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Zed

How much influence has Doomworld had in the fate of Doom?

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Basically, the title says it all. How do you think the community (Doomworld in particular) has influenced Doom's fate? I know there are some other sites (especially the ZDoom forums) that play a very important role in everything related to Doom, but those sites seem to be more focused in "specific aspects" of the Doom engine itself (I don't know if this makes sense, I hope you understand). I mean, Doomworld seems to be like a "melting point" of everything related to Doom (maybe to a greater extent that NewDoom and DoomCenter). Source-port developers, wiki and idgames staff, "historically significant" mappers, composers, etc., almost all of them are here. How do you think this has influenced the Doom community (and, of course, the game), as opposed to having 5 to 10 "main sites"? Is this a good thing, or for example, you think that this has lead to some kind of "monopoly" about what a gaming/modding community should be?

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I think the existence of a central hub/nexus of activity for this community is inevitable and necessary. If Doomworld had not existed, it would have taken some other form. I think the influence comes from the individuals who participate, although, to say this place does not have its own culture would definitely be wrong. Some aspects of it are more or less pleasant, but that's life.

Before Doomworld, there was pretty much just Usenet. Anybody who was anybody was posting to the rec.games.computer.doom hierarchy. That was in the golden age before spam, though.

IRC has also always been a very strong nexus, though. The torch has passed from EFNet #doom2 to #doomroom to #zdoom (and probably a couple in between that I've forgotten). Unfortunately it's a lot more fragmented now; I have to be in a half dozen channels to make sure I don't miss stuff, while #zdoom itself sits mostly idle.

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In the beginning, there were no webpages. Communication was done on BBS or Usenet. Then there were webpages. But there was no central hub, nor search engines to look for stuff. So peeps posted their URL on Usenet, and webpages usually had an extensive 'links' page that pointed their visitors to other sites the owner thought worth visiting.

Around the release of Quake things began to change. Bluesnews started out as a Quake fansite, but gradually started to cover general Quake news and later general gaming news. Game sites started to spring up. The Doom community did not have their own hub, but were still 'stuck' using Usenet, IRC and a smattering of fan pages. The only thing in common was the Walnut Creek FTP site, where all Doom mods were uploaded to. Adelusion and Fingers still announced their latest levels on Usenet. In 1997 the guy who was working on an 'Independence Doom' mod started to put general Doom news on his page. That was Andrew Stine, also known as Linguica. In august of the same year, one of his Doom buddies started to do the same thing with his 'Mordeth TC' webpage. More 'general' Doom pages sprang into being, including review sites and 'Doom Center'.

The Doom source code was released, no small parts thanks to Linguica. He managed to talk Marv of Telefragged (one of the general game sites, and still our host despite their name change to Atomic Gamer) into hosting the first big general Doom gaming site. Due to increased interest and the birth of the first source ports, Marv thought it had a chance. In March 1998, Doomworld was born as a cooperation between Linguica, myself and Dukrous.

You can still read the general Doom news of that year, since it remained preserved at the Mordeth TC site.

The concept of Doomworld was 'copied': DoomNews, DoomShack, DoomNation and later NewDoom. Especially DoomNation was noteworthy. For most of its history, Doomworld was never the sole hub. And to this day, the speedrunning, demo and multiplayer scene had their own websites.

Our 'competitors' eventually folded, leaving just Doomworld. But there's still the ZDoom website and the speedrunning, demo and multiplayer scene are still quite separate.

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Mordeth said:

The Doom community did not have their own hub

Not strictly true- http://www.gamers.org/doomgate/ and the associated "DoomWeb" existed.

All the post-Quake-release Doom website stuff was sort of a "second wave" largely unrelated to that initial one, which was mostly centered on university networks for obvious reasons (it was friggin 1994, how many people even had WWW access then?).


Mordeth said:

The Doom source code was released, no small parts thanks to Linguica.

I may have had something to do with the relicensing of the source code to GPL, but I had nothing at all to do with the initial release of the source code. If anyone was directly responsible, it was Bernd Kreimeier, who approached id Software about writing a book documenting the Doom source code (which is why the released version of the source was never precisely the "real" source, since Kreimeier made various edits and "fixes," not all of which turned out to be for the best.)

Mordeth said:

He managed to talk Marv of Telefragged (one of the general game sites, and still our host despite their name change to Atomic Gamer) into hosting the first big general Doom gaming site.

That's actually backwards - Marv foresaw that with the source code release there was likely to be a Doom modding renaissance, and registered "doomworld.com" with the intention of capitalizing on it. Because of my Functional Entropy stuff I was the first person he thought of to run it.

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Yeah, you're right. Memory is a bit hazy after just spending 2 hours stuck in a traffic jam :) Functional Entropy... god this is ages ago.

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I think Doomworld is a very important reason why a lot of newer people are getting into Doom and modding for the game. It was never the centralized hub in general for the game, I remember browsing DoomCenter years and years back (like 2001 and I only remember that because Digimortal by Fear Factory had come out around the time I really started getting more into Doom), looking for new mods and mods and actually learning what shit like ZDoom and GZDoom were (because 13 year old noob at the time).

Every community has to have a place where the majority congregates at, and with things like the recent release of all of the different things that never fully made it into the game, and even DoomED and such its no surprise that now, DoomWorld has kind of become that central pillar for the general Dooming community. I'm totally ok with this too because I fuckin' love this site and its random little community I've been floating around in since over a decade ago.

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PlanetDoom used to be a good resource for some of the latest Doom 3 mods. Most of those were cosmetic in nature, like weapon skins, gore mods, over-the-top shitty custom maps, etc. Also that infamous recreation of Doom E1's maps into a Doom 3 darkness crawl.

There were a couple of great Doom 3 forums focused mainly on level editing and scripting. But they disappeared off the internet a while ago. Kinda too bad. People were making some amazing shit, like breakable materials, reactive liquids, huge detailed worlds of darkness and shadow like that Thief mod. Also a lot of terrible newb projects, but it was all essential to the process. You need to cater to the newbs and the professionals in a healthy community.

Err but yeah DW is by far the best community for Doom left alive, especially for the classic games, and arguably even for Doom 3 knowledge. Members of Doom 3 Team Phobos I believe lurk DW still, also probably Hexen: Edge of Chaos team.

StevieCybernetik:
I think Doomworld is a very important reason why a lot of newer people are getting into Doom and modding for the game.

Undeniably, yes. There was a massive influx of new members during the hype-filled days of Doom 3's pre-release and onwards. I imagine we're going to see a repeat of this phenomenon.

I hope we can all agree that this next game will be called Doom 4 by the fans, and we will have to subtly reminds all the newcomers that it is going to be thought of Doom 4 among the classic enthusiasts, not a reboot, remake, or remodeling of the original 2 games.

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That does raise an interesting question. The new game will be called "Doom" but obviously, on this of all sites, that would cause problems. The alternative is to refer to it by the not-actual-name "Doom 4" which would make us look like weirdo grognards.

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Linguica said:

That does raise an interesting question. The new game will be called "Doom" but obviously, on this of all sites, that would cause problems. The alternative is to refer to it by the not-actual-name "Doom 4" which would make us look like weirdo grognards.

We've had the same argument on the Doom Wiki. I am suggesting that the article be renamed to Doom (201x) (is leaving the 1 there overly optimistic?) once a release date is confirmed, and leaving Doom 4 as a redirect. There has been a surprising amount of dissent to something I would think uncontroversial, given that's what other sites, including MANY wikis, do to disambiguate otherwise conflicting titles. See IMDb for a billion and two examples.

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True, but it's infeasible for a forum to try and get people to write "Doom (2015)" to discuss a game. So it's either "Doom, and hopefully the context makes it clear" or "Doom 4". Not sure which is superior.

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Let's just call it Newfangled Doom and be done with it.

Re: Doomworld, I'm frankly kind of amazed this site is still going. I was always under the impression of Telefragged as being a commercial company akin to the empire of gaming websites that GameSpy used to host. It must have been ~1998 that Doomworld started (?) and it was already an ancient game by then. So I've been waiting for years for the day when Telefragged's management would finally notice that they're still inexplicably running this website and finally pull the plug.

Fortunately it seems that I'm completely wrong as Telefragged's website proudly lists Doomworld on its hosting page and it seems that we're in good company with a rag-tag group of other random gaming websites. So it looks like the future of Doomworld is a lot more secure than I imagined.

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Mayhaps the forum subsection can be called "Doom (2015)" and the subheading can be "For all your Doom 4 needs. id Software, rest in peace."

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""How much influence has Doomworld had in the fate legacy of Doom?""

FTFY.

And.... probably no where near as much as its influencing DOOM of tomorrow.

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fraggle said:

Let's just call it Newfangled Doom and be done with it.

Re: Doomworld, I'm frankly kind of amazed this site is still going. I was always under the impression of Telefragged as being a commercial company akin to the empire of gaming websites that GameSpy used to host. It must have been ~1998 that Doomworld started (?) and it was already an ancient game by then. So I've been waiting for years for the day when Telefragged's management would finally notice that they're still inexplicably running this website and finally pull the plug.


I remember helping Oddball and Cyric with planetdoom, where we were trying our hardest to keep it relevant with news, mods coming out, etc... I was digging bottom of the barrel around 2007/2008 for anything we could find, and that was only a few years after Doom 3's release. I was pumping out 4 (or more) frontpage news posts a day for a while just trying to shock it back to life... which did little to nothing. In hindsight, while Gamespy shuttered everything up a couple years back, planetdoom had died long before that (obviously) as visitors dwinled, no one cared anymore and the community had long sinced moved on (for there were far more established sites for focusing on classic DOOM news), and I can't help to think that it was because we were focusing on Doom 3 with our news updates and mods more so than DOOM on a whole, and tried injecting classic DOOM stuff at the last minute to no avail.

Point is being that it doesn't matter how well these new era DOOM's do.... We could start another site all about the new DOOM game and it'd be dead in a couple of years if that was our focus, if not sooner, with the rate of gamers attention span today towards reboots and remakes. The modding barely extended Doom 3's interest, not like the classics anyways, and I think no matter how hard they try, it'll likely remain that way for the new DOOM. The sites that stay relevant the longest are the ones that focus on the classics, just like this one. Which is quite impressive and a gaming anomaly... proving once again that "just because it's new doesn't mean it's better."

Even more impressive, this site isn't powered and funded by some huge cash cow like Gamespy, IGN, or Ziff Davis publishing like PlanetDOOM was.... it's fueled purely out of community interest rather than corporate cashgrabs. And here it is, standing the test of time. David beating Goliath.

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Doomworld is a major aspect of Doom history. Nearly half the Doom community would be lost if Doomworld were lost, I'd say.

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Doomkid said:

Doomworld is a major aspect of Doom history. Nearly half the Doom community would be lost if Doomworld were lost, I'd say.

Where else is there to go? The horrid ZDoom forums? Zandronum? /doomgeneral/? I like it here, I like the banter, the unobtrusive layout, and the discussion.

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Yeah, Zdoom... I'm not a fan of Wildweasel's moral guardian ways. The moderators here tend to stay out of the messes and stand more as keepers of peace and sanity. And it's much better that way, in my opinion.

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Just realizing.. I'm a regular here, Zandronum, Zdaemon and Odamex forums, but for whatever reason I never did much over at ZDoom, although I do have an account. I guess most of my stuff is vanilla-ish and intended for multiplayer, the two aspects ZDoom is quite far from, but I definitely don't think of it as anything personal against the mods or whatever. I've never seen anything that struck me as out of line that I can recall.


Oh... and boy am I glad the ST forums are dead - I said so much embarassing shit there during my youth and I'm glad it's all gone.

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Jaxxoon R said:

Yeah, Zdoom... I'm not a fan of Wildweasel's moral guardian ways. The moderators here tend to stay out of the messes and stand more as keepers of peace and sanity. And it's much better that way, in my opinion.


He's got a bit of a forum to deal with if you think about it. There's a lot of kiddos who discover ZDoom and then shenanigans happens because of various reasons.

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The one thing I don't like about the ZDoom forums is that one issue with posts being removed after a certain length of time and it can't be resolved by the admins due to its webhost.

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I'm kind of bummed it's mostly gameplay mods and projects based off of other games/movies over there, not as many stand-alone experiences/level packs taking advantage of all the new Zdoom features.

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BlackFish said:

He's got a bit of a forum to deal with if you think about it. There's a lot of kiddos who discover ZDoom and then shenanigans happens because of various reasons.


I agree. Last time I was there, some dickhead tried starting an argument with me over my spelling. Sometimes I still look at the projects page, but I can't be bothered in posting anything if that's the sort of level its users are on.

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BlackFish said:

He's got a bit of a forum to deal with if you think about it. There's a lot of kiddos who discover ZDoom and then shenanigans happens because of various reasons.

Yeah, it's not easy to deal with. I find on a lot of problems, I basically have to take the "moral guardian" stance, even if I don't agree with it, because leaving something alone implies tacit acceptance and sets a really bad precedent. Which leads to more people complaining later on, because "why did I get a warning for this when [established user #225] didn't? this place sucks fuck you just ban me," which I'm sure happens here once in a while (just gets shuffled off to Losers or Post Hell more often than not). I wish I could do something about the Off-Topic autoprune, but according to Randi, the Off-Topic forum uses a lot of forum disk space, and that was the compromise taken to appease the hosting provider.

Basically, I understand that you're unhappy with the ZDoom forum experience, and I'm sorry. I just don't know what I can do about it.

As far as stuff like stand-alone experiences and level packs...well, the problem is, a lot of folks who try those wind up turning them into full-bore total conversions, which leads to overambitious projects that wind up getting canceled because those authors don't feel they can finish them. Hell, even community-darling Demon Eclipse has been more or less canceled, several times.

[/zdoom forum ombudsman]

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I've been a fan of Doom since it originally came out all those years ago, after all this time it's nice to see a strong community of fans. It's funny, all that time and I barely knew anyone who actually liked the game. It was always the graphics suck, there's no story, you can't look up or down, it's too old etc. And yet, it's one of the most iconic games ever, and it's one game that I can play and not get bored at all. I've even just recently started mapping, sure my maps are shit but I enjoy making them, even if they wont see the light of day. And Doomworld certainly has kept my interest, even taught me a few things and inspired me. I think this place will be around for awhile yet, especially after the release of the new Doom game.

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Mordeth said:

More 'general' Doom pages sprang into being, including review sites and 'Doom Center'.

I didn't think Doomcenter had opened nearly that early, but I just happened to come across something written in 2001 by, uh, me, and this rang a bell:

20 year old me goddamn where did the years go said:

In mid-to-late 1997 Doom Central opened. Originally, it started as a page dedicated to a Terminator Doom which ripped its HTML from FE. Although at first, we were put off, we had noticed they did put on their main page where the HTML was taken from. Javier befriended the site's creator, who was named Sir Alien, and when he decided he wanted space on Telefragged, Javier told him he could put him as a reference for getting space. Whether or not his name was there, though, Doom Central joined Telefragged as their second Doom site. Soon, many saw Doom Central and FE as rivals. That was never the case. Sir Alien and Javier talked often through the newly released ICQ. We traded many updates the other didn't have. In fact, Doom Central and FE constantly referred to each other. You could say that Doom Central and Functional Entropy were the first two Doom news sites -- however, Doom Central was the first to really announce itself as such. Late in the year, however, we lost Doom Central due to Sir Alien's RL commitments. It's too bad and he is missed.

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When I first joined this site, DoomNews was in its death throes and NewDoom was founded soon after. Doomnation was around too, but it was mostly just darknation trolling Fiffy while Bloodshedder went mad trying to moderate it. I might be thinking of different sites...I think those were the names. I remember there was a bit of a rivalry between sites, especially here and NewDoom, but it was mostly a joke as most people had profiles on multiple sites. Then wmull took it seriously, especially after the hacking incident, and shit got real. Eventually his head went so far up his anus that it created a singularity, collapsing his site along with it. That wasn't all that long ago, though, relatively speaking. It's kind of funny that a lot of mods and admins of 'rival' sites became regulars and mods here, at least for a time: Manc, BS, Alitroph, etc.

What the fuck does any of that have to do with anything?

Anyway, on the subject of Doom 4, I remember when Doom 3 was coming out. There was some grognardage over whether we should accept the new game or its fans into the community. We figured they'd give this site a pass for the most part and go on to form their own community. Looks like these days, however, this is basically the only place for Doom 3 stuff as well. Same thing will likely happen with the next Doom as well.

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Heh, that animation looked so 90s. I had never seen it before, but it really took me back.

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Piper Maru said:

It's funny, all that time and I barely knew anyone who actually liked the game. It was always the graphics suck, there's no story, you can't look up or down, it's too old etc.

I've actually noticed a lot more respect for older games or games with simpler graphics in recent years.

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Jaxxoon R said:

I've actually noticed a lot more respect for older games or games with simpler graphics in recent years.

Yeah, Doom for sure has completely passed from "new and cool" to "old and clunky and gross looking" to "timeless retro classic" where it will stay forevermore...

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Jaxxoon R said:

I'm kind of bummed it's mostly gameplay mods and projects based off of other games/movies over there, not as many stand-alone experiences/level packs taking advantage of all the new Zdoom features.

I agree with this. Lately it's been a lot of flavor of the month type gameplay mods. I originally joined for the cool mapsets.

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