SIGIL v1.21 - New Romero megawad [released!]

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Megalyth said:

 

The Plutonia Experiment is a WAD for Doom2 that uses music from Doom1. It's almost like mappers have been using MIDIs from other games for decades.

Caveated by that id had Plutonia produced exclusively for Final Doom, and certainly would've had the legal grounds to say "Sure, you can use those songs."

 

Pretty sure the Zenimax-owned id won't be so kind to Romero, so he (wisely) tapped Buckethead for the paid version since that was his inspiration, and community talent for the free version since naturally we'll be a lot more receptive to a project like this than Zeni's lawyerss will be.

 

5 minutes ago, noisebloom said:

Am I SOL if I didn't order one of the Sigil boxes and want one? Doesn't look like you can get on the mailing list anymore. 

 

I'm usually not one to want extravagant merch, but I'll probably pay over-the-top eBay prices for it, unless there's another way to get it at a reasonable price down the line.

You can try emailing Romero at a certain address I think, but there's no guarantee you can get a copy, and if you do, it might cost more than it cost those of us who preordered.

 

EDIT: Found the quote.

Quote

If you email info@romerogames.com and tell us that you missed the SIGIL box ordering window we will enter you in the list of people who want to order. We cannot guarantee that we can help get you a box, and it will most likely be more expensive than it was during the ordering window.

That said, remember the WAD itself will be free - the premium version is mostly the extra physical goodies, and the WAD that will have Buckethead's music. The free version of the WAD will have music by Doomworld's own @Jimmy who's contributed to a bunch of projects over the years.

Edited April 15, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[noisebloom]

20 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

You can try emailing Romero at a certain address I think, but there's no guarantee you can get a copy, and if you do, it might cost more than it cost those of us who preordered.

 

EDIT: Found the quote.

That said, remember the WAD itself will be free - the premium version is mostly the extra physical goodies, and the WAD that will have Buckethead's music. The free version of the WAD will have music by Doomworld's own @Jimmy who's contributed to a bunch of projects over the years.

 

Thank you, sir! :) 

[Megalyth]

55 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Caveated by that id had Plutonia produced exclusively for Final Doom, and certainly would've had the legal grounds to say "Sure, you can use those songs."

 

Pretty sure the Zenimax-owned id won't be so kind to Romero, so he (wisely) tapped Buckethead for the paid version since that was his inspiration, and community talent for the free version since naturally we'll be a lot more receptive to a project like this than Zeni's lawyerss will be.

 

*sigh*

 

Okay, I guess I have to spell this out. My post had nothing to do with whether or not John Romero could or should use certain music. It was a specific response to the post I quoted, and the statement that certain music in certain WADs makes "zero sense" because of some arbitrary purism. 

[Dark Pulse]

1 minute ago, Megalyth said:

 

*sigh*

 

Okay, I guess I have to spell this out. My post had nothing to do with whether or not John Romero could or should use certain music. It was a specific response to the post I quoted, and the statement that certain music in certain WADs makes "zero sense" because of some arbitrary purism. 

Got that much, just saying Plutonia kind of is the "odd man out" in terms of being legally clear to use music from one game in another game in a product people paid for, since most PWADs weren't sold, after all. (TNT reuses some Doom II tracks, but to be fair, it originally was a Doom II PWAD.)

 

While SIGIL technically isn't being sold here (the Buckethead music is its own WAD file), it's pretty much just Romero hedging his bets - and rather than re-use the original Doom soundtrack, he wanted a fresh experience, regardless of if you're playing the Buckethead version or not. He definitely picked a solid choice in enlisting Jimmy.

[kb1]

On 4/12/2019 at 10:35 PM, dpJudas said:

I'd say this depends on how big version 1 was and how long it took to get it working. My personal experience has been that when I set out to rewrite something I usually make some new mistakes that I did not make in the original version. It may be things I thought wasn't important but turned out to be. I also may become overambitious in the second version. Maybe I didn't understand the problem as well as I thought I did. In some cases I actually end up liking my original version better.

 

If the project is sufficiently small you can of course just throw away version 2 if you didn't like it, but for larger projects you'd now have a big problem. You will effectively have wasted a lot of time with nothing to show for (except learning things). For that reason I think it is much better to do iterative rewrites like Gez talked about.

 

In any case, I didn't say that rewrite could never be justified - just that for most cases I think it is a bad idea. Especially if you have a codebase as large as the source ports we were talking about. :)

I'm completely guilty of the overambitious V2! One terrible way to ensure that you stick with your V2 is to overwrite your V1 source with your V2 source (living on the edge, baby!)

 

For me, most issues that occur are based on point-of-view. At V1, you know nothing. At V2, you have the advantage of knowing what has been done, and what can be done. You also have the disadvantage of not knowing when something is missing (because you've already built it once). But V2 is always easier than V1, if you can manage scope creep. Good points.

 

 

On 4/13/2019 at 8:09 AM, ketmar said:

@kb1 usually, when you are near completion of your V2 rewrite, you already know that you did everything wrong, and the only way to do it right is throw that stupid "V2" that gone wrong out of the window, and start V3. then, when you are near completion of your V3... ;-)

Heh - nicely said!

[noisebloom]

I'm officially on the waiting list for the very unnecessary but cool Sigil stuffs!

 

Any new info on the release date for the episode?

[Jalapen0]

9 minutes ago, noisebloom said:

I'm officially on the waiting list for the very unnecessary but cool Sigil stuffs!

 

Any new info on the release date for the episode?

 

From the website: https://www.romerogames.ie/sigil

 

Quote

UPDATE April 7, 2019: Due to a delay in physical production of some of SIGIL's pieces, fan boxes will ship in the first week of May. The free megawad will be made available one week after fan boxes begin shipping so paying customers can play SIGIL first.

 

[noisebloom]

9 hours ago, Jalapen0 said:

 

From the website: https://www.romerogames.ie/sigil

 

 

 

Thanks!

[ketmar]

now, i should write Romero to delay free release until july, so i'll get a birthday gift. also, make it k8vavoom-specific too, while i am at it.

[Dark Pulse]

36 minutes ago, ketmar said:

now, i should write Romero to delay free release until july, so i'll get a birthday gift. also, make it k8vavoom-specific too, while i am at it.

That'd make it a birthday gift for me too, but I've got enough to play over the summer.

[wheresthebeef]

Don't delay that shit to July since my kid is suppose to be born then.

Release it next month so I have enough time to play it at least 5 times.

[Dragonfly]

16 hours ago, ketmar said:

now, i should write Romero to delay free release until july, so i'll get a birthday gift. also, make it k8vavoom-specific too, while i am at it.

how about.... no.

 

[ketmar]

4 minutes ago, Dragonfly said:

how about.... no.

rejected. please, try again.

[KVELLER]

5 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

how about.... no.

 

I see you're not familiar with ketmar's humor ;)

[CyberDreams]

@KVELLERI'm pretty sure Dragonfly knew it was sarcasm, i know i did, but still.

 

Also, i'm sure Dragonfly had some humor in his answer as well, as it was a simple yet "to the point" answer. A straight up "no" haha! 

[noisebloom]

17 hours ago, wheresthebeef said:

Don't delay that shit to July since my kid is suppose to be born then.

Release it next month so I have enough time to play it at least 5 times.

 

Knee Deep in the Diapers 

[Dragonfly]

I'm well aware yes, their humour involves mentioning k8 in every sentence possible. 

[ketmar]

hell no. k8vavoom is Serious Business, you know.

 

but you're somewhat right, because just "k8" is the abbrevation of my short name. and mentioning ketmar is good, ketmar luvs popularity.

[VGA]

Attention hoe!!

[Ferk]

I wonder if SIGIL.WAD would use UMAPINFO, or if instead it would be adding the GZDoom/Eternity specific lumps.

Sadly there aren't many wads (is there any?) that use UMAPINFO even though it's supported by both engines (and by Graf's PrBoom+ fork... and I think maybe also Doom Retro?).

Edited April 19, 2019 by Ferk

[VGA]

Doom Retro only supports Hexen style MAPINFO lumps

[ketmar]

that umapinfo thing is so widely known that i didn't even know about it until today. not sure if Romero knows about it too. you can't even read about it in doomwiki/zdoom wiki.

[Gez]

It's our international national Xaser who did the MAPINFO stuff.

[Szymanski]

11 hours ago, Ferk said:

and by Graf's PrBoom+ fork

sounds interesting

[Ferk]

39 minutes ago, Szymanski said:

sounds interesting

It didn't catch on since nobody stepped up to help maintain it, but it's there and it serves as a reference implementation for UMAPINFO:

https://github.com/coelckers/prboom-plus

The syntax is documented in umapinfo.txt

 

9 hours ago, VGA said:

Doom Retro only supports Hexen style MAPINFO lumps

Yeah, it seems that the initial commit for UMAPINFO support in Doom Retro was reverted immediately afterwards and work on it didn't resume, I guess the lack of traction and the zero adoption by mappers didn't warrant the extra work. Sort of a Catch-22 situation: the source ports are waiting for the mappers and the mappers are waiting for the source ports.

I noticed however that Doom Retro has its very own "RMAPINFO" header. Yet another incompatible standard, sadly.

 

It'd be great if SIGIL added UMAPINFO maybe that would kickstart the adoption. But to be realistic it seems unlikely that it was added, since everyone seems to have forgotten about it.

Edited April 19, 2019 by Ferk

[KVELLER]

22 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

I'm well aware yes, their humour involves mentioning k8 in every sentence possible. 

 

I never said their humour was good.

[ketmar]

8 hours ago, Ferk said:

It didn't catch on since nobody stepped up to help maintain it

...and that's why it is impossible to find any info about it in both wikis? sadly, it doesn't work this way. how can i support something i don't even know about?

 

ah, nevermind. it is effectively dead on arrival now. and none of the points Gez made in the original topic were addressed, so there is little motivation to implement yet another badly designed zdoom spawn.

 

 

5 hours ago, KVELLER said:

I never said their humour was good.

it is never late to make a confession.

[dew]

9 hours ago, Ferk said:

It'd be great if SIGIL added UMAPINFO maybe that would kickstart the adoption. But to be realistic it seems unlikely that it was added, since everyone seems to have forgotten about it.

Interesting idea, but ultimately not worth lifting a finger. Xaser already explained the situation, but let me reiterate since people have been killing space with pointless banter and """humour""" for the last two pages.

 

SIGIL contains zdoom- and eternity-specific mapinfo and that's it, because other ports that have been considered relevant for testing don't really support E5 properly.

SIGIL_COMPAT contains a dehacked lump and should be supported by everything "down" to Crispy. It contains everything except the extra menu choice, since it overwrites E3. This is also the version everyone is expected to record demos on, so introducing poorly tested extra *info hijinks would be ill-advised for such a product.

 

Not that anyone really wants UMAPINFO anyway, not after the chalice was poisoned from the start by toxic bikeshedding. And before anyone gets to akkshully me... no, you can't use Eternity to record on SIGIL E5. You want to run it with the "-vanilla" parameter for proper accepted behaviour, but that will also forcibly rewrite the demo header of anything above E4 as E4. You can go back and hexedit the information, but that's enough to consider the option unpractical (it's how the demo reel for E5 was made though). And recording anything for zdoom is just shedding tears in the rain.

 

It's too late for crazy last minute ideas anyway. So late, in fact, that it was impossible to fix a benign oversight that already made it onto the physical media. Romero decided to keep it in™ the online version as well in order to avoid checksum validation hell when mixing versions in online ports.

[Xaser]

I briefly entertained the idea of adding a UMAPINFO instead of ZDoom's mapinfo (as mentioned in the other thread, Eternity doesn't yet support it), but as much as I want UMAPINFO to exist, trying to use John's project as a bargaining chip to force feature adoption would have been a really really shitty move on my part.

 

If there ends up being enough map bugs to justify a Sigil 1.1 update, then I'd love to consider it then (along with Doomsday episode defs, while we're at it). If not, it's the wad's at least a nice test case to play around with.

[ImpieEyez95]

Can't believe it's so close to being released aka almost May already.... :) Getting excited.