any plans for freetonia/freetnt?

I'm pretty sure that final doom pwads are supported with freedoom2, but are there any plans to make new freedoom IWADs for the two final doom IWADs? As far as I can see the only difference would be 64 extra maps and new midis for them, but I wouldn't be totally against something like that.

seeing how frequently plutonia mapping projects appear, maybe we should launch a freetonia mapping project

Freedoom2 supports tnt and plutonia 99%. A few textures conflict with doom2 which is why it is only 99% supported.

I think it would make more sense to finish off the 2 current IWADs before considering anything like this.

Besides, why "freetnt" or "freetonia"? We aren't using the original IWAD names anyway. They may as well just be phase 3 and 4.

3 main targets is best I think. There really is no need for more iwads. But we should also support a Freedoom pwad. We have tons more textures than doom2, so a Freedoom pwad would be a great idea.

Pluto-free-a
Freevilution
T N Free

Plutopia.

Sounds like a great idea!
Althrough it would require a lot of time for mapping and making new midis.
But Freedoom is not yet completed and there is still work to do, so maybe in the future it could be made.

fraggle said:

I think it would make more sense to finish off the 2 current IWADs before considering anything like this.

This is a good point, i was just wondering if it was planned or not.

I think a freedoom pwad would be a good idea.

No plans to make anything of the such, and we probably won't be adding new IWADs just because the Doom series had a couple more of them... Phase 2 already supports TNT/Plutonia mods.

The only thing I can really think that would make sense is new multiplayer IWADs, like FreeCTF and other game modes.

Maybe the CGI guys would be interested in making a Duel mapset, FreeCGI :)

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/70462-countergoat-initiative-duels/

Catoptromancy said:

3 main targets is best I think. There really is no need for more iwads. But we should also support a Freedoom pwad. We have tons more textures than doom2, so a Freedoom pwad would be a great idea.

I think this is an excellent idea: make a freedoom phase 2 with as many textures as possible, but add incompatible freetnt and freeplutonia textures with PWADS. Although that might bring up issues if you tried to use them with something like zandronum.

I'm actually kinda glad that so much focus is being placed on Phase 2. Aside from clearly being something that resources can be taken from to create other things, like Phase 1, "FreeTNT", and "FreePlutonia"... it seems like some of the levels are actually better than the original Doom 2 levels. I honestly used to think the D2 maps were weaker than the Ultimate Doom levels.

And in some ways, I actually prefer the new textures and sprites that freedoom has. It makes the game feel new, but the same, if that makes any sense. After 20 years, it kinda deserves to have a new and improved version (Doom 3 doesn't exist, and while Doom 64 EX is pretty cool, it wasn't originally designed for the PC).

That sounds like a good thing for such additional IWAD(s). It reads like there are components designed for Zandronum, and Freedoom by philosophy does not recommend/advocate ports which are not entirely free software (Zandronum shares ZDoom's unfortunate use of non-free code such as BUILD and FMOD), although Odamex is 100% free.

I have to admit some hesitation in adding new IWAD targets, primarily because of the amount of work it adds, but also just on keeping the list of Freedoom downloads short and simple to understand. FreeDM has a share of maps that are small and optimized for duels. ... but that's my own feelings, we can definitely add new stuff if there's resources and demand.

chungy said:

That sounds like a good thing for such additional IWAD(s). It reads like there are components designed for Zandronum, and Freedoom by philosophy does not recommend/advocate ports which are not entirely free software (Zandronum shares ZDoom's unfortunate use of non-free code such as BUILD and FMOD), although Odamex is 100% free.

Does this explain why I can't use Freedoom Phase 2 with the original DOOM2.EXE? :p

I agree with keeping things (relatively) simple for now. However, will Phase 1 be completed before the 1.0 release? (I'd love to see something like a 0.95 release with all of raymoohawk's updated sprites, though)

Some PWADs still exist for doom.wad.

That's just because Freedoom: Phase 1+2 currently target Boom, not vanilla. Even if that changes, we won't advocate the use of doom2.exe, but we could advocate Chocolate Doom.

chungy said:

I have to admit some hesitation in adding new IWAD targets,

Allow me to express the same hesitation in a much more forceful way: I think that adding more IWAD targets would be a huge mistake, at least at this point in the project. We don't even have a complete set of levels for the current two IWADs: why add more? The same goes for doing PWADs: it's a distraction from completing the task(s) that we've already set for ourselves.

We're still entirely missing a bunch of levels in Phase 1, and the levels we do have have a bunch of bugs that need to addressed. To be honest I also think we probably ought to spend some time aggressively playtesting the levels we already have and fixing issues with them (gameplay, integration between levels, saner difficulty progression, etc.).

We recently agreed that we were only going to do 32 levels for FreeDM and no extended levels, the idea being that we should concentrate on making a limited number of really good levels rather than lots of mediocre ones. I think the same principle applies here. Let's make Freedoom quality over quantity.

As for a PWAD project, I'm not sure what the point would be. It would essentially be just a megaWAD project that was freely licensed. That's a good thing but it doesn't need to be part of or associated with Freedoom. Actually it would be better if we expended that effort on just encouraging more WAD projects to use free licenses in general (ideally something like Creative Commons rather than Freedoom's BSD license) - especially seeing that there may be some problems with the standard WAD template copyright text.

frithiof said:

However, will Phase 1 be completed before the 1.0 release?

Remember, the next release is 0.10, it is not a decimal point number

Edit: fraggle when i said i was advocating the release of a freedoom pwad, i meant it in the sense of reformatting freedoom's resources in a non-iwad safe manner, as an optional extra download to use a resource wad instead of an IWAD. This simply means renaming all the resources to not conflict with IWAD resources.

jmickle66666666 said:

Remember, the next release is 0.10, it is not a decimal point number

Edit: fraggle when i said i was advocating the release of a freedoom pwad, i meant it in the sense of reformatting freedoom's resources in a non-iwad safe manner, as an optional extra download to use a resource wad instead of an IWAD. This simply means renaming all the resources to not conflict with IWAD resources.

So it would go from 0.9 to 0.1?

Technically, since it literally does use a decimal point...

jmickle66666666 said:

Edit: fraggle when i said i was advocating the release of a freedoom pwad, i meant it in the sense of reformatting freedoom's resources in a non-iwad safe manner, as an optional extra download to use a resource wad instead of an IWAD. This simply means renaming all the resources to not conflict with IWAD resources.

Not certain what you mean.
Do you mean reformatting the IWAD resources as a PWAD so that you can break mod compatibility and do more creative things with the material?

frithiof said:

So it would go from 0.9 to 0.1?

Technically, since it literally does use a decimal point...

Nope, it's not a decimal number. It is two separate numbers that happen to be separated by a period. 0 is the major version number, 10 is the minor version number. 0.1 was already released, years ago.

A good demonstration of this is the fact that Freedoom has in the past made "minor" releases that contain three version "segments": 0.6.4 for example.

fraggle said:

Nope, it's not a decimal number. It is two separate numbers that happen to be separated by a period. 0 is the major version number, 10 is the minor version number. 0.1 was already released, years ago.

A good demonstration of this is the fact that Freedoom has in the past made "minor" releases that contain three version "segments": 0.6.4 for example.

But 0.6.4 could be referred to as 0.64, right? I mean, if there was a minor update even to that, couldn't it be referred to as 0.641? It sounds like we are debating semantics about how it isn't a decimal point system when it literally is that, but with the decimal points placed arbitrarily in order to pretend that it isn't. Going from 0.9 to 0.10 sounds confusing, and I doubt that it will instill confidence in people (the kinds that might be considering downloading freedoom) that don't know any better. More people might download a 1.0 release than a 0.10 release...

I'm not even going to bother continuing to participate in this particular conversation because I'm sure it will give me a headache. This must be one of those linux things that I don't understand.

I'm cool with freetonia/freetnt chat, though.

VVVV - Does this have anything to do with freedoom releases being delayed by multiple years in the past? (One release per year probably wouldn't be all that bad...especially considering that for most practical purposes, phase 2 is almost entirely functional as an IWAD)

frithiof said:

But 0.6.4 could be referred to as 0.64, right?

No. There are 58 minor versions between 0.6 and 0.64.

I mean, if there was a minor update even to that, couldn't it be referred to as 0.641?

No. See above.

Your way of writing versions only allows 10 versions per "level". For example, suppose you get to 0.649 and want to do another patch release. You can't, because that would be 0.65. You're forced to do a minor release instead of a patch release, and your version number loses semantic meaning. And this is exactly what we're seeing with Freedoom now that it's reached version 0.9.

Because of this, decimal version numbers discourage regular releases because people start to think that "not enough progress has been made to do a new release" (see Sodaholic's comment recently for example). It encourages people to hold off for longer and not do a release, in order to fit what's essentially an artificially imposed limit. This is actually really bad for open source software, where the wisdom is that regular releases are good practice.

Put it this way: imagine you're a software developer. For your software you have the choice of writing versions as 0.64 or 0.6.4. One way of expressing versions has an arbitrary limit that restricts and potentially distorts your release process. The other does not. Why use the former instead of the latter?

It sounds like we are debating semantics about how it isn't a decimal point system when it literally is that

No, it isn't. That's the entire point. When you let go of that misconception it will make a lot more sense.

If it helps, mentally substitute the period for a different character. Imagine it as 0:6:4 for example. It's just a separating character. It doesn't represent a decimal point.

Yeah, I'd forgotten that Freedoom used that version numbering system when I wrote the comment, please disregard it as I fully agree with Fraggle.

As for Final Freedoom or whatever, I'd avoid doing it because Final Doom was just two megawads that id snapped up for commercial use. It may as well have been released as two Doom 2 PWADs than actually having them as standalone IWADs.

It's good to have the Final Doom textures in Phase 2 for compatibility and convenience when loading PWADs, but Final Doom is hardly different enough from Doom 2 to justify having a redundant IWAD. At least Doom 1/Ultimate Doom has enough major differences to justify having a Phase 1 (episodic structure, etc, can't just swap out map data without restructuring).

fraggle said:

No. There are 58 minor versions between 0.6 and 0.64.

It might be worth saying that before the project reaches 1.0, all 0.x releases are major. This seems to be the spirit of the Semantic Versioning standard/movement, too, although Freedoom doesn't strictly follow that standard, else the present release would be numbered 0.9.0. Linux doesn't follow that standard either, 3.17 is a major release and 3.17.1 is the following minor/patch release; personally, I find leaving off a trailing ".0" to be better-looking, it's implied anyway.

But yes, the version number is not a percentage or progress indicator, it just tells that there have been nine major releases of Freedoom and it has not reached 1.0 yet. Freedoom 1.0 will essentially be fully play-tested, all levels supporting easy/normal/hard difficulties, all levels deemed "fun" by some kind of standard (this cannot be determined objectively, of course), and ordered sanely (hard maps should not precede easy ones; Ultimate Doom's Episode 4 is an example of doing it wrong), and no resources missing or with ugly placeholders.

Freedoom 1.0 will not represent an end to the project, although perhaps some more thought is required about what the version number will represent after it, because I fear it would be too easy to have a version like Freedoom 1.42 and simply never have a 2.0 (which is what SemVer seems to demand, given the constraints of our project). Maybe there's nothing wrong with having 1.42, but Emacs had decided against going that route long ago when they jumped from Emacs 1.12 to Emacs 13.0, dropping an essentially useless "1." that had been preceding all the releases (until 13, "Emacs 2.0" was thought to have been a hypothetical 100% rewrite). Linux did the same recently, with dropping "2.6." and going straight to 3.0, just because Linus thought 2.6.40 was getting to be "too big" of a number in the third spot, although it still has an essentially meaningless "3." in front of it. Firefox and Chromium have gone the direction Emacs did, dropping a major number in the front of the versions that effectively would never change due to their rapid release cycles.

I think I got a little bit off-track there, but in short, the version number is not progress nor percentage, nor a decimal number.

jmickle66666666 said:

Remember, the next release is 0.10, it is not a decimal point number

If you can see into the future, can you please tell me if I become rich? :D Joking aside, the next version might be 0.10, or it could be 0.9.1 or 1.0, don't know until we get there. :)

Sodaholic said:

At least Doom 1/Ultimate Doom has enough major differences to justify having a Phase 1 (episodic structure, etc, can't just swap out map data without restructuring).

That, and the handful of PWADs that require Doom 1/Ultimate/Phase 1 to be used.

I don't know if some of you remember this, but I had fond memories of playing the Aliens total conversion with Doom 1. By modern standards, it probably sucks balls (of course, that's assuming that you actually LIKED the Duke Nukem Forever interpretation of Aliens), but back then, it was awesome.

edit: I sometimes find myself weirded out when people talk about how they weren't even ALIVE when Doom 1 was released. That's like not knowing who your state's congressmen are. I don't think I could ever truly love a girl that didn't at least pretend to enjoy playing Doom.

Right, compatibility with Doom/Ultimate Doom PWADs was the main reason that Phase 1 became a thing, not because of "More levels!"

No, it is not impossible to add a Phase 3 or more, but we have no purpose to have one specifically because of Final Doom. Such a thing is unlikely before 1.0, anyway.

chungy said:

Right, compatibility with Doom/Ultimate Doom PWADs was the main reason that Phase 1 became a thing, not because of "More levels!"

No, it is not impossible to add a Phase 3 or more, but we have no purpose to have one specifically because of Final Doom. Such a thing is unlikely before 1.0, anyway.

"Such a thing is unlikely before 1.0, anyway."

*sigh*...

frithiof said:

VVVV - Does this have anything to do with freedoom releases being delayed by multiple years in the past? (One release per year probably wouldn't be all that bad...especially considering that for most practical purposes, phase 2 is almost entirely functional as an IWAD)

Nope, it doesn't have anything to do with it. Regular releases are a good thing but do require discipline: it's easy to fall into a slump where you just put off doing a new release.

Ideally we probably ought to do a new big release (like we've done with 0.9) yearly, and possibly put out smaller patch releases every couple of months.

frithiof said:

"Such a thing is unlikely before 1.0, anyway."

Unlikely is not impossible, but there would have to be a very good reason to do it. As fraggle mentioned earlier, moving the goalposts doesn't really get Freedoom any closer to 1.0, just the opposite, really. The project's already twice had such goal posts moved, with the additions of FreeDM and later Phase 1, and we have settled into a comfort zone of these three IWADs, each with a well-defined purpose. While extra levels can be nice, Freedoom already has placed upon itself the task of making one hundred levels, between all three games, and all of these should have quality testing to them.

fraggle said:

Ideally we probably ought to do a new big release (like we've done with 0.9) yearly, and possibly put out smaller patch releases every couple of months.

This is a good idea, although on our part, we should have a clear idea of what the patch releases contain. Largely, Freedoom has developed with an almost-entirely linear history, making major releases (like 0.9) every so often, even if not as often as it should. It's tempting to make several small "patch releases" every handful of months in the same linear trend, but it gets into a trend where we might see 0.9.31 being released and no clear goal of what exactly is required to turn it into 0.10. (This is the same problem Firefox faced when the release cycle altered to become very rapid compared to 3.6 and earlier. They could have kept the numbering at 4.x for a very long time, seeing up to possibly Firefox 4.24 before a full UI revamp for Firefox 5.0 (the actual release being Firefox 29.0), but decided against being in that versioning rut.)

I made a post on Google+ about the version number topic. Largely all the same stuff already said in this thread, but neither you nor Sodaholic are the only ones to bring it up... so I thought it was worth doing.

All I'm going to say is that I won't be happy if we reach Freedoom 527.3.2.7, and Phase 1 is still incomplete.