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Astral-Doomer

Has Doom aged well?

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Gez said:

But chess is a terrible game because the pieces can move backward as fast as they move forward. Except the pawns. The pawns are the only good part of chess.

That's why everybody is playing English Draughts instead of Chess.

But then you can get kinged, and can move backwards just as quickly. What an awful board game.

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Shadow Hog said:

But then you can get kinged, and can move backwards just as quickly. What an awful board game.


Not to mention the pixelation... My god.

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traversd said:
EDIT: Google points to Tetris, Pong as well which is true too. also I guess those games are recreated mainly because there isn't any source to port or like chess existed prior to computing etc. [/B]


They're simple games that are suitable for learning a new API or environment, or for an inexperienced coder to cut his teeth on. And you can really implement them in any kind of situattion, even if all you got to work with is a plain VT100 console or very slow hardware or limited RAM (example: those little boot loader games for LILO or GRUB, etc.)

DOOM is a very different beast. It needs a helluvalot more resources to run adequately (fast 386, 4 MB RAM, VGA gfx) unless you're willing to "downgrade" some aspects, like I guess was done for the C64 remake - I don't even know if that's a real game, never played it. And you need to be an experienced coder to have any chance to understand the inner workings and port it to some arbitrary platform.

Personally I think DOOM will eventually fade away, just like previously popular games that only "retro gamers" play anymore these days. Maybe someone will try to cash in on the franchise by using the DOOM name, but it won't have much in common with the original game. Heck, even the popular ports these days won't play the same as the original. And I'm guessing most players today don't feel satisfied playing the original game without add-ons like Beautiful Doom or whatever. I'm not sure what that is, and frankly don't care, but the impression I get from the community is that DOOM is already "obsolete" because almost nobody plays or maps for the original game anymore.

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One of the reasons I think Doom has aged so well is because of what you describe (people playing with mods). Doom is an iterative experience, and we're constantly refining it, and doing crazy or subtle things to the visuals and even the core mechanics. But at the end of the day, it's the strong aesthetic and gameplay core that binds the whole process together. I'll admit, there are a lot of fun mods and WADs out there that drastically change the game, but that game is still unmistakably Doom.

I mean, even the rules of chess were iterated over the ages. Not saying Doom has that level of timelessness, but as far as aoftware goes, I'd say it's pretty high up there.

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If you cnange the parts you don't like, such as low gfx resolution, various gameplay stuff (mouselook, scripts, whatever), engine limiations, and so forth, then you can't honestly say the game has "aged well" because you simply changed the parts you thought weren't so good. It's not at all the same as looking back at an old game, and playing the original version (or something damn close to it, like Chocolate Doom) and then still enjoying the experience. Those are two entirely different situations, and you don't gain anything from confusing the two.

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Doom is like good quality whisky, the older it gets the better. Nowadays adhd kids raised with fast games and short focusing time on puzzles makes them hateful against old games with puzzles and slower speed.

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Call of Duty is shit because it has regenerating health.

THERE I SAID IT.

It won't age well.

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hex11 said:

If you cnange the parts you don't like, such as low gfx resolution, various gameplay stuff (mouselook, scripts, whatever), engine limiations, and so forth, then you can't honestly say the game has "aged well" because you simply changed the parts you thought weren't so good. It's not at all the same as looking back at an old game, and playing the original version (or something damn close to it, like Chocolate Doom) and then still enjoying the experience. Those are two entirely different situations, and you don't gain anything from confusing the two.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. I prefer my own view. Doom with things tacked-on, to me, is still unmistakably Doom. Because no matter what, the core remains. You disagree, obviously.

It's not so much about changing what parts 'weren't so good' as it is about adding to what's already present. Surely, there's more to a game than what was originally put out by its developer. Patches, fixes, new levels and other enhancements (most of the latter two being a matter of personal preference) need not be a bastardization. This is software, not the freaking Mona Lisa - it's meant to be played with.

Sidenote: I fear if we continue along this path of the discussion we'll end up in the dreary swamps of semanticisms.

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Gez said:

(Blue is) all sad and serious; angsty and nerdy. If you want fun, look at warm colors like orange, yellow, and red.




Doom is therefore all things to all people.

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ellmo said:

Call of Duty is shit because it has regenerating health.


Regenerating health is for pussies. Get a health pack and return to the fray.

#DoomLogic

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hex11 said:

almost nobody plays or maps for the original game anymore.


Reverie
Doom Core
Doom the Way Id Did
Interception
Back to Saturn X
Khorus' Speedy Shit
Plutonia Revisited Community Project

What do all these things have in common? They're megawads made recently (2011 to 2013) for the vanilla engine. They've been done by people alone, or by closed teams, or as open community projects which anyone could join if they wanted.

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schwerpunk said:

Sidenote: I fear if we continue along this path of the discussion we'll end up in the dreary swamps of semanticisms.

I don't really care about semantics. Doom is fun for me, and will always be fun for me. Do I really need to elaborate on it?

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Captain Ventris said:

I cannot grasp how realism and fun are connected.


In my experience realism and fun are connected in the sense that more realism means less fun

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Gez said:

What do all these things have in common? They're megawads made recently (2011 to 2013) for the vanilla engine. They've been done by people alone, or by closed teams, or as open community projects which anyone could join if they wanted.


What they have in common is: 99% of players are going to use PrBoom+ or ZDoom (possibly with Brutal/Beautiful Doom or other mods) to play them, and not Chocolate Doom or doom.exe.

Anyway, some of these productions absolutely "had" to be vanilla or they simply wouldn't feel right as sequels/tributes. Others like BTSX are impressive feats of pushing the vanilla engine to its limits, kinda like Alien Vendetta did some time ago. These are special cases and not at all comparable to the majority of releases, which are by and large these days for advanced ports.

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hex11 said:

What they have in common is: 99% of players are going to use PrBoom+ or ZDoom (possibly with Brutal/Beautiful Doom or other mods) to play them, and not Chocolate Doom or doom.exe.


Irrelevant. The port that end users load the mod with is a personal preference and most of the time is a matter of convenience. The port the mod is intended for is what matters here. I primarily use GZDoom, but usually with no external mods at all, particularly on first playthrough, and I still fire up the IWADS now and again.

Besides, loads of poeple use Chocolate Doom (not least of all for testing), and loading up the original .exe on modern OS's can be a bit of a faff, especially if you're trying to run DOSBox on older hardware. Not to mention those who are still playing the originals on the likes of XBLA and PSN (censorship aside). No real upgrades there.

Also, regarding your earlier post, doesn't making maps for a game count as "changing" it? As soon as you load up a PWAD, you're no longer playing the original game, whether you're using vanilla or Doomsday to lanuch it. Modifications are the entire reason the game has held up for so long. Remember, Carmack released the source code for the very purpose of letting coders remix the engine. They have, but the end result is still Doom, except that now it is much more flexible.

As for those people who have Brutal Doom on autoload, well, they don't count :P

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Brutal Doom is fun for a romp, but every now and then you just gotta load up Chocolate Doom with PC speaker sounds and an aspect ratio of 5:4, just to appreciate that Doom is still better than your last satisfying shit (*nods at Maes*).

There really isn't that big a difference between DOS/Boom/Choco Doom and what G/ZDoom put on the screen (when playing iWADs). The main difference for me is smoother mouse movement, and the potential to play around with extra options.

I think it's silly to look at the progression of the tech as some kind of bastardization of the original code. Even Brutal Doom, as radically as it changes things, is still unmistakably Doom.

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hex11 said:

I'm not sure what that is, and frankly don't care, but the impression I get from the community is that DOOM is already "obsolete" because almost nobody plays or maps for the original game anymore.



Ugh..

What an utter load of bullshit.

If you look at it that way, yes, Doom is and has been for years - obsolete!

The original engine doesn't scale well to modern hardware, being designed for an operating system that has no longer been in use for more than 10 years.
The low res graphics look like complete garbage on modern monitors unless hacks are being used.
Hell, even id themselves shipped Final Doom with a higher resolution engine!

So yes, no matter how you look at it, the original Dos executable is obsolete for all intents and purposes.

Who cares if some people are deadlocked in a mindset that doesn't allow any improvements. Be careful, you may find yourself being considered obsolete eventually. :P


Doom, the game, however is not obsolete. We have a thriving community here, there's still people working on the game engine and mods being released constantly. It doesn't matter what port they use to play it! Different people have different preferences. Just because things were done in a certain way in 1993 doesn't mean that this has to be the one and only way to do it! Some people can't stand blur-o-vision - they could even barely stand it when the game was current! Some people prefer the look of hardware accelerated true color rendering. Others prefer to have a more 'modern' way to use the mouse. And so on and so on.


Let's be clear about one thing: Without the release of the Doom source and subsequent rise of various source ports, the game would be utterly dead already - it would have been for years!
Just like many other games of the time period that just vanished into obscurity when it became too much of a hassle to launch the games on evolving hardware/OSs.

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There's a big difference between just making maps and using entirely different game engine. Like you could make map replacements for Super Mario Bros (NES) as a ROM hack, or just use the built-in editor of some games like Boulder Dash (on various 8-bit computers), and you'd have new levels but it would still run in the same exact engine. The key here is you're still using the same old technology of the time, because that's really the main limitation of a game. You can only go so far with it before hitting a brick wall, and have to use a new engine, or enhance the old one somehow (src code if it's available, otherwise disassembly or other reverse-engineering to find ways you can hack the engine, sorta like Doom+).

You're not playing a new game when you load up a random PWAD from your shovelware CD. It plays and looks more or less like the original (often worse in case of 1994 maps, but much better after people got more experienced). But when you start making big engine changes, like ZDoom and various other ports, then it doesn't play the same, look the same, or feel the same, even without loading those enhanced game mods. It doesn't play the same because it the engines (except Chocolate Doom, and to a much lesser extent PrBoom) don't try to emulate the original engine's behavior very closely. They also provide added functionality like mouselook, manual aiming, jumping, etc. It's true those can be disabled, but the engine doesn't enforce that while playing vanilla maps, and I'm sure many people use those features. It doesn't look the same because of OpenGL, higher res, and widescreen resolutions, etc. The various high-res texture packs, sfx packs, and such things have also been very popular items on this and other forums, so I'm sure they're used by many players. In fact, I seldom see a Doomsday thread that doesn't mention them. So yeah, you can' t fool me into believing everyone is just playing ZDoom or whatever like it's plain old vanilla. I know they want the pretty eyes candy and all that. ;-)

I really doubt many people here use doom.exe or Chocolate Doom as their default engine for vanilla maps, and even less use it as their sole or "go to" engine for everything. I certainly do, but probably very few others. I find it convenient though, but in a backwards way than you do: if a map doesn't run in vanilla engine, I usually don't play it. :-)

I understand why people want the advanced engines, and why they're here and how they came about. But they're not DOOM to me, they are evolutions of DOOM, each with various capabilities and goals. But the last, final IWAD releases of DOOM and DOOM II were v1.9 for DOS, and I think that's the real measuring stick for what DOOM really is. I mean, ZDoom for example as taken many Hexen features and integrated them, along with lots other stuff. Is Hexen the same as DOOM? It has similarities and shares some code, but to me they're not at all the same. In fact, I don't much play Heretic or Hexen precisely because I enjoy the lean & mean (some would say limited) gameplay of DOOM.

Edit: @GZ - You give the DOOM src release far too much credit. Fact is: other games that didn't have src were re-implemented by careful reverse engineering or just observing gameplay and trying to replicate it in a new engine. One good example is the old 80's RPG "Dungeon Master". There is a community for that game too, and many engines, some very faitthful to the original and others with many enhancements. But they were all created from scratch by that community. And in fact, before doomsrc there was a project "Dumb" that could play DOOM/DOOM2/Heretic, although not using the same rendering techniques as the real engine. But with a community this large, I have no doubt that a very close approximation of doom.exe could have been realized even without id's help.

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vinnie245 said:

Considering there is no other game out there that is as old or older than doom has nowhere near the active community then yes its aged terrificly

Mario, Pokemon, Zelda, lots of other games etc etc

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hex11 said:

Edit: @GZ - You give the DOOM src release far too much credit. Fact is: other games that didn't have src were re-implemented by careful reverse engineering or just observing gameplay and trying to replicate it in a new engine. One good example is the old 80's RPG "Dungeon Master". There is a community for that game too, and many engines, some very faitthful to the original and others with many enhancements. But they were all created from scratch by that community. And in fact, before doomsrc there was a project "Dumb" that could play DOOM/DOOM2/Heretic, although not using the same rendering techniques as the real engine. But with a community this large, I have no doubt that a very close approximation of doom.exe could have been realized even without id's help.


You obviously have no idea how complex such a thing is. Sure, some approximation would be possible, but understanding every single tiny bit of the code is far from trivial.

The game logic is probably the easiest part but making sense of the rendering code is an entirely different matter. No such engine would have been the real deal - and even in the best case scenario they mighr have been less faithful than ZDoom or other more advanced ports because it's those tiny, hard to understand things that produce what so many users define as 'the Doom experience'.

I understand why people want the advanced engines, and why they're here and how they came about. But they're not DOOM to me, they are evolutions of DOOM, each with various capabilities and goals. But the last, final IWAD releases of DOOM and DOOM II were v1.9 for DOS, and I think that's the real measuring stick for what DOOM really is. I mean, ZDoom for example as taken many Hexen features and integrated them, along with lots other stuff. Is Hexen the same as DOOM? It has similarities and shares some code, but to me they're not at all the same. In fact, I don't much play Heretic or Hexen precisely because I enjoy the lean & mean (some would say limited) gameplay of DOOM.


Yes, sure. That makes perfect sense. It just isn't true. The last released versions of Doom came with - yes! - Doom95.exe!

But does anyone take it seriously. Sure not - but according to your logic it's the defacto most recent and most updated version of the Doom engine that was shipped with the game data.

So much about being more hardcore than the company that developed the game.

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hex11 said:

What they have in common is: 99% of players are going to use PrBoom+ or ZDoom (possibly with Brutal/Beautiful Doom or other mods) to play them, and not Chocolate Doom or doom.exe.

And why do you care about how people play them? Does it matter? How does it matter?

Besides it's false. The community's enthusiasm for Chocolate Doom -- as well as all the bug reports that Fraggle got for even the tiniest deviations and the requests for emulating the hardware of the era with scanlines and stuff -- cannot be denied.

Finally, the sanctification of the exe makes little sense to me. Id Software themselves never had such an attitude. They changed Doom, adding features, dropping others, fixing bugs, etc. The difference between Doom as it was originally planned (cf. Doom Bible, press statements, stuff from the alpha...) and Doom as it ended up are huge, and even after release the differences between Doom 0.99 and Doom 1.9 or the more recent Doom Classic code are impressive too.

Id didn't object either when, due to technical and contractual reasons, the Doom ports on various consoles (including the Jaguar port which they did themselves) were completely modified. Different resolution, different HUD, drastically simplified levels, fancy colored lighting and transparent linedefs added, cut monsters, new monsters, cut levels, new levels, entire soundtrack completely replaced, etc. Doom's been ported to the Jaguar, the 32x, the Saturn, the PlayStation, the Super NES, the GBA, and the 3DO. To say nothing about the N64.

And they don't just change the game itself, but also the way it's played (controller, sofa, TV vs. keyboard+mouse, chair, desktop).

All of that with the blessings of Id Software. Because what makes Doom what it is cannot be reduced to the minutia of the playsim behavior.

Graf Zahl said:

Yes, sure. That makes perfect sense. It just isn't true. The last released versions of Doom came with - yes! - Doom95.exe!

Heh, the last released versions of Doom are in Doom 3: BFG Edition and the PS3 Doom Classic Complete.

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I was speaking of the original releases from the 90's. The Final Doom CD I bought in 1995 got Doom95.exe as its main executable on it. The DOS EXEs are hidden in some subdirectories inside install packages but this is not what the average user will see: They will be directed directly to the hi-res Windows version. To ecen install the DOS version you have to search the CD manually.

But anyway, this glorification of the DOS-EXEs from a 'meant to be played this way' attitude is ridiculous. This sure has its place but most definitely not as the one and only genuine Doom experience.

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@maggotjoe: See vinnie245's post.

@hex11: I wasn't saying that everyone uses ZDoom in vanilla-compat, but that I do. Most of the differences in the way that these advanced engines play are superficial at best. Most regular players won't even notice the difference outside of improved visuals and many of the changes are for the better. And, as Gez said, Choco Doom is there and still being worked on to cater for those who want the true oldskool experience. But to put the original .exe on some sort of pedestal is to go against the ideology of the very people who made the game.

Doom has evolved. That can only ever be a good thing, and this is what does my head in about purism. The beauty of this game is that all players can play it their way, even if that does involve daft enhancement mods. I have an enhancement mod in my software ZDoom folder which actually removes some of the special effects, and I am by no means a purist.

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