Port devs, why do you dev ports?

[Altazimuth]

As the title says. I'm wondering what inspires other port devs to continuing doing so much work for such long periods of time for free? Why haven't you hung up your hat yet?

 

I'll put my reasons in the spoiler box below since I feel awkward about answering my own question and my answer is super sappy.

Spoiler

I just love it. I love helping Eternity's devoted userbase, and feel genuinely happy whenever I manage to fix something for somebody. It fills me with excitement when I find out a new mapper or modder is working on EE, and it even just makes me happy when a user of Eternity I wasn't aware of makes themselves known. Even outside of that it's just fun developing new features, filling in the gaps. It's taxing and interesting and difficult but so damn rewarding.

 

[Edward850]

How many ports could a port dev port if a port dev could dev ports

Personally I do port development because I like finding solutions to weird problems and questions. Though I also technically do it because it's my job. :V

Edited December 5, 2019 by Edward850

[Graf Zahl]

I started because nobody was making the Doom engine I wanted to have and once I got there what made me going was trying to add new things to the game that sounded interesting from a developer's point of view.

 

[printz]

Regarding my interest in Eternity, I really want the Boom/MBF/SMMU/Eternity line to survive, as I consider it a more true DOOM than other ports. Still not perfect, but I'm working on that slowly.

 

Overall, the reasons:

1. I like solving DOOM engine problems, such as linked portals and maybe other stuff too.
2. I like helping the few Eternity mod authors do cool stuff.

Regarding AutoDoom: I feel it's a much more important research or proof of concept DOOM project than Eternity, but see my reason above of why I haven't abandoned the former. Yet having autonomous (robotic) game players, or basically any human replacement, is a huge thing in this age. We also need autonomous mod makers. Maybe OBLIGE is a good base.

[andrewj]

I don't really know why I worked on EDGE for so long.  At the beginning there were some ideas (features) I wanted to implement, and help make a source port that worked nicely in Linux (at a time when the other major ports only ran in Windows).  Then there were some large tasks that I guess were satisfying to achieve: porting the code from C to C++, transitioning from fixed_t to floating point, making an OpenGL renderer, implementing a better savegame system.  In the end I guess it became too much of a chore, the constantly fixing bugs, and I started to prefer things to be as close to classic DOOM as possible.  Plus after a while I more-or-less stopped enjoying actually playing the game, so the motivation to keep wprking on it fizzled out.

[fabian]

Mostly to scratch my own itch.

 

Back when I started Crispy I was looking for a source port as simple and faithful as Chocolate Doom, but with (1) optional higher resolution, (2) raised limits and (3) Boom support (note that I still haven't made it to add this!). I had some experience hacking on the prboom-plus Debian package and WinMBF before (but was still a noob in C) - and since I had a shitload of free time back then (2,5 hours train ride to work *each direction* on three days a week) I just started writing a patch for Choco. And once I presented that patch here on the forum, people started asking for more and more features. And since I had the time and motivation, I delivered. ;)

[printz]

17 minutes ago, fabian said:

(2,5 hours train ride to work *each direction* on three days a week)

Trains are awesome because of this, letting you use the laptop with no disturbance whatsoever, sometimes even having power outlets. In a similar way, I implemented edge portals in Eternity during a 7-hour long sea cruise, all offline to boot. I wish that the power brokers around here weren't so hellbent at destroying train transport in favour of stupid unsafe road travel :(

[jval]

I started DelphiDoom back in 2004 because I wanted to understand how my favorite game works from the inside. Since I wasn't fluent in C, I ported the source source to Pascal.

FPCDoom started at late 2017 to provide a small, solid and robust codebase in Pascal language.

[MadGuy]

I started because I wanted to learn about game programming.

While I was trying initially to make yet another Classic Doom port (possibly from scratch) I found out that the BFG Doom Classic was able to still accept launch arguments but it was never getting any because all of them where used only on Doom 3.

Since I was already frustrated that they use the engine but it was impossible to load any mod on it I decided to try to make classic Doom launch arguments to pass to the classic Doom engine, and it was a success. After that I kind of got carried away and decided to keep working on that.