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MrFlibble

Preservation of incomplete and rejected assets

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Greetings to the good community. I was wondering if there's an effort to archive rejected and incomplete assets that were made for the project.

I am aware of the attic, however it is my understanding that it only contains assets that had once been committed but then replaced by newer ones. Which means that, for example, the rejected versions of the medikits that were discussed here are not in the attic because they were never committed.

This is not optimal for at least two reasons. First, these resources are scattered throughout the forum and are not easily accessible. Secondly, many images were uploaded to various third party image hosting services, and in some of the older thread here they have already vanished (in some cases without even having been archived by the Wayback Machine).

The same applies to incomplete assets. They are scattered across the threads, and some have disappeared because ImageShack or some other service decided to remove them. For example, this sprite sheet was apparently close to completion, according to its author (in a subsequent post in that thread). However, the image is only salvageable through the Wayback Machine. In other cases, files at ImageShack have not been preserved.

I assume that incomplete assets could still be of interest, and there's a real possibility of another artist (or even the original author) of completing them.

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You have to send them directly on the github archive, don't expect fraggle or anyone else to commit it for you. Sounds rude at first, but that is just an (justified) unwritten norm. Who are they to judge when a contribution is finished? There are other variables, probably.

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XCOPY said:

You have to send them directly on the github archive, don't expect fraggle or anyone else to commit it for you.

I don't see what that has to do with any of this. OP is talking about creating another repository with submitted but uncommitted assets. There'd be no reason to have it on the Git repository since that's used for the active development of what actually gets compiled in.

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This is a great idea. Those Eriance sprites are great and I had never seen them until now, despite following FreeDoom closely.

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Depends on the reason for rejecting. For example if submissions are rejected for legal / licensing issues then Freedoom should really just have nothing to do with them.

Assuming it's something that could in theory be part of the main repository then I see no problem with adding them to the attic.

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i the case of the eriance monster, it was his own from scratch design, so it should be safe to attic it, too bad it didnt got finished

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fraggle said:

Depends on the reason for rejecting. For example if submissions are rejected for legal / licensing issues then Freedoom should really just have nothing to do with them.

Yes, I certainly did not mean anything rejected for legal reasons. Sorry I didn't explicitly mention that in the first post - I assumed that it goes without saying that such material should be excluded from the project.

But for everything else, there seems to be a growing collection of assets that can be used (e.g. by modders or other developers) but without proper archival these resources can just vanish, and there's no telling if the Wayback Machine will preserve what has been uploaded to image hosting services.

On a side note, I would also appreciate if there were screenshots from older versions of Freedoom on the screenshots page, similar to the presentation of The Battle for Wesnoth for example. That would help illustrate how the project is developing.

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I think catoptromancy talked about setting up a website with a gallery of such things on it. That's something I could be interested in working on.

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I also mentioned pwads with specific resource sets. A full set of frames for a specific gun or monster would have its own pwad. People can quickly tested out single sets resources.

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Catoptromancy said:

I also mentioned pwads with specific resource sets. A full set of frames for a specific gun or monster would have its own pwad. People can quickly tested out single sets resources.

Yup, I read your suggestion recently and I completely agree. I think it would be nice to have a gallery with the option to download PWADs with those resources.

Speaking of which, single resource PWADs have been also uploaded by some of the contributors, but not all such files are available anymore. For example, there's a Super Shotgun submission by Fredrik made in early 2004, however the PWAD file is no longer accessible and there are no preview images either. Is that an earlier version of the current Super Shotgun (which I presume is the same as this; again, the PWAD file is not accessible), or something completely different?

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MrFlibble said:

Yup, I read your suggestion recently and I completely agree. I think it would be nice to have a gallery with the option to download PWADs with those resources.

Speaking of which, single resource PWADs have been also uploaded by some of the contributors, but not all such files are available anymore. For example, there's a Super Shotgun submission by Fredrik made in early 2004, however the PWAD file is no longer accessible and there are no preview images either. Is that an earlier version of the current Super Shotgun (which I presume is the same as this; again, the PWAD file is not accessible), or something completely different?


I *think* Fredrik's SSG is the one in this commit https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/commit/22a0cf02d7c642cad7a3c749acdfedd0a502b138#diff-cfdca7b26bfde4627352ddac27ef0ca2

github even inlines the gfx in that page which is awesome

I agree that this stuff is rather buried and hard to find though, and that stuff that is never committed will get lost.

Edit: oh, actually it's much more likely to be the 2006 SSG.

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I was thinking that maybe it'd be a good idea to archive various edits of Freedoom assets? For example, Maz did some nice recolours of the current baron (no idea how they look in the game though):
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=48340&start=90&sid=33a928a16ab48d01accfae36b189f1a8#p833340
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=48340&start=90&sid=33a928a16ab48d01accfae36b189f1a8#p833347

Orb monster:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1319721
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1321183

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Guys, while making a reply here I noticed that I cannot find fredrik's old armour sprites in the attic. I've checked all sub-folders and the files seem nowhere to be found. Have they been put somewhere else?

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