Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Blastfrog

Will the Doom community eventually die?

Recommended Posts

For some reason, I get the impression that this place used to be a bit more populated and less obscure than it is now. Will it ever return to it's former "glory", or will it continue to fade into obscurity until there's only very few of us left?

Share this post


Link to post

DOOM's never going to be as popular as it used to be. There once was a time when Doomworld had a picture of the day, with DOOM screenshots and fanart, and people not only bothered to submit all these things, but other people working for Doomworld actually bothered to maintain such features. We'll never be able to reclaim that sort of enthusiasm.

But honestly, you have to give DOOM credit. It's, what, 17 years old now? It's mind-blowing that there's still new mods being made for it pretty much every month. That doesn't even seem possible, considering how many games--even well-liked ones--seem to just vanish within a couple of years or less.

And I know there's no other games I love even remotely as much as I do DOOM. I can't seem to have any success making my own levels for it, but darn it, I'll force myself if all the actually-talented mappers disappear! I won't let it go! :)

Share this post


Link to post

There are currently 60 members and 71 guests on the boards.
not bad. i get the impression that this place used to have less mature atmosphere and people schemed crazy antics and whatnot while now they just chat politely about today's doom weather.

Share this post


Link to post

Die completely, I highly doubt it. But it might eventually boil down to only the truly dedicated (or obsessed) fans, and we will no longer see people drifting in from the outside world at random like we do now.

I have for example pointed out that a 3rd generation of source port authors is, at this point, overdue to appear. There have been a few show up just recently, however, such as Ladna with his work on Odamex and EE:CS.

Someday us old fogeys will either kick it or lose interest, and at that point we'll need some younger counterparts to take over.

Share this post


Link to post

I think the community is doing quite well now. I remember times when Newstuff Chronicles were rare and often covered five or fewer wads, but in the last few years there has been an amazing amount of work, often from people new to the community. This year in particular has seen an extraordinary amount of high-quality projects, including many megawads. If this is the level of activity 18 years into the game's lifespan, I don't see any reason to fear for the community's future.

Share this post


Link to post

The IDL has brought in more players for one season than most quake leagues have in years. Multiplayer has to be taken into consideration, this end of the community is almost entirely separate from that side

Share this post


Link to post
dew said:

i get the impression that this place used to have less mature atmosphere and people schemed crazy antics and whatnot while now they just chat politely about today's doom weather.

Perhaps, with larger groups tends to be more idiocy. Still, I wish I hadn't missed the antics, I seem to have joined roughly when it died down.

That's not to say I don't want intelligent, mature posts, I just wish there was more feuding and drama, since, well, it's entertaining.

It just isn't the same reading old archived drama threads, since it happened long ago, and isn't current. Just kinda takes away from the "holy shit, this drama is actually happening?" factor, which is a large part of the appeal of drama (for me, anyway).

Don't think I want this place to turn into a total drama shithole, as that would suck. I think that there should be a balance of drama and peace. Too much drama, it gets boring because there's nothing special about it. Too little drama, it's slightly boring since there's nothing but serious stuff happening.


The above is just me rambling and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Share this post


Link to post

Some of the older fun that the forums had has definitely died off and the modding community seems to mostly be striving for some sort of professionalism now, so I think the overall community is probably becoming more of a dedicated thing, even with the new people that still turn up almost every day.

It'd not surprise me if the Doom community outlasted me, or if I saw the Doom community end to be honest. Could go either way for all I know. As things are chugging along quite smoothly these days talking about the end seems quite fantastical.

Share this post


Link to post
Sodaholic said:

I just wish there was more feuding and drama, since, well, it's entertaining.


...How old are you, exactly?

Share this post


Link to post

There is plenty of feuding and drama to go around anyway. Do you not look around? If you really can't find it, the multiplayer port communities might be a good place to start.

I have been around for a little while now, and besides a change of faces, things don't seem that different.

Share this post


Link to post
Megamur said:

...How old are you, exactly?

How exactly is finding a little bit of drama entertaining immature? I didn't say I wanted the whole place to be infested with it, just a small bit to keep things interesting.

In fact, I'm not even that concerned with drama, I'm more worried about ending up being in an extremely obscure community. Just feels lonely when you're only one of maybe 15 to 20 people in an online community.

I know that this change won't happen overnight, but maybe in 10 years nobody will give a shit about Doom, and I don't want to see that happen. :/

Share this post


Link to post
Sodaholic said:

How exactly is finding a little bit of drama entertaining immature?


Because I know I grew out of that stuff eventually, so I figured it's something relegated to the young. Or maybe I'm just sick and tired of drama after spending probably a solid decade of seeing Internet debates. I've reached a point where "drama" just looks like a bunch of childish slapfights to me, and being entertained by such things seems...well, childish.

Share this post


Link to post

Of course it'll die out. Not today, next month or even 10 years from now. But at some point, technological progression will make it very difficult to modify or even play Doom. Our familiar way of computing will change fundamentally in a few decades, just as it did in the 80s when the GUI (graphical user interface) was introduced and suddenly you didn't have to type everything in at a command prompt.

When the change becomes significant enough, .exe programs and even source ports won't be compatible with whatever OS is in mainstream use. They'll be as foreign as 5 and 1/2 inch floppy disks, punch cards and dot matrix printers. Any semblance of a Doom community will completely disappear when the most elderly tech geeks using century-old technology finally keel over.

EDIT: A friend of mine that I showed my post to said that "they'll just port it to whatever fantastical machine is the norm [in the future]." That may actually be possible if the community continues to update it alongside Windows upgrades, but if Windows is replaced by something else, or a new version uses a completely rewritten code, I wonder if it would simply be a matter of time before compatibility issues were worked out, or it'll just be plain impossible. How many computer games, for instance, from 40 years ago, are playable on today's operating systems?

Share this post


Link to post
GoatLord said:

When the change becomes significant enough, .exe programs and even source ports won't be compatible with whatever OS is in mainstream use. They'll be as foreign as 5 and 1/2 inch floppy disks, punch cards and dot matrix printers. Any semblance of a Doom community will completely disappear when the most elderly tech geeks using century-old technology finally keel over.


Then how come I can still watch silent films from the 20's? Or read centuries-old poetry today?

Yes, technology changes. And old technology gets ported to newer formats.

Share this post


Link to post
Megamur said:

Because I know I grew out of that stuff eventually, so I figured it's something relegated to the young. Or maybe I'm just sick and tired of drama after spending probably a solid decade of seeing Internet debates. I've reached a point where "drama" just looks like a bunch of childish slapfights to me, and being entertained by such things seems...well, childish.

good for you, but some drama is fun to watch, or even participate in. for example the multiplayer doom communities need certain amount of drama, feuds and rivalries to stir activity and interest. i dunno if such a thing is needed here at dwf, but an occassional cjwright and the public outrage against him is just fun to read.

Share this post


Link to post
Megamur said:

and being entertained by such things seems...well, childish.

I can see how it would become very unentertaining after seeing loads of it for years. Thing is, I don't see very much of it, so it's not commonplace for me.

The main entertainment value in drama that I see is the irony of when it's out of place and uncommon (drama going on in an otherwise very peaceful and mature place). I dunno, for me it's fun to see adults that usually act well to start throwing shitfits when it's very unusual around where they are, especially since I tend to miss most drama that occurs.

Note that I don't like to participate in drama, only watch.

Still, it's better to have a completely peaceful place than a drama infested shithole. It just becomes boring when it's commonplace.

--------------------------------------

Anyway, though, getting back on topic, I wonder what we as a community could do to spark more interest in Doom? Perhaps start branching out into other communities with TCs and stuff. (kinda like Cutman's MMDM mod)

Any annoying shits from other communities could be easily weeded out via the magic of forum administration. So that way, arrogant and stupid fanboys would be banned like they already would be, therefore bad apples from other communities wouldn't be a problem, as long as they're managed properly.


And note that I'm mostly talking about the singleplayer community, I already understand that the multiplayer community will remain popular. I tend to avoid multiplayer just because of their highly immature 10-year-old- filled communities. (I cringe frequently whenever I read posts on the Skulltag forums)

Share this post


Link to post

I'd say that most of the people that used to be behind these antics are not here anymore. Like Hyena for instance. Surely miss that guy.

Share this post


Link to post
Sodaholic said:

I'm more worried about ending up being in an extremely obscure community. Just feels lonely when you're only one of maybe 15 to 20 people in an online community.

I guess you might as well leave right away, then, before that lamentable day approaches; you wouldn't want to risk feeling lonely online. Perhaps you could roam around 4chan instead, plenty of likeminded people await you there.

Anyway, though, getting back on topic, I wonder what we as a community could do to spark more interest in Doom? Perhaps start branching out into other communities with TCs and stuff. (kinda like Cutman's MMDM mod)

And note that I'm mostly talking about the singleplayer community, I already understand that the multiplayer community will remain popular. I tend to avoid multiplayer just because of their highly immature 10-year-old- filled communities. (I cringe frequently whenever I read posts on the Skulltag forums)

Diluting the Doom fanbase by trying to branch out into other communities sounds like a terrible idea. I'd rather see the community suffer a slow, Shaker-esque population death than to have it filled with more newbs who don't actually care enough about Doom itself to seek others out on their own volition. (I cringe frequently whenever I read topics that you post in.)

Share this post


Link to post
Megamur said:

Then how come I can still watch silent films from the 20's? Or read centuries-old poetry today?

Yes, technology changes. And old technology gets ported to newer formats.


I'm not sure that's such a great argument. You can still watch silent films from the 20s because a group of people have painstakingly transferred the film reels to a digital format and distributed it via DVD and Blue Ray. You can still read centuries-old poetry because they have been featured in books that are still published.

Software, however, is not a tangible thing. It is a series of zeros and ones, and we've all seen the gibberish it turns into when you try to open it on Notepad. We can still successfully play and modify Doom because operating systems are not so fundamentally different that those zeros and ones can't be deciphered.

But remember how I mentioned punch cards? They're completely useless now, even though they contain information on them. You would have to go through an enormous amount of trouble in order to make use of one. That's because computing fundamentally changed when we introduced keyboards which could type instructions out to a monitor. Likewise, this business of mouse and keyboard, and binary code, won't be around forever.

I won't rule out the possibility that a future operating system will be so powerful and all encompassing, that it would be fairly easy to port ancient code to a new platform, but I think it's more likely that future computers will have no interest in running old software.

Share this post


Link to post
Jannak said:

If want to see a real dying community, look at the Blood Community as one example.


Ouch, yes, that's quite unfortunate. Not all their fault, of course. If they'd actually release the blasted source code for the game, that'd probably be a real shot in the arm.

GoatLord said:

But remember how I mentioned punch cards? They're completely useless now, even though they contain information on them. You would have to go through an enormous amount of trouble in order to make use of one.


I wouldn't put anything past DOOM fans. They're a resourceful bunch.

Share this post


Link to post

We can still play Doom because a lot of programmers have been very busy for the last 18 years writing ports and emulators. Had it not already been for a lot of work in the intervening years, many of us Windows 7 users would simply not be able to run it (no 16-but support for us 64-bit guys).

This doesn't compare well with punch cards. The problem them is often that the code itself is in danger of being lost. Card readers are bulky, hard to maintain and take work to interface with. Other options are transcribing their contents manually or scanning them, both of with take lots of labour. The problem is worse for things like software tapes from 50 years ago. Those can't be transcribed by any idiot with too much time and suffer natural decay in addition to most of the problems associated with punch cards.

I don't think Doom itself will be lost until something huge upsets society itself. It's too valuable an artifact to people who care about the history of games, and there are lots of those. Tthis is why you can still easily find code for games that were ancient and never mainstream, like Spacewar.

Of course the community will eventually die. All communities either die or change beyond recognition with time. There will probably come a time in the far future when people who find a copy will have to put in hundreds of man-hours of dedicated work to be able to play it. When they manage it they might not appreciate it as anything other than a piece of history.

Share this post


Link to post
Aliotroph? said:

There will probably come a time in the far future when people who find a copy will have to put in hundreds of man-hours of dedicated work to be able to play it. When they manage it they might not appreciate it as anything other than a piece of history.

Given how simple Doom's engine is, I don't think it will be too hard to find a working source port for extremely futuristic computers. Don't underestimate future computer's ease of use and compatibility with simple, old programs. If anything, computers will become more capable in the future.

If no source ports, there will always be emulators. And don't worry if the emulators become too outdated to work with computers, there will be emulators to run whatever platform the other emulator was written in.

And then you'll be running an emulator inside an emulator inside an emulator and so on. And if it gets too slow (doubtful, since computers would be super fast by then), you can bet that someone will write a more direct emulator by then anyway.

Share this post


Link to post

But if we stop using binary, how easy would it be to transcribe Doom's code to a modern OS? I know quantum computing is still decades away from being mainstream, but it operates on the basis of using values between one and zero instead of just one and zero. I can't help but wonder how that would effect running binary, or if it would effect it at all. It's entirely possible that there will always be a way. Hell, it may not even be a software issue. It may be more an issue, as was previously pointed out, of the format in which the code is stored.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×