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fraggle

Bikeshedding: Renaming Freedoom's IWADs

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Currently Freedoom builds three IWADs, which are named: doom.wad, doom2.wad and freedm.wad.

In an IRC discussion it has been suggested that we rename these IWADs. One reason is that when playing online using multiplayer ports (eg. Odamex), having a name that conflicts with the original IWADs is problematic. It also conflicts if you want to install both side-by-side - eg. on a Unix system where the WADs are installed into /usr/share/games/doom. The Debian project is already renaming our doom2.wad IWAD to freedoom.wad.

The counterpoint to this proposal is that most source ports locate and identify IWADs based on name. That's the main reason they've been named doom.wad and doom2.wad until now - otherwise you have to manually specify them. I think it should not be too much work to petition the main source port authors to add Freedoom's WAD names as recognized IWADs; however, before we do that, we should decide what they should be called. This is already a problem for freedm.wad, which probably doesn't need to be renamed.

Proposals so far:

  • freedoom1.wad / freedoom2.wad - simplest, no abbreviations, but does not fit into an 8 character DOS filename. Should we care nowadays?
  • fdoom1.wad / fdoom2.wad - loses the 'free' part, but there might be WADs already with this name
  • frdoom1.wad / frdoom2.wad - some people don't like this because it suggests "French Doom" or something similar.
  • Wildcards: fredoom1.wad, freedom1.wad, or once we've decided this question it could be named something like frphase1.wad.
Should the "doom.wad" equivalent have a '1' at the end, or not? eg. fdoom.wad vs. fdoom1.wad?

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Eternity seems to support the same names. They've always been unofficial and I don't know where they originate from. freedoomu.wad probably isn't going to be appropriate for the future given this.

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fraggle said:

Eternity seems to support the same names. They've always been unofficial and I don't know where they originate from. freedoomu.wad probably isn't going to be appropriate for the future given this.

I got them from ZDoom. I guess ZDoom made them up. Though again like I mentioned in the other ongoing thread it's important to understand EE doesn't assume the file name means anything; it's the lumps inside that are used to detect gamemode, mission, and give special version recognition at startup ;)

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They do originate from ZDoom, and they weren't meant to be official, just a convenience for users who want to have both Doom and Freedoom in the same directory. A number of other aliases are provided for other IWADs, and absolutely none of them pretend to be official.

If newer versions of Freedoom get new IWAD names, they'll just be added to the list (as far as ZDoom is concerned, each name to check is just a line at the bottom of a text file).

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I'm personally in favor of fdoom1.wad/fdoom2.wad; short and simple. The only other alternative I really like is the more expanded ones: freedoom1.wad/freedoom2.wad.

I think really to cover most bases, the following ports may as well be contacted for IWAD name additions:
* ZDoom / Zandronum
* PrBoom / PrBoom-Plus
* Odamex
* Eternity
* Doomsday

I think that probably covers all of the ones with significant userbase... there's far too many ports to chase after every single one, and surely some of them may even reject the change.

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chungy said:

I think really to cover most bases, the following ports may as well be contacted for IWAD name additions:

We should contact whoever maintains Chocolate Doom, too. :p

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I do have to isolate freedoom downloads into their own directory and put links to the files under alternate names.

DoomLegacy searches for the following file names.
The first name is the preferred file name.
It also examines lumps to confirm the wad identity.

FreeDoom: freedoom.wad or doom2.wad
Ult FreeDoom: freedu.wad or doomu.wad
DeathMatch Freedoom: freedm.wad

Shareware Doom: doom1.wad
Doom: doom.wad
Ult Doom: doomu.wad or doom_se.wad or doom.wad
Doom II: doom2.wad


A consistent prefix is easier to recognize that other naming schemes.
"frdoom" could be anything, like french.

"free" is easy to recognize as FreeDoom. The ".wad" part already says that it is a doom wad, so the "free" prefix is more significant than getting "doom" in there.

Once "free" is accepted as the prefix for FreeDoom wads, then
Free-Plutonia: freeplut.wad
Free-Tnt: freetnt.wad
Free-Strife: freestf.wad

That would not work well if fdoom was the prefix (fdoomplut.wad??).
If "fd" was the prefix, then that leads to fdplut.wad ???

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I'd just go with freedoomX.wad, or is actually anybody using something less than Windows 95 (who'd also want to play Freedoom)?

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Gez said:

We should contact whoever maintains Chocolate Doom, too. :p

I hear that guy is a jerk.

In seriousness, all of this is outside of the scope of Chocolate Doom anyway, IMO it'd be the only one with reason to avoid any change of this nature. Plus, FreeDM is the only IWAD target there is with vanilla compatibility. Whether fraggle supports them is up to him, of course, but I think it's highly inappropriate. (There's a certain point, where... if you're trying to use a very conservatively vanilla-Doom-and-nothing-else engine, you can rename the IWADs or just use -iwad freedoom.wad)

wesleyjohnson said:

DoomLegacy searches for the following file names.
The first name is the preferred file name.
It also examines lumps to confirm the wad identity.

FreeDoom: freedoom.wad or doom2.wad
Ult FreeDoom: freedu.wad or doomu.wad
DeathMatch Freedoom: freedm.wad

I think this just exemplifies the issue. Even though source ports aren't supposed to treat Freedoom specially, the ideal was a drop-in replacement for Doom, they do it anyway. None of these ports have even told Freedoom about their supported IWAD name changes, and I somehow doubt users most of the time have good ways to find out about the supported alternative names; ZDoom is surprisingly a good exception to this. As for Legacy and Eternity Engine... no way unless you read the source code.

wesleyjohnson said:

Ult Doom: doomu.wad or doom_se.wad or doom.wad

Ultimate Doom's IWAD has only ever been officially named doom.wad, as well.

wesleyjohnson said:

Once "free" is accepted as the prefix for FreeDoom wads, then
Free-Plutonia: freeplut.wad
Free-Tnt: freetnt.wad
Free-Strife: freestf.wad

That would not work well if fdoom was the prefix (fdoomplut.wad??).
If "fd" was the prefix, then that leads to fdplut.wad ???

Freedoom's doom2.wad already supports the (rather minor) extra textures in the Final Doom IWADs, there will be no separate targets for them. As for Strife (or Heretic/Hexen, before anyone asks), this is a separate game and won't be part of the Freedoom project any time soon; the project has a hard enough time just completing a Doom game.

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chungy said:

I think this just exemplifies the issue. Even though source ports aren't supposed to treat Freedoom specially, the ideal was a drop-in replacement for Doom, they do it anyway. None of these ports have even told Freedoom about their supported IWAD name changes, and I somehow doubt users most of the time have good ways to find out about the supported alternative names; ZDoom is surprisingly a good exception to this. As for Legacy and Eternity Engine... no way unless you read the source code.

Just trying to provide maximum utility to the end user. Is there anything wrong with that? If I want to have freedoom and doom in the same directory, that KIND of rules out having the files be named the same. For that reason alone we support an alternative unofficial file name for it.

Freedoom is under no obligation to honor the existing choice of name. But there should be recognition that suddenly changing it now IS going to break the configuration files of everyone who uses source ports that allow setting paths to the files, *regardless of what they're changed to*.

The only other special treatments freedoom gets in EE are these two differences:

  • Eternity acknowledges it as being Freedoom at startup
  • Gamemission is forced to be "doom2" because the presence of TNT/Plutonia lumps in the IWAD otherwise causes it to be treated as TNT: Evilution, which doesn't seem to be the project's intention.

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Quasar said:

Just trying to provide maximum utility to the end user. Is there anything wrong with that? If I want to have freedoom and doom in the same directory, that KIND of rules out having the files be named the same. For that reason alone we support an alternative unofficial file name for it.

It's primarily the apparent lack of trying to get the changes upstream in Freedoom itself that frustrates me. I agree that making things easy on users should be the driving motivation, and it's pretty much what this thread is about already.

Quasar said:

Gamemission is forced to be "doom2" because the presence of TNT/Plutonia lumps in the IWAD otherwise causes it to be treated as TNT: Evilution, which doesn't seem to be the project's intention.

I don't think we really care. I think it'd matter most only for vanilla demo compatibility. The TNT support specifically has never really been fully tested out; Final Doom support was added primarily so that Plutonia 2 could be played.

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Being "Doom II" rather than "TNT" or "Plutonia" is important for DEHACKED/BEX purposes, since the game mission determines which set of level names are used, and therefore determines whether or not Freedoom's replacement names are used or not.

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I think imposing the DOS 8.3 limitation is silly nowadays.

Hence vote for: freedoom1.wad / freedoom2.wad

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What I do in DoomLegacy to cope with the name conflict will not be run past this forum for approval, for several reasons.
This forum could not agree on any solution, as this thread shows.
Also, this forum does not easily adopt suggestions from outside the inner circle, the usual reply is to bash them.
A posting of the problem would only get replies on how there was not a problem and we were not doing it "right".

My copy of Ultimate Doom installs as doom_se.wad.

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wesleyjohnson said:

Also, this forum does not easily adopt suggestions from outside the inner circle, the usual reply is to bash them.
A posting of the problem would only get replies on how there was not a problem and we were not doing it "right".

I'm really sorry to hear that you feel that way. I think everyone values your contribution to the project. I'm sorry if my previous post seemed overly dismissive, it's just that Freedoom doesn't have a "Free TNT" or "Free Plutonia" project, and your comment in this thread is the first time I've ever heard such a thing suggested. It seems like you're trying to design for a use case that doesn't exist, and that in that case, YAGNI applies.

For example you said:

Free-Strife: freestf.wad

But note that even if a "Free Strife" project was created, there's no guarantee that it would even be named "Free Strife". In fact, if you look at the only existing precedent - the Blasphemer project - it wasn't named "Free Heretic".

My copy of Ultimate Doom installs as doom_se.wad.

You mean you have an actual Id installer package that does that? I've never encountered one before and this sounds really interesting to me. Does (Ultimate) doom.exe recognize that as a valid IWAD name?

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In the Debian "freedoom" package, Freedoom's doom2.wad is already renamed to freedoom.wad to avoid conflicts with the original doom2.wad. So, my vote is to rename it that way.

In general, I think a project should acknowledge naming conventions that have established outside i.e. in other projects, e.g. ZDoom supporting the freedoomu.wad file name.

So my vote is:

doom2.wad -> freedoom.wad
doom.wad -> freedoomu.wad

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Quasar said:
Gamemission is forced to be "doom2" because the presence of TNT/Plutonia lumps in the IWAD otherwise causes it to be treated as TNT: Evilution, which doesn't seem to be the project's intention.

I think best practice here is to look for the presence of a FREEDOOM lump and act accordingly, before you start looking for tnt and plutonia lump names.

(Has anyone ever added a gamemission enum for freedoom? It probably shouldn't be necessary...)

wesleyjohnson said:
Also, this forum does not easily adopt suggestions from outside the inner circle, the usual reply is to bash them.
A posting of the problem would only get replies on how there was not a problem and we were not doing it "right".

I assume this is written out of frustration that your map01 edit wasn't accepted.

I can't speak for the others with freedoom.git push access but in the absence of a "artistic director" the way I try to work is to establish consensus (because basically I am a wimp and want to avoid confrontations and being yelled at).

Your maps are yours and as long as they're not broken (i.e. one can beat them, get 100% kills, etc.) you can make them how you want to, but if you want to edit someone else's I think there has to be a consensus. And in the case of your map01 edit it was pretty obvious consensus was against you.

That's all, I'm sorry that you felt there's some kind of conspiracy from some inner circle against your work. Perhaps you got the wrong impression from map19? I accepted your edits there because the original author has disappeared for years and the map was otherwise broken. With map01, the author is still around, and the map wasn't broken, so pulling your version in would have been controversial to say the least.

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fabian said:

doom2.wad -> freedoom.wad

I think perhaps a good argument can be made for this.

doom.wad -> freedoomu.wad

This I'm less sure about, if for no other reason than we seem to have a consensus to drop the "Ultimate Freedoom" name. We shouldn't tie our hands based on what source ports are already doing.

If we're changing one we might as well change both so that they're consistent. Personally I'm thinking that freedoom1.wad / freedoom2.wad is the best option (ie. disregard the 8.3 limit). If people are using DOS source ports in this day and age, they're probably smart enough to just rename to doom.wad / doom2.wad.

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I know this may sound crazy, but the syllable "free" could be considered a play on the number three (as has happened e.g. in the X.org predecessor XFree86, which was a free implementation of X386 and did the 3->free play in its name). So, what comes next after free... erm... three? Four. A play on the number four could be the syllable "fore".

Hence, I suggest that the IWAD file name for "The Ultimate Freedoom" gets renamed to foredoom.wad. This is (a) a continuous usage of syllables that sound like numbers, (b) a play on the fact that the IWAD contains four episodes and (c) reflects the fact that the story in this IWAD is the prequel to the one in freedoom.wad and thus is a foreshadow or "foredoom" of it.

What do you think?

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That sounds like a perfectly contrived name that makes people reach for a README to figure out what the hell it means. :p

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Other than the relationship between Freedoom->3Doom->4Doom->Foredoom is kinda excessively convoluted, the problem with Foredoom is that it sounds like a prequel to Doom (rather than to Freedoom) and it doesn't feature the name of the project.

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