What source ports should my WAD be compatible with?

Full disclosure: I've made a lot of doom content in the past (we're talking about over a decade ago though), but I am a newb when it comes to modern Doom etiquette/community expectations/etc.

I've been working on my first WAD in many years. It's a huge map with 100% custom self-created textures/flats. Up until last night, I had strictly been testing in GZDoom which appears to be a really "forgiving" source port. Others appear to be not so "forgiving." After a few hours of converting graphics, troubleshooting weird texture issues, etc. I finally have the thing load "true color" textures in GZDoom and glboom-plus and gracefully degrade to Doom-paletted textures for prboom-plus.

A few quick questions:

1. Supporting both true color and doom-palette textures is a huge pain in the ass. It feels a bit like trying to support cross-platform/cross-device CSS for a website (which is always worth it). For Doom though, is it worth it to do this or am I just making more work for myself?

2. If I'm going to do this, what are the most commonly used source ports that I should make sure my WAD loads properly in?

Thanks in advance!

Edit: If it's helpful, gameplay is all vanilla Doom. Crouching/jumping/mouse-look are all optional and do not break anything. So supporting ports which do not allow these is not beyond the realm of possibility. I did have to use the boom-compatible switches lump-thing in order to make my custom switch graphics work though, so that might be a limiting factor.

From your description, the map is a Boom-compatible map, meaning any port that supports Boom (the vast majority) can play it. Not to mention you use SWITCHES, which is a Boom lump.

It also means you should use Doom pallete textures. All ports support this. True color, not that much.

10 minutes ago, Voros said:

From your description, the map is a Boom-compatible map, meaning any port that supports Boom (the vast majority) can play it. Not to mention you use SWITCHES, which is a Boom lump.

It also means you should use Doom pallete textures. All ports support this. True color, not that much.

Thank you, this is very helpful. My understanding of all of this source port terminology is spotty since I'm just joining the modern doom world now (I've got a lot of catching up to do). Knowing that I can say: "This WAD is boom compatible but also has additional true color textures for ports that support them" and the player community will understand what I am saying makes me feel more confident. I want to make sure that I am communicating clearly when I eventually release this thing.

Since all of the work I've put into the map so far uses these true color textures, ports which support them get the player closer to my original vision than the mediocre doom-palette conversions.

The individual textures don't appear to look that different:

...but the cumulative effect of all of them together makes the map much more washed out:

So I think I can't abandon the true color thing entirely unfortunately. The map looks so much sweeter with them any way... bleh. I do think favoring maximum compatibility across ports is the way I wanna go though. Thanks again!

If you want to continue using true color, have you thought about switching to UDMF too? This is an advanced and powerful map format.

But hey, it's your decision. If you want to make a Boom map with true color textures, that's fine. Maybe in the future, Boom-based ports will get a true color renderer :) Although what I can say is that your map will only look ok on ports that have true color rendering, like GZDoom, DelphiDoom, etc.