Explain how doom wads have gotten better over the past 20 years

I think this will either fuel comedy or debate. Discuss.

Do you mean vanilla maps or limit removing?

In either case, I think better editors played a major role. Typical 1994 WADs claim development times of about a month each.

It made maps not look and play like doom 2 Map10 the refeuling base.

I would debate the better part, maps can be more detailed and graphicaly diverse while still being able to play relatively bad.
It is all related to who is playing and who is mapping as nobody likes the same. Then you have art like maps not made to play superb but
look beutiful, i gues there is no set name for those type of maps and they seem to be scarse.

it is all relative for me.

Not sure there's much comedy or debate left on the topic.

As Maes says, better tools help a lot.

Throw in 20 years of experience no matter the particular niche you're into, and there you go.

Every now and then someone pops up to tell us all modern wads suck and are too formulaic and back in the day this was so much better because people were creative and didn't let guidelines get into the way of their vision or whatever... Seems like we get plenty of newbie mappers doing just that in Wads&Mods, plus if that's what you're into there's still more '94 wads that you could possibly play in a lifetime.

You also have people for which oldschool will always be better because of nostalgia.

Phml said:

Throw in 20 years of experience no matter the particular niche you're into, and there you go.

This.

During those 20 years of people making and playing Doom wads, it's been discovered what works the best and what doesn't. Players pointed it out, mappers had to take it into account and improved next time. That's how everything slowly evolve. In the general and overall view, it shows as raised "standards" in level design, gameplay, visuals, variety and innovation, required to keep experienced player's fun. The standards have changed during the years. Maps that weren't generally considered ugly in the 90's might be generally considered ugly nowadays. Maps that were generally considered fun to play in the 00's might be found plain and boring now. In these regards, good wads are more likely to be created today, because wad authors know the standards and mapping principles better and can work on it.

Of course, there will always be old-school lovers, and "avantgardists", and people who don't accept any standards, and people who don't know the standards, and people who can't manage to hold up with the standards - and that's 100% alright. Another great thing is that during the years, a really wide variety of Doom wads has been created, so that everyone can play what he likes. In this day, however, even "oldschool-styled" maps can be polished and perfectized by knowledged mappers in order to satisfy both modern players and old-schoolers. That's still in compliance with my words - today we have more experience than before, and we can use it for improving and creating better player-friendly wads. In theory, at least.

tl;dr - Experience, evolution, variety.

I thought about this for a bit and I think it's more appropriate to talk about changes rather than improvements. I can name a bunch of wads I find brilliant released in any year from 1994 to 2014, all very different in the ways they impress me. And I just can't compare them and say that some are better than others. I can only talk about how wads were changing over time influenced by players' preferences (or, sometimes, the other way around).

One big thing I'd say is attention to detail - not that every new map has to have 20,000 linedefs or lightsources with 50 sectors to simulate gradually fading light over a distance or anything like that, but rather, things like texture alignment, or thematic coherence. In the early days, textures were just slapped on with no real concern for whether there was a seam between linedefs or anything like that, or you'd have textures get cut off at weird points. Also, you'd have situations where, say, the floor didn't really go with the wall texture, or you'd have a jarring transition between themes when moving to a different room. Granted, some of this is stuff that modern editors have helped a lot with - proper texture alignment is much easier these days, with automatic tools to align textures and 3D modes that let you preview a map to see where there may be a conflict in alignment. Part of it, though, too, is just that as people have gotten better, those small details are more noticeable, and because it takes less effort to fix them, people have more time to deal with those kinds of problems.

On a somewhat related note, I'd love it if id put out an 'official' Doom2.5 - Similar to what capcom did with mega man 10. 32 all new, professionally designed maps, like TheCastle's No Rest For The Living 'official' expansion, which proved the interest is there. 3 or 4 new enemies, 3 or 4 new guns, and it comes with it's own native source port, and modern console ports, probably as a download. I'd pay 10-15 bucks for that shit, if the monsters and guns looked as good as the real Doom stuff.

we're very fortunate as a community for how quickly an idea can become a reality in the Doom universe. With a very well structured and thought out idea, an entire megawad can be generated within the span of a month purely with the collective effort of various volunteering community members. Or even with the perseverence of regularly scheduled speedmaps, a half-megawad or short episode can be constructed in a few mere weeks by a single mapper. The map output here is growing so extreme that maps are being generated faster than they are being played. Some may argue that that can be a bad thing, but considering the amount of time I intend to continue playing Doom, (for the rest of my life, I'm sure) I think this is a very good thing.

Source ports have helped tremendously with Doom. I probably don't have many games compared to most and I've bought Doom multiple times to satisfy a lot of my gaming needs.

Source ports like gzdoom and zdoom give probably the biggest technology advancements with Doom. The fact you don't even have to buy a new game makes it great. Wads such as "Ultimate Torment and Torture" give great gameplay and stories (even better than original Doom sometimes).

After all that you got something like Eternity that is very representative of vanilla Doom behavior, but at the same time is very advanced, customizable, and supports the "Master Levels" of Doom 2.

Then you got chocolate-doom. A pretty much vanilla version of Doom with the vanilla source code of linux. Except it doesn't crash and it's portable to multiple architectures and OS's; hence the name chocolate-doom.

Oh yeah, and then you got Doom 64 EX. An accurate port of the original Doom 64 game that never was released on any other platform (besides the Nintendo 64).

So yeah I think the source ports have helped wad authors tremendously and vice-versa. There's plenty of room for more advanced wads with gzdoom, but there's also plenty of room for vanilla like wads.

I think sometimes people take the source ports (and wads) for granted and don't realize how great they are. The source ports don't crash and it's not like the wads were made by authors that didn't know what they were doing (and even the ones that are like that are kinda fun to play once and a while lol).

Doom is like the best thing since sliced bread!

I think sometimes people take the source ports (and wads) for granted and don't realize how great they are.

Yeah that's a good point. Whenever I try source ports for other games I'm always taken aback whenever I run into issues, because Doom ports tend to be so flawless it's easy to assume that's the norm. Amazing work around here.

Better editors and people have more experience on level editing.