GZDoom and Doomsday

[Saucerful]

I don't mean to pit these source ports against each other; I think they are both fantastic. I've been a longtime fan of Doomsday since I believe it was one of the first ports that had OpenGL graphical enhancements as well as having Doom/Heretic/Hexen all under the same hood (sort of). 

 

Fast forward to 2018, I decided to give GZDoom a try and I admit I was impressed. But my question is this: why does this seem to be the clear favourite of the two? From my initial impressions, I'd have guessed the preferences would be split something like 50/50. I can understand that the enhanced graphics in Doomsday may be off-putting at first if that's not your thing, but the rendering settings can be tweaked to be anywhere from plain vanilla to super fancy, or anywhere in between.

 

So, again, I like them both but I'm just wondering if there is something about GZDoom I'm missing. Is it more popular because of the modding community?

[Urthar]

Doomsday Engine looks great, and runs the IWADs just fine. But it can't run any mapsets that are more advanced than 'limit-removing'. (And to honest it has framerate issues with quite a lot of limit-removing stuff.)

 

GZDoom looks very nearly as good, and it runs pretty much everything, including popular mods such as Brutal Doom.

[Gez]

2 hours ago, Saucerful said:

Is it more popular because of the modding community?

Yeah. Doomsday appeals more to those people who want to play the original Doom (or Heretic or Hexen) in an updated engine with fancy effects, while GZDoom appeals more to those who want to play mods that do impressive and surprising things with the engine. The ZDoom community had people working on maps and mods, while Doomsday's had people working on high-res textures and 3D models. And that means that in a modding-focused community like here, you'll see (G)ZDoom stuff a lot more often than Doomsday stuff.

[Saucerful]

Ok, that makes sense. I definitely play the IWADs more often but upon poking around these forums a bit, I discovered Doom 64: Retribution which looks awesome. I used to play the Doom 64: Absolution TC back in the day and I thought it was really well done so I'm looking forward to trying this one out.