LouigiVerona Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) The Doom II community is going pretty strong. It's the end of 2019 and this forum is still very active, people are still playing and creating Doom levels. The mere fact that a forum is active is a testament to this community's power, since we are in the age of social networks and forums are (regrettably) not a thing anymore. But how long do you think this will last? Is Doom II here to stay for years and years to come, or do you think that slowly but inevitably the amount of engaged users is decreasing? Do we have the stats that address these dynamics? 4 Share this post Link to post
Martin-CAI Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) 18 minutes ago, LouigiVerona said: Or do you think that slowly but inevitably the amount of engaged users is decreasing? Well, yes. I think I that, eventually, the old glories of the forum are gonna get older and maybe not as active as nowadays. But I think that that's not gonna happen in the near future, I think that this forum is gonna be as active as nowadays for a long time. 0 Share this post Link to post
Eurisko Posted November 19, 2019 I've been on here for just under a year and I think it's a fantastic forum. Not only because there's the shared interest in DOOM and the continuation of the series bringing in new fans but also the folks here seem to be very like-minded. DOOM is the digital Dungeons and Dragons , It'll never die. 3 Share this post Link to post
Phobus Posted November 19, 2019 I've been on this forum for ages, and lurked before then. People are always asking this question - normally new people. We've had quite a turnover of users in that time, and stuff like "the /newstuff chronicles" seem to have been consigned to history, but this forum seems to be more active than ever, to me. Particularly in the WADs and Mods section, where new threads are dropping off the front page within a day because there's so much activity in various other threads. The simplicity of getting started with editing Doom has always been it's strength, and that's not going anywhere. 3 Share this post Link to post
TheMightyHeracross Posted November 19, 2019 The peak "most online" members for this forum so far was in 2015- considering that this forum was made in 1998 that seems like a good sign to me. Same with ZDoom- its "most online" count peaked just this last June, for a forum made in 2003. If anything it seems like it's making a comeback. The fact that new AAA Doom titles are coming out and doing well is probably helping matters a lot. I don't think the Doom community is going anywhere for a while. 4 Share this post Link to post
Curunir Posted November 19, 2019 I've been following and occasionally actively participating in the Doom community for over 20 years. A lot of the old great content creators and engines of the community have moved on due to life being what it is, but for every older mapper whose trail ran cold, two new talented ones stepped in. I am continuously being amazed by the amount of fresh blood that Doom attracts and by their dedication, ability and creativity. The openness and ease of use of the tools, the possibilities that the modern Doom engines offer weighed against the time required to produce assets and write code, all of this is never going to be matched by any other game. I actually believe Doom has the largest body of user-generated content in the history of anything, and this body is still growing every year. I've also seen similar discussions over the last couple of decades but frankly, seeing what has been produced in the engine over the last couple of years, I don't think Doom is going anywhere or that the community is going to wane in the foreseeable future. 5 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted November 19, 2019 Doom had been lucky that its makers designed both the engine and the map format in a way that is easily extensible. Look at how far Doom ports have progressed from the origins of the game and then compare it to other older games. Nearly all of them got ultimately bogged down by some internal roadblocks in the engine or a map format that was too tightly coupled with the engine - Build is a good example here for an engine that was technically superior to Doom in any conceivable way but totally failed to deliver on the outward facing components - which offered little abstraction and on the other hand took low level hacks for granted, essentially creating an upper barrier for where the engine could go. A lot of what makes Doom still go strong is the fact that as a result of the above, mapping feels more like being made for the mapper and less for the engine - and that will always attract new talent. I don't know any other gaming engine where a mapper needs to know this little about the engine's internals (that is, if we leave vanilla with its limits and arcane render hacks out of the picture because that can easily frustrate new mappers, but fortunately most ports have removed these limits or the need for those hacks entirely.) and the editing tools far eclipse anything that was made for newer game generations. 19 Share this post Link to post
seed Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) All good things eventually come to an end, it's only natural to see the classic games die eventually, be it natural death or otherwise. But that day has not come yet, it's far away since we still have an expanding fanbase, communities of modders, many source ports still in active development, and re-releases of the original games with some lesser known entries such as Doom 64 also seeing remasters. 0 Share this post Link to post
Curunir Posted November 19, 2019 Speaking of low-level hacks and tools made for the creator and not the engine, it continues to amuse me how the Build crowd keeps defending eduke32 and mapster32 and even somehow feels they are superior to current Doom ports, despite the clusterfuck of an interface, abysmal shortcuts and general usability, as well as the "yeah we can do that if we jump through a couple dozen hoops", i.e. the low-level hacks Graf mentions. 3 Share this post Link to post
Doomkid Posted November 19, 2019 The forums and Classic Doom community in general are more active than they ever were during the eternity between Doom3’s popularity fading out in 2005ish and the hype Doom4 started generating in 2015. I don’t see it going anywhere any time soon. The multiplayer side of Classic Doom is the lowest it’s been in a long time in terms of numbers, but there’s still definitely a pulse. I’ve yet to find a moment where there aren’t at least 30 people playing and it’s usually higher than that. Despite being way down from 10 years ago when you could see 300 people in-game at peak, it’s online MP is still doing better than pretty much any other 1993 multiplayer game and I seriously doubt it will ever totally die. The SP and modding scene though? It’s only growing! 8 Share this post Link to post
seed Posted November 19, 2019 8 minutes ago, Curunir said: Speaking of low-level hacks and tools made for the creator and not the engine, it continues to amuse me how the Build crowd keeps defending eduke32 and mapster32 and even somehow feels they are superior to current Doom ports, despite the clusterfuck of an interface, abysmal shortcuts and general usability, as well as the "yeah we can do that if we jump through a couple dozen hoops", i.e. the low-level hacks Graf mentions. That's probably because not many have taken their time to look around at other games and their respective ports, as well as the source codes. I, too, though eduke32 is great (and it definitely is than trash like World Tour) with a cool map editor, until people explained that things aren't actually that great, especially under the hood. 0 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) 27 minutes ago, Curunir said: Speaking of low-level hacks and tools made for the creator and not the engine, it continues to amuse me how the Build crowd keeps defending eduke32 and mapster32 and even somehow feels they are superior to current Doom ports, despite the clusterfuck of an interface, abysmal shortcuts and general usability, as well as the "yeah we can do that if we jump through a couple dozen hoops", i.e. the low-level hacks Graf mentions. I think they still stand in awe before the moving sectors which are part of Build but don't integrate well with the Doom engine. But that's really the only thing Build has going for it. Overall the entire engine is a crude piece of work where nothing ever was cleanly implemented, mainly owed to very low level code quality of the originating product, that goes both for the Build engine itself and for Duke Nukem 3D. While the compromises due to that are excusable, the not so pleasant side is that the engine's internals have basically seen no fundamental refactoring whatsoever - vital parts of the hardware renderer are still present in unaltered form from the old JFDuke days, and it's mostly this code that causes the most problems today. It'd also become a VERY long list just to name all the hacks that were added to the engine to make Ion Fury happen. 18 minutes ago, seed said: I, too, though eduke32 is great (and it definitely is than trash like World Tour) with a cool map editor, until people explained that things aren't actually that great, especially under the hood. Unfortunately I cannot agree with the "great" part. The engine simply does not run well on my system with VSync enabled, and that outright kills it for me. Equally bad is that over the last year they have essentially disabled all True Color rendering from the original game assets - apparently because the renderer has just become too broken. So, compared to a version from earlier this year, what they have on offer now qualifies as no longer acceptable in my book. 2 Share this post Link to post
seed Posted November 19, 2019 3 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said: It'd also become a VERY long list just to name all the hacks that were added to the engine to make Ion Fury happen. I'm interested. 0 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted November 19, 2019 Oh, just an example: The menu code in Duke Nukem is one unbelievable clusterfuck - virtually uneditable. So in order to add some customization, instead of taking the time to rewrite some parts of it to make it more flexible they merely added some script hooks. But wait: The script hooks are not there to display custom content but to hack the coordinate and font tables so that they can place the menu items where they wanted - and to draw an under- and overlay. By doing this they essentially forfeited any chance of properly refactoring the menu, because this very much depends on specific details of how the menu code operates, especially of how the low level 2D drawing routine in Build works. That is, Build has no 2D drawing routine - every single 2D element is routed through the entire CPU based software transformation - which is SLOW! You can literally bog down the entire engine just by drawing 2D stuff. 1 Share this post Link to post
Tartlman Posted November 19, 2019 I'd say that the classic doom community is currently in a good spot. Doom 2016/Eternal certainly helped give it attention. I'd say that classic doom is going to keep going for a very long time, especially since doom is, historically, very significant. While maybe not as famous as mario or something, i'd say there's a good chance you've at least heard of doom. Also, extremely hot take: brutal doom was actually a net positive for the community 7 Share this post Link to post
ReaperAA Posted November 19, 2019 Even though I really love Ion Fury, i'll admit that it did took a quite some time to mess with settings just to get rid of the random FPS drops and stutters. The engine is in a dire need of some fixing and this is really holding the game back imho. Infact a part of me wishes that Ion Fury was made on GZDoom instead of EDuke32. 0 Share this post Link to post
seed Posted November 19, 2019 2 minutes ago, Tartlman said: Also, extremely hot take: brutal doom was actually a net positive for the community Except it's not. Not hating on BD, but BD seems to attract only an audience that's specifically interested only in that mod, and not classic Doom itself. People who like the idea of Doom, but not Doom, the game. 5 Share this post Link to post
ReaperAA Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) 10 minutes ago, seed said: Except it's not. Not hating on BD, but BD seems to attract only an audience that's specifically interested only in that mod, and not classic Doom itself. People who like the idea of Doom, but not Doom, the game. Actually I think that Tartlman is right about it being a net positive for the community (even if its a very very small net positive). Granted the majority of the BD community which likes BD (and BD only) wouldn't have played vanilla doom any any case. But there is a small number of folks which did got into Doom (or returned to Doom, as in my case) because of it but over the passage of time, they got bored of BD and instead ended up liking vanilla doom enough to stick around. 3 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) 14 minutes ago, seed said: Except it's not. Not hating on BD, but BD seems to attract only an audience that's specifically interested only in that mod, and not classic Doom itself. People who like the idea of Doom, but not Doom, the game. While for a large part that is certainly correct, the net result is still positive. Some of these people will eventually broaden their horizon and notice that classic Doom has a lot more to offer than Brutal Doom and that some mods actually play a lot better without it. 4 Share this post Link to post
soner du Posted November 19, 2019 3 hours ago, LouigiVerona said: Is Doom II here to stay for years and years to come [...] ? Certainly not ... Ultimate Doom shall prevail ! 3 Share this post Link to post
Liberation Posted November 19, 2019 I think the mix of ports is one of the reasons that this community is kept alive, want to make normal vanilla doom maps.. sure... Want to make very technical maps with 3d floors, dynamic lighting and shaders etc etc.. it's all here for people to use. The modding capabilities of the engine, even in the pre port days was decent enough for people to make cool projects. 4 Share this post Link to post
seed Posted November 19, 2019 8 minutes ago, ReaperAA said: But there is a small number of folks which did got into Doom (or returned to Doom, as in my case) because of it but over the passage of time, they got bored of BD and instead ended up liking vanilla doom enough to stick around. True, I'm one of those people after all. It's perhaps the very vocal part of the fanbase that's drowning the silent majority, definitely a possibility, but that's how many fans seem to be. 2 Share this post Link to post
ETTiNGRiNDER Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) I have my doubts about "Doom is forever" style optimism but think Doom as a community will be a thing for the rest of my lifespan at least... it perpetually surprises me how often I'll see someone say something on these forums that confirms them as someone a lot younger than I am. I suspect that the game's at kind of an interesting juncture, back in the early 2000s the prevailing attitude towards Doom from outside the community seemed to go something like "HAHAHAHAHA why are you LOSERS still playing this OLD game? Can't afford a better computer? Why aren't you playing Half-Life/Halo/whatever cool new thing on the block?" But now we've come to a point where there's been this resurgence in nostalgic feelings for the earlier days of video games, and disillusionment with the direction gaming has gone in of late, so old stuff is considered "cool" in gaming again. In that context I'm sure Doom gets a lot of interest for being one of the more historical games out there in how it shaped things to come. While at the same time for people who are interested in more modernized stuff there's the various ports and stuff some of which can practically be looked at as a sort of "FPS Creator Studio" type thing in their own right that's arguably more accessible than modern engines so there's interest from that end of things as well. I think Doom also benefited a lot for having a community that cared about hanging on to its old levels, and coming at a time when swapping levels online was becoming a big thing and major FTP sites were taking over from scattered BBS systems and sneakernet distribution--who knows how many levels were made for games that had editors back in the 80s (Lode Runner, anyone?) that got lost because they were only swapped around on floppy disks among a few friends. I remember the cdrom.com crisis and how a scramble was made to ensure that the idgames archive survived after the original host shut down, and I think at least among the old guard there's still this awareness from back then that if we're not vigilant in our stewardship all this stuff could disappear. I consider myself a bit of a preservationist when it comes to custom maps for old games that I'm interested in, and compared to stuff int the "Doomosphere" there are some that really feel like being an archaeologist digging up the ruins of a long-dead civilization. There's an entire generation of Warcraft II maps that as far as I can tell are preserved only thanks to shovelware CDs--they probably were posted to someone's Geocities page that's long since gone or something, so partly Warcraft may have suffered from not having a central archive back in those days. But it's an interesting example of a game that was also massively popular and influential but that got treated a lot less kindly by the ravages of time. Perhaps part of it is the singleplayer vs. multiplayer issue, a lot of the Warcraft II maps out there are only really viable if you have someone else to play them with which creates a barrier towards new interest; the AI's too dumb to get how it's supposed to play some of those layouts. Suffice to say, Doom doesn't just have a history, it has a history that's still with us in an easily accessible form and I think that also helps a lot. In a couple of millenia, will scholars be doing something like this in a Doom deathmatch? I rather doubt it, computer stuff is so much more finicky than a simple board game and already we have to wrangle with compatibility issues just to play some of our games from 20 years ago, but it's a fun sci-fi concept to think about I suppose. Edited November 19, 2019 by ETTiNGRiNDER : typo 4 Share this post Link to post
Curunir Posted November 19, 2019 37 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said: Oh, just an example: The menu code in Duke Nukem is one unbelievable clusterfuck - virtually uneditable. So in order to add some customization, instead of taking the time to rewrite some parts of it to make it more flexible they merely added some script hooks. But wait: The script hooks are not there to display custom content but to hack the coordinate and font tables so that they can place the menu items where they wanted - and to draw an under- and overlay. By doing this they essentially forfeited any chance of properly refactoring the menu, because this very much depends on specific details of how the menu code operates, especially of how the low level 2D drawing routine in Build works. That is, Build has no 2D drawing routine - every single 2D element is routed through the entire CPU based software transformation - which is SLOW! You can literally bog down the entire engine just by drawing 2D stuff. This is fascinating stuff, really! Do you also have any idea why the AI in IFury is such a complete mess as well? I have seen the devs half-admitting it IS indeed because they took too many shortcuts with levels as well and the geometry is way too complex for the AI to navigate in a lot of places, but I'd much rather hear a second opinion, if you could provide one. 1 Share this post Link to post
TheMightyHeracross Posted November 19, 2019 (edited) 38 minutes ago, Tartlman said: Also, extremely hot take: brutal doom was actually a net positive for the community That take is room temperature at best. 22 minutes ago, Linguica said: [graphs] If you don't mind me asking, it says bottom graph is new posts, but what is the top graph? Page visits? New members? 1 Share this post Link to post
anotak Posted November 19, 2019 25 minutes ago, Linguica said: graphs what caused the increase around 2009ish 0 Share this post Link to post
dr_st Posted November 19, 2019 1 hour ago, Doomkid said: The multiplayer side of Classic Doom is the lowest it’s been in a long time in terms of numbers, but there’s still definitely a pulse. I’ve yet to find a moment where there aren’t at least 30 people playing and it’s usually higher than that. Despite being way down from 10 years ago when you could see 300 people in-game at peak, it’s online MP is still doing better than pretty much any other 1993 multiplayer game and I seriously doubt it will ever totally die. The SP and modding scene though? It’s only growing! This is actually an amazingly important point. In a world where most games, and definitely most FPS, have gone with full-multiplayer focus, DOOM's comparatively simple engine and gameplay would find it difficult to stay relevant. So instead, DOOM stays relevant by continuously tuning the arts of design and single-player challenges - where the exact choice of architecture, monsters and item placement makes each level a puzzle to solve. 1 hour ago, Curunir said: Speaking of low-level hacks and tools made for the creator and not the engine, it continues to amuse me how the Build crowd keeps defending eduke32 and mapster32 and even somehow feels they are superior to current Doom ports, despite the clusterfuck of an interface, abysmal shortcuts and general usability, as well as the "yeah we can do that if we jump through a couple dozen hoops", i.e. the low-level hacks Graf mentions. The way I see it, based on my limited experience with playing the games and some of their mods (never creating anything, but half-following the scene), as well as reading the explanations of experts such as our very own Graf Zahl, is that the fundamental differences in code quality, philosophy and original implementation between DOOM Engine and Build engine, make Build great (and impressively advanced) for running the original games it was developed for, with the original levels and assets, but not much more; whereas DOOM's initial simplicity has made it almost infinitely moddable and adaptable. 5 Share this post Link to post
Linguica Posted November 19, 2019 9 minutes ago, anotak said: what caused the increase around 2009ish I would imagine the global recession. 5 Share this post Link to post
Tartlman Posted November 19, 2019 24 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said: But now we've come to a point where there's been this resurgence in nostalgic feelings for the earlier days of video games, and disillusionment with the direction gaming has gone in of late, so old stuff is considered "cool" in gaming again. I'd definitely say that's a big reason people are returning to old games and retro-style fps. 36 minutes ago, Linguica said: graphs Interesting how the posting amount fell so drastically after doom 3. It looks like we haven't recovered to pre-doom 3 levels yet. I wonder what the posting statistics for the ZDoom forums looks like. Would it tell a similar or different story? 1 Share this post Link to post