating in the process by uploading the historical wads during the first part of the week and not when the usual flood comes in near the weekend. He excises any single level that would otherwise condemn a multi-level wad due to duplication of id maps and gets the rest into the archives. He identifies every wad as one he uploaded so it's simple enough to scan for "Funduke" in the text files and ignore them if you like. Or scan the idgames database here for Funduke in the email and you'll find all 194 as of now, if you do want to look through them. To each his/her own.

I also appreciate that the DW team wants to do newstuff reviews. The mechanism when any wad comes in is simply that it gets put in the archive, and a copy goes to newstuff for a few days so people don't have to go plowing through the archive looking for date stamps. It was easy for DW folks to just look at newstuff to determine what had been recently uploaded. However, not everything in there gets reviewed anyway--certainly it's unlikely to see a re-review of a re-upload in response to criticism, even here in the chronicles, or bug fixes. There are new versions this week of a couple of Ledmeister's info files but they won't get reviewed, and likely neither would a completely new file. So it's not a given that because it's uploaded, it'll get a review or even a mention.

So, we have a quandary. I have to do my job and insert files that are uploaded and aren't against the rules into the archive. DW wants to review recently uploaded wads, but people including the reviewers don't like to review 1994 wads. Well then, don't. Pretty simple, I'd say. Make a list if you like, with links to the database--that would be appropriate--but just otherwise ignore them. TNC #238 and #237, other than complaining that they existed, ignored them completely without even linking to them, so I would say you guys don't have a lot of consistency in how you approach them anyway. Certainly TNC isn't being used as a way to link to the files.

All that said, I have one other possible thought--Funduke does play through these and perhaps a one-line "opinion" or even a scoring system would be a help. He already has to type up the standard text file for most of them, so adding a "Review:" line might be a simple fix. TNC reviewers could just plunk that text next to a link to the file in a small section at the end of TNC and be done with it.

Ty Halderman said:

...
All that said, I have one other possible thought--Funduke does play through these and perhaps a one-line "opinion" or even a scoring system would be a help. He already has to type up the standard text file for most of them, so adding a "Review:" line might be a simple fix. TNC reviewers could just plunk that text next to a link to the file in a small section at the end of TNC and be done with it.

Thank you for your words.
I will add the "Rewiew:" -section in the beginning of my templates from now on.

Greetings
Funduke

Oh look, its funduke himself... [insane laugh]

Anyway, one thing that gets on my nerves is people judging wads by there date. Trust me, someone said Total Darkness was a '98 wad. To him I said well mate, it has skulltag monsters and weapons so you better check your shit out. And I believe I made it in the year 2005 in the month of May, from the 14yh to the 25th approx. Heh, that shut him up :) So if someone might not like a wad someone else loves, they immediatly calssify it as a 94-96 wad. Stupid.

Oh, sorry for that Graf, just funduke and his '94 wads.

Yes Nmn, we do need a sort of folder in tha archives for rather turdy wads from 94, but also a folder with exceptional 94 wads.

evilhomerdoomer said:

Yes Nmn, we do need a sort of folder in tha archives for rather turdy wads from 94, but also a folder with exceptional 94 wads.

If you're going to do that with the '94 wads, you may as well implement that for the whole archive. I don't see why the older wads deserve special treatment or segregation.

Who says I'm gonna do it ;)

Well, it was just suggestion. Mayby iot could be all in dates from 94-05 but that would take for freaking ever.

A small suggestion/idea. Feel free to ignore it.

I’m assuming most Doomers use the IDgames "frontend" to browse the archives...

Currently the date field for each wad displays the date the wad was uploaded rather than it's actual age.

I don't know how difficult it would be to code in, but perhaps where the text file lists it (after all not all wads in the archive list their creation date), the date from the wads text file could be listed instead?

That would be a great idea if there was a way to tell what "01/02/03" vs "03/02/01" mean.

Vermil said:

the date from the wads text file could be listed instead?

First of all, you're not talking about the 1994 wads that were uploaded in 1994, of which there are lots. You (and others) are just talking about the recent (mostly Funduke's) arrivals. The text file is going to be the most recently updated file because it's going to be in the new format, and the zip file will have just been created because of having to zip the two together. In some cases I mentioned above, even the wad file may have been updated more recently. There's just no way to do it, really.

And I'm certainly not about to reshuffle the archives with pointers all over the Internet to where the files are now. That's why even megawads that were uploaded before we started segregating those out are still in the alphabet soup areas.

I didn't mean the time/date stamp of the text file.

In some cases, the author writes the date they completed building the wad in the text file.

I was suggesting that, if possible, perhaps for wads where the text file lists a completion date, the wad info in the ID games archive "front end" could use this data for the date field instead of the date the wad was uploaded to the 3dgamers archive. For wads that don't list such info in their text file, the date field could be left blank (or, if possible, entered manually if it's release date is known, but just not written in the text file).

Apologies if my previous post implies I meant something else.

Keep these 'funny' reviews coming! That's the reason why I check doomworld twice a day now.

bow down douche bags, darknation has shown you the way.

mallis said:

bow down douche bags, darknation has shown you the way.

dn mallis dn mallis... new years resolution broken, you still have a very good idea.

This thread has been Haldermaned. I hope you can all see the benefit of his wisdom.

And btw Tom you fag I'm the most popular British guy ever so there you Cheshire person.