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Kotzugi

Community balance

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So I was just thinking the other day, for the Doom community to thrive there needs to be a good amount of people in certain roles:

- casual players and watchers of demos (outside world, some of them may later become mappers/runners/etc.)
- mappers/modders
- musicians
- speed runners
- techies (people who keep sites running, work on ports, etc.)

Of course, more than one role can be filled by the same person. But there can be a lack of balance. For example, if there are too few mappers, casual players might get bored playing the same old maps and lose interest. Speed runners provide an extra dimension to the game that you don't find in normal play-through demos and help to keep interest and even healthy competition.

I'd like to know if we need more mappers? More musicians? More runners? More PR? Or are you completely fine with the current state of affairs?

Just curious because for example it seems like a lot of hard work to make maps but it's a lot easier to do speed running (to do it well, that's another issue). So currently there seems to be enough new WADs to play around with but perhaps some time in the future it may become an issue.

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How about less mappers. We've all played hundreds (thousands for some) of wads by now so just average releases don't really leave any impression on us. Let the elites make truly impressive maps and assign people with no artistic or gameplay balancing talent to recording demos on these wads. The Speed Demos forum could always use some new faces. jk

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I think we need less ZDoom-centric stuff, but that's about it. Either give the other ports some love, or go limit removing/Boom.

But that's only because of the tendency to go for flash and tons of content rather than solid work.

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It'd be nice to see Eternity get some love, on all fronts. It needs an up-to-date website, documentation on par with the ZDoom wiki, and people mapping/making mods for it.

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Bloodshedder's actually right on the money. From a nodding perspective, visual and audio artist-y types are in really short supply.

In terms of classic dooming n' mapping go, I'd say we've got pretty good coverage. Also, don't forget the review crews. :P

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Cool to see what you guys think.

Memfis said:

How about less mappers. We've all played hundreds (thousands for some) of wads by now so just average releases don't really leave any impression on us. Let the elites make truly impressive maps and assign people with no artistic or gameplay balancing talent to recording demos on these wads. The Speed Demos forum could always use some new faces. jk

I know you wrote jk but indeed there are a crapton of WADs out there and - not that I've played most of them - but it seems that most of them are crappy or at least average. Plenty of good ones too, enough to keep a somewhat casual player like me busy.

Here's what I would like to see: Better support for cross-platform ports and easy to find documentation. I must admit I haven't played with a lot of ports, I do play with PrBoom Plus on my Mac and it's doing pretty well (and overall, a big improvement on previous versions) but it's quite hard to find out how to make TAS runs for example. Most if not all of the software used for TAS (the way it's supposed to be done, not only slowing down and stuff) is only available on Windows, as far as I know. Yes I know I can use emulators and such on OS X but it's a matter of convenience and user-friendliness. Yes I know people are already doing a heck of a lot of work, for free, in their spare time, and I'm grateful. Not criticizing, just saying what would be nice to see still.

I do also get the feeling that the Doom community, at least as far as speed runners and quality mappers go, is pretty small albeit enthusiastic, at least as Classic Doom is concerned. I started to post a few cool maps/runs on Reddit recently and I got quite a few positive responses - I think lots of people don't know that there is a lot of great user-generated content out there and it's nice to spread the word, so to speak. :)

Mods such as Brutal Doom are interesting ways to get more people interested although at least as BD is concerned it's certainly only for a specific crowd. Although not my cup of tea, nothing wrong with it though.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

It'd be nice to see Eternity get some love, on all fronts. It needs an up-to-date website, documentation on par with the ZDoom wiki, and people mapping/making mods for it.

I couldn't agree more. A very underrated port in my opinion that has superb features. I was playing around with portals not long after blue box came out but I only ever got the basics down. I have been tossing around a few ideas for maps to create in Eternity, but I would really like to create a Heretic map when support for Heretic becomes available speaking of Eternity, I should really start practising EDF coding.

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Kotzugi said:

Better support for cross-platform ports and easy to find documentation.

Absolutely. There's so much Doom lore that only gets passed "verbally", as in answered direct questions. Almost all Doom-related activities are woefully underdocumented and whenever someone steps up to fill the gap, they're usually not the right (knowledgeable) person for the job, so they give up soon.

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More ACTIVE Doom wad LP'ers? (i.e. promoters for Doom?)

Aside from throwing myself out there as one said Doom wad LP'er, having people Let's Play Doom wads on a consistent basis potentially gets new people interested in playing Doom (wads) in the first place, thus meaning new people get involved in the community, thus new people for all the roles described in the OP come into existence.

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Bloodshedder said:

More good sprite/texture artists
More/any good foley artists


Now I think about it, yes.

I'd really fucking love to see more original content; especially since the community does have some talented people from almost all fields -- why hasn't Doomworld got together and made its own original game yet?

No, Freedoom does not count (though I love it).

With these two though, I have to say; of the first, spriting takes a long time when done well. Spriting an animated sprite, more so. Spriting between 5 and 8 different viewpoints for an animated sprite, even more. Not everyone has that level of dedication. Hell, I've not even finished one sprite of my own game yet. Whoops.

As for foley, not everyone has a decent mic for the task. I'd try, but I have a cheap condenser mic (a 'podcasting' mic I bought specifically for voice-acting my own animations) which picks up voices well, but not incidental sounds. Though, this will be sufficient for my own game since I don't mind it being a bit rough around the edges.

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We need more quality graphic designers.

Mappers always emerge from somewhere, and if 1% or just 0.1% of them becomes actually The Good, it's enough. The rest of them may be mapping for they own joy, which is also keeping the community alive, don't forget that.

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The problem with saing "we need more x" is that "x" is usually an artistic skill, whereas forum personalities, people who play the game and even mappers are all easy things to be. Whilst I'd agree that talented artists and music/sound guys are definitely in short supply, they're just not as easy to pick up.

I mean, I've tried my hand at the art work side of things a few times. The results haven't been great (to say the least) and the amount of time I have to spend on it is demoralising. Recording sound was easy enough, as long as "sound" was just "noises or voices I could make" - editing it and making the volumes consistent? Much harder, especially as Windows 7 doesn't even come with the basic editing capability that XP had. I'm not even sure where I'd start if I wanted to try my hand at music, which is why I'm glad there's so many freely useable MIDIs out there.


I quite like the high presence of people enthusiastic about dabbling in content production and playing stuff, as ultimately the community has always been about people sharing what they've made and other people coming back with opinions. I'm even happier that a lot of what gets made is people who aren't well-established showing off their early works, as it means there's still a large pool of people that talent can surface from. There's nothing better than a decent project by a previously little-known mapper, as the new style tends to be a welcome breath of fresh air.

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Speaking as a professional video game artist with plenty of experience creating animated sprites and some experience in recruiting professional artists:

Artistic talent is a very rare thing in human beings. Having the kind of talent it takes to create quality animated sprites is even more rare. Add into the equation the fact that the Doom community is really small and you've got yourself one hell of a small chance of finding artists with the drive to work on something like this.

I have an artistic Doom project and it has taken and will continue to take a long time to "complete". The only way to get anything significant done on a project like this is to work a great many hours on it. Reinchard666 is a good example of a relatively prolific artist in the Doom community but I think he might agree that animating is a different beast all together.

Finding an artist who is able and willing to create animated sprites of the quality you see in Doom era games would be a very difficult/lucky endeavor indeed.

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Phobus said:

The problem with saing "we need more x" is that "x" is usually an artistic skill, whereas forum personalities, people who play the game and even mappers are all easy things to be. Whilst I'd agree that talented artists and music/sound guys are definitely in short supply, they're just not as easy to pick up.


I understand what you're saying and I agree with it to an extent, but it's also true that people can learn things and are almost guaranteed to improve over time, if they keep at it.

A number of people in this community have been around 5 years or longer. Anyone that said 5 years ago "I'm going to learn to do pixel art" and actually followed through on practising would today be at least a competent artist, and likely a good one. (This is not meant as a criticism; people only have so much time and obviously it's easier to say "I should have started so-and-so years ago" than it is to do it.) Mapping for Doom gets decent results much faster than making new art does, but in both cases you rarely start out good at all.

Ultimately it's no one's duty to learn to make sprites or whatever, and everyone has more important things than Doom to worry about I'm sure. But if you see yourself still here in a few years, consider what you might be able to make (for your own projects if nothing else) if you decide to try to learn new skills right now.

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I somewhat agree with Jayextee, with ZDoom mostly being the source port of choice for mapping and modding, there are fewer wads for other source ports. I personally would love to see more wads for Eternity.

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Zdoom gets chosen because it can do the most the easiest, when Eternity irons out the kinks in its portal code, gets less shit menus, and supports Decorate, it might see some more projects for it. Heck I'm working on a Zdoom+Eternity compat project right now and the only reason I'm shooting for Eternity compat is Eternity doesn't share Zdoom's shit demo capabilities, if it wasn't for that I wouldn't bother because 50% of the time I want to do something new I have to think "Wait can Eternity do that too? Fuck it can't!"

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I'll be more than happy to try out Eternity mapping when you can actually engage in combat with monsters through portals. As it is, now that ZDoom has software-rendered 3D floors (that mostly work) its got everything I can think to want, offhand.

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One thing we lack is musicians, ones who can create original music for projects. I know we have PCorf, Mr. Freeze and Jimmy but that's all I can think off the top of my he ad.

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You can't really apply certain fascist principles to a forum that's open to voluntary registration. People can come and go as they like, so they have the right to do what they want without an extra nudge from some self-proclaimed powers that be. The whole DW community isn't just some sprawling megawad staff list that can be directed one way or another.

That said, I'm impressed things are as active now, if not more so, than when I first registered here.

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Mr. Chris said:

One thing we lack is musicians, ones who can create original music for projects. I know we have PCorf, Mr. Freeze and Jimmy but that's all I can think off the top of my he ad.


And Esselfortium, Stewboy, Ribbiks, Yakfax, Bucket, Lippeth, and Eris Falling

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Tarnsman said:

And Esselfortium, Stewboy, Ribbiks, Yakfax, Bucket, Lippeth, and Eris Falling

Xaser, Fisk, PRIMEVAL, sirjuddington, and The Green Herring, as well.

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