ID24 - a new feature set standard

[Canjul]

8 minutes ago, Andromeda said:

Important to note that it's a "paywall" that affects a diminute percentage of active classic Doom players, since everyone that owns the game on Steam/GOG/etc. is eligible to a free upgrade to the new version (as has been repeated throughout the thread).

True, but that's why I include it on the idealistic side rather than the practical!

[Gez]

26 minutes ago, Canjul said:

The idea of "new" Doom content that is walled off behind a paywall is disconcerting in a 30 year old game that's been open source for decades. 

Yet this is something that has happened again and again, starting with Master Levels and Final Doom all the way back, then we had No Rest for the Living that was exclusive to the Xbox port. Doom 3 got The Lost Mission, Quake got Dimension of the Machine, Quake II got Call of the Machine, Doom 64 got The Lost Levels...

 

Open-sourcedness has only ever concerned the game logic and never extended to the game content. The IWADs have always been paywalled. Well, except for Shareware versions, but they don't let you run mods.

[Kinsie]

7 minutes ago, Gez said:

Quake II got Call of the Machine

Quake 2 also had some pretty massive tech changes to the game code - merging all the expansions together, massively increasing the tick rate, converting to 64-bit, etc. - that had the minor side-effect of rendering every single previous mod ever made incompatible.

 

The community was naturally outraged about this, bitterly arguing against this grave injustice and hounding the developers out with pitchforks. Also, the entire previous sentence was a flagrant lie - people just kinda shrugged and kept making mods, bouncing between the old and new versions as mood dictated.

[Canjul]

5 minutes ago, Gez said:

Yet this is something that has happened again and again, starting with Master Levels and Final Doom all the way back, then we had No Rest for the Living that was exclusive to the Xbox port. Doom 3 got The Lost Mission, Quake got Dimension of the Machine, Quake II got Call of the Machine, Doom 64 got The Lost Levels...

 

Open-sourcedness has only ever concerned the game logic and never extended to the game content. The IWADs have always been paywalled. Well, except for Shareware versions, but they don't let you run mods.

Well this is admittedly where my technical knowledge lets me down a bit, but I think more people were upset at the id24 standard than the new LoR levels. The fear, if I understand correctly, is that future community wads that use it might be off-limit to fans who don't own this new copy.

 

Frankly, I have faith that the community will figure out a way around any issue pretty snappily. I just hope bridges don't get burned before then.

[Kinsie]

1 minute ago, Canjul said:

I just hope bridges don't get burned before then.

Bit fucking late for that.

 

17 hours ago, LexiMax said:

I intend to continue contributing to Odamex, and I plan on adding ID24 features to it, but this does make me want to significantly cut back on my engagement with the greater Doom community, as I now feel like people like me have been "othered" and considered the enemy, which is soul-rending for a community that I once considered "home."

[Canjul]

3 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

Bit fucking late for that.

 

I know. Fucking sucks every time drama rears its head.

 

I can't speak to Odamex since I never used it, but I know Lexi worked on MBF21, right? I hope she knows that far more of the community are grateful for her work than the few people who lash out.

 

Honestly, as a lurker for 99% of Doom life and somebody whose technical knowledge ends at hacking together cblood patches, I'm sort of continually in awe of all the awesome shit people in this community have produced. I'm fairly well convinced that the end of No End in Sight, where the only video game left after the apocalypse is Doom, has a pretty solid shot at becoming reality some day.

[Gez]

17 minutes ago, Canjul said:

The fear, if I understand correctly, is that future community wads that use it might be off-limit to fans who don't own this new copy.

Classic Doom is three different games. There's Ultimate Doom, there's Doom II, and there's Final Doom. The overwhelming majority of the community-created content is for Doom II, so that makes it the best game to get, but if you only have it then you can't enjoy the content created for Ultimate Doom or that created for TNT and Plutonia. I'm not sure this is significantly different.

 

Also, the Freedoom developers are already planning to cover the needed resources with free alternatives.

 

30 minutes ago, takyon_64 said:

So, again, the community is right to express its concern here and elsewhere. If we'll turn out to be wrong, then all is well. But what if we're right and Doom modding community is on its way to be Embraced, Extended & Extinguished?

I'm honestly quite puzzled about how the modding community would be extinguished in practice.

Quote

The strategy's three phases are

1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with an Open Standard.
2. Extend: Addition of features not supported by the Open Standard, creating interoperability problems.
3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors who are unable to support the new extensions.

The question here is how does any of this apply, in practice, to Doom mods.

 

First, there's no real Open Standard. The baseline standard is defined by vanilla Doom. It's not an open standard; all the knowledge about this standard has been obtained through discovery and experimentation. The open-sourced code released does not correspond to actual vanilla Doom; finding the differences and correcting ports to play back vanilla demos correctly even when they get snagged on some obscure quirks that only shows in three demos out of several thousands has taken several years of community work.

 

Secondly, for several years, all ports have gleefully added their own features without much concerns about interoperability. That's how we got DOSDoom/EDGE, Boom, Doom Legacy, jDoom, ZDoom, etc. back in the late 1990s.

 

Despite all these extensions being added willy-nilly, when Chocolate Doom, which deliberately supported none of the new extensions, arrived on the scene, it was a resounding success.

 

Thing is that all of these ports are freeware. The notion of a market share for them is largely irrelevant since they're not getting paid for them. At most it can motivate a developer to know that a lot of people are using what they're working on; but the drawback of that is that a lot of users also generally means a lot of abusers. And it can also demotivate a developer to know that a lot of assholes are constantly whining about what they're working on.

 

Will ID24 let D+D2 displace GZDoom? I don't think so. Basically everything ID24 can do, GZDoom can also already do, and in addition GZDoom can do much more. Will ID24 let D+D2 displace DSDA-Doom? The lack of demo compatibility for complevels above vanilla says otherwise. Will ID24 let D+D2 displace Chocolate Doom? The entire point of playing with Chocolate Doom is to not have any of the raised limits, fixed bugs, or added features that other ports include. I could go on for the rest of the ports, but it'd take all day.

 

At the end of the day, ID24 is kind of nifty but doesn't really bring all that much to the table. A new way to change music dynamically, some colormap stuff, flat and texture mixing, a new way to set up multiple skies in one map... Cool, but not game changing. Basically all of that stuff could be done in some ports before; it's just that sometimes it required using ACS and/or new UDMF properties. So now you have a way to do that stuff in the plain old Doom map format.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

10 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

What i found really disgusting is how this whole ordeal started when Goober was called a gpl launderer: Which is solely intended to piss people off and divide this community. The outcome is clear: It did piss people off and it divided people. dsda-dev's arguments could well be presented in a less than hostile manner - And with evidence given to boot.

 

Now that Goober has replied back, i would ask the same thing. Where is the evidence? Goober has delivered a spec that is out in the open, so the whole GPL antagonizing doesn't even make sense here.

I was wondering about this but didn't ask because the discussion was very heated and i don't have the technical chops that many others here do. So if you don't mind..

 

How i understood things is, Goober said it's a clean room engineered code so it could be licensed for use in consoles that don't support GPL, and license that to bethesda. Because asking everybody involved in the decades old projects is effectively impossible. That must've been a mountain of work to get things working close enough without referring to the original code for legal reasons. 

And here's my lack of understanding, and i don't mean to start the flames again but: is that not license laundering? Legally it isn't. It's not the same code. But is it ..okay? People who originally wore the code intended it to be public, for the benefit of the community. Now the code that's effectively doing the same thing is closed off with the official seal of approval of bethesda, for bethesda's benefit. 

Do i understand it correctly? And should we be okay with that? 

[Kinsie]

1 minute ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

It's not the same code. But is it ..okay?

It's how every non-Apple computer from 1984 through 2006-ish worked.

[Gez]

1 minute ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

And here's my lack of understanding, and i don't mean to start the flames again but: is that not license laundering? Legally it isn't. It's not the same code. But is it ..okay? People who originally wore the code intended it to be public, for the benefit of the community. Now the code that's effectively doing the same thing is closed off with the official seal of approval of bethesda, for bethesda's benefit. 

Enjoy some closed-off code!

2 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

Do i understand it correctly? And should we be okay with that? 

No, console peasants should not be allowed to experience the full glory of Modded Doom, so as to convince them to stop buying walled garden consoles and start playing on the Linux-powered Ouya instead.

[elf-alchemist]

5 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

is that not license laundering? Legally it isn't. It's not the same code. But is it ..okay? People who originally wore the code intended it to be public, for the benefit of the community. Now the code that's effectively doing the same thing is closed off with the official seal of approval of bethesda, for bethesda's benefit. 

Do i understand it correctly? And should we be okay with that? 

Dual-licensing.

The code has been effectively dual-licensed, "GPL or Commercial" as it were, which enables the code to be offered to Bethesda on the basis that both them and GooberMan settle on, but also is GPL licensed so any source port can still make use of it. And yes, it's fine, source ports don't support ID24 yet, but they will eventually. The whole license laundering thing is over dramatization, specifications are specifications, and as long software specs have existed, there have been both proprietary and open source implementations of said specs. I, for one, am glad this whole project, from the beginning was going to be made not only for Bethesda, but also for the community simultaneously, as the moment KEX Doom was available, we had the draft spec almost immediately after, and all things considered these events will be a net positive for Doom and the community on the long term.

[LuciferSam86]

23 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

Do i understand it correctly? And should we be okay with that? 

GooberMan released his source under two licenses: one GPL and the other commercial for Bethesda/id/Nightdive.

 

The clean room implementation was needed because to release code under dual licenses you need to own that code, to avoid the GPL virality.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

6 minutes ago, elf-alchemist said:

Dual-licensing.

The code has been effectively dual-licensed, "GPL or Commercial" as it were, which enables the code to be offered to Bethesda on the basis that both them and GooberMan settle on, but also is GPL licensed so any source port can still make use of it. And yes, it's fine, source ports don't support ID24 yet, but they will eventually. The whole license laundering thing is over dramatization, specifications are specifications, and as long software specs have existed, there have been both proprietary and open source implementations of said specs. I, for one, am glad this whole project, from the beginning was going to be made not only for Bethesda, but also for the community simultaneously, as the moment KEX Doom was available, we had the draft spec almost immediately after, and all things considered these events will be a net positive for Doom and the community on the long term.

 

5 minutes ago, LuciferSam86 said:

GooberMan released his source under two licenses: one GPL and the other commercial for Bethesda/id/Nightdive.

 

The clean room implementation was needed because to release code under dual licenses you need to own that code, to avoid the GPL virality.

Thanks for actually answering the question without being snide

[Underqualified_Gunman]

13 hours ago, Ravendesk said:

Can you be so kind to point in the OP where it says "draft" or "request for comments".

 

If you cannot do that, can you be so kind to not act snarky after making a factually wrong statement, as this poisons already heated conversation.

I might have conflated draft with later comments by someone else, however the context of the OP and what i have read of the documentation and the wiki entry heavily suggested this to be a in development standard. it's still funny to see people working themselves up over something that isn't even finished. As for the usage of the word literally that was a mistake  i try not to misuse that word but i didn't reread a product of quickly typing up something before leaving to work.

[yum13241]

Unpopular opinion: I think it's about time we moved on from DEHACKED, the biggest HACK to every touch Doom.

[anotak]

i want to talk about this situation as a whole, but there's been so many posts, not just here, but on various social media sites and private chatrooms, that it's honestly hard to respond to all of it. in some cases a person may have said something polite and civil here, and not so polite on twitter. and i'm mostly trying to hold all that here, instead of responding to one person or singling anyone out. (except for some specific thoughts about things specifically gooberman has said, which i'll get to)

 

Friends

several folks i disagree with in this thread, in the past i have considered them friends, or at least friendly. ideally i'd like to continue thinking and feeling that, but i get the general impression that that feeling might not be mutual. i wouldn't compromise what i see as my morals for that, but know that i don't say anything here out of malice or any kind of desire to burn bridges. i took my time thinking on this topic so that i don't come at it hot. i hope you all understand that i'm not here angry-posting or trying to get a last word or anything like that. i have legit concerns, and i know i'm also not alone in them. i'd like to ask people to not discount them as "boring" or jaded-boomerisms or whatever else i have seen people saying in various venues, but legitimately try to understand. especially if you consider me a friend or once considered me a friend.

 

and on the other hand at least one person in this thread that i come close to agreeing with, i otherwise wouldn't ever want to be in a room with. just saying this as an explanation that i'm not doing some us-vs-them shit here, or digging up old beefs. i had and continue to have legitimate concerns, and i was not bringing any of them up to attack anyone who posts here, and it's incredibly frustrating to be seen that way especially by people who i thought trusted me at least a little bit.

 

i should also say i literally have never interacted with dsda-dev/kraflab nor am i aware of the situation with dsdahacked or whatever it is.

 

i'm also sympathetic to the folks coming back from quakecon and suffering from con-plague. i wish you all a speedy recovery, sincerely. i myself have been going through what i'd characterize as a family emergency without going into more detail. i don't say this to play some sort of suffering-olympics or to minimize, just to say: hey, i get it. i've also worked very hard on something (more than once), and had people publicly criticize it to varying levels of civility and had it turn into an enormous clusterfuck while i'm dying inside from tiredness. i'm also sympathetic to that.

 

On "community members":

so i want to start this post off by saying something to everyone in this thread, holding every position:

a lot of this discussion has revolved around who is a "community member" and who isn't. and an awful lot of misunderstandings and problems and bad feelings are at least partially a result of not realizing that people are meaning different things by this wording. i've seen people express feelings of being "othered" on all sides. i think some of those feelings are a result of this.

 

i'd like to point out that this isn't just about definitions though. it's also about the way we organize our communities and subcommunities. if you think of a person as "not a community member", i ask that you think about why that is. not just, what the facts are about their current situation, but how they ended up there? what pressures in the doom community drive people to leave? are those pressures worth trusting in or supporting implicitly by assigning significance to the current status? what pressures prevent people from joining the community in the first place? what stake do they have in this matter, what stakes did they once have, or might they in the future?

 

Trust:

there's been a lot of ask of trust for old friends on behalf of the nightdive folks - but shouldn't that go both ways? there's been a lot of assuming that people who have legitimate concerns are just, trolling? angry for no reason? making shit up for no reason? all sorts of weird accusations have been leveled at the people who have concerns.

 

and the thing about trust going both ways - is that for myself at least, and i suspect others, this started as what felt like a violation of trust, and honestly to me, still feels like one. the thing about trust though, is that it doesn't disappear after one violation, typically. i came here asking questions not because i didn't trust, but because i *did* trust. i trusted folks to give truthful answers. i trusted folks to understand our concerns and not dismiss them. i waited when edward said that explanations were coming in original rerelease thread because i trusted. i trusted that if i came to nightdive folks with a problem, i wouldn't be treated like i was treated.

 

so: where's the trust?

 

On "civility" and "personal attacks" and good/bad faith:

it's necessary to link the bits of this thread that were split off into an entirely separate forum without linking them here. while they are gone from the context for future readers, they are still the origin of a lot of this.

 

so, in the original announcement thread for the new kex release, one or two people had some concerns about the GPL, an employee of nightdive told them to hold their concerns, as an explanation from gooberman was coming. i saw this, and i had some similar concerns. so i held off. i figured the post would come when folks were ready to have a good discussion about it. when the "explanation" came and was lacking many key details, i was pretty concerned at that point. i'll get to specific concerns i still have farther down, but the posts i made were not born out of attempting to stir the shit.

 

i may have been a bit abrupt, but i can't say i was insulting in that thread. i never accused anyone who posted here of actual malice, even in private. in retrospect it appears to me that what i said was viewed as an accusation of malice. but many people violate copyrights in good faith and with best intentions. i did approach the situation with distrust, but given the situation with the wad-uploader, is it so surprising that many people's distrust would extend elsewhere? i don't think the wad uploader has been done this way out of malice either, to be clear.

 

i would say the discussion was civil and free of attacks up until gooberman's posts here and especially here in response to me. this was pretty disproportionate to the things i said. i'm not unsympathetic to his feelings (see the first section of this post). but a lot has been said about people having a problem with the ID24 situation being especially uncivil or engaging in personal attacks, without acknowledging the fact that it's directly a response to and a matching of the tone gooberman took with me. and i think the silence on that topic from the people who are for the ID24 standard feels like an endorsement of that tone.

 

Quote

anotak is known around these parts for hounding on a topic they know nothing about.

 

this thing gooberman said about me here was a very direct personal attack. this is the first time i've ever been told anything like this. as far as i know, this is not an accurate representation of my reputation. this is not me saying i'm flawless, or without enemies. i'm a pretty fucked up person all things considered, and i know i can be mean and cruel at times, hold grudges, etc. but i don't feel like this was even one of those times. it's with awareness of my flaws that i try to go through my life and do right by people. but as far as i know, this post does not describe me.

 

i've only interacted with gooberman once or twice in passing. i don't really know where this was coming from. gooberman doesn't seem to me to be dishonest or a liar, so it seems to me that someone else said this to him in private. which tells me there are people in this discussion throwing stones and hiding hands. which doesn't strike me as very civil either.

 

it seems like the intent was one of or all of the following:

- to discredit me?

- to shut me up?

- to anger me and cause me to lash out in response? (which goes back to discrediting and possibly retroactively  justifying his own attitude)

 

if folks are supposed to take gooberman's claims on good faith, why did he go with this approach? put yourself in the shoes of someone who is understandably skeptical about the situation before reading those two posts, and read them. how do you think you might react or feel, even if you weren't the direct target of this statement? how do you think you might react or feel if the rest of the folks involved seemed to indicate that this was an acceptable way to address these concerns?

 

i'd also like to state that there's been at least one person here i've seen talk about civility and then go elsewhere publicly and post with the exact opposite. which really feels nasty, and i don't understand what even motivates this kind of behavior.

 

Specifically, the GPL and ownership of Chocolate Doom

gooberman makes the claim that id software fully owns the components of chocolate doom that interface with his r+r code that was used in the kex port. this is a pretty surprising claim to me. he said that "fraggle forking Doom and calling it Chocolate Doom does not mean he has immediate copyright over the entire codebase". this is a logically valid statement, but it is not an accurate description of what happened. as boris pointed out, chocolate doom has 77 contributors listed on github. and to go further - chocolate doom is older than github. chocolate doom has also incorporate gpl code from other sources. it is a long project of not just fraggle, but an entire community. for gooberman to say what he did, in the way that he did, erases a tremendous amount of work. that exact claim and its phrasing also feels hurtful and insulting (alongside this later post here) to quite a few folks.

 

again, i don't think this is done out of malice, just. a mix of good intentions for making a thing gooberman thought was cool and motivated reasoning.

 

since my previous posts, i reached out to a few people (outside the community with no stake) who have expertise in copyright issues related to the gpl, and explained the situation to the best of my ability while leaving out names. the consensus i have received is that this is a complex/weird enough matter that the only way this could be definitively answered would be were if the contributors to choco took id to court over it. i do not think they would or should do this. and me, as a reasonable person, understand that regardless of how it might shake out in an ideal world, id through beth through microsoft effectively have more money than god, so, you know, they would win. so okay, i guess because that's the reality, it's not a gpl violation. doesn't feel good to me, and it shouldn't feel good to you.

 

"Financial incentives", companies vs people, and why care about the GPL here?
the reason i care about the gpl here, and why i think you should care too, is that the gpl is as close as a promise that's been made by id software. the thing about promises and legal contracts and corporations, is that no matter how much we trust xaser or sponge or anyone else that works there, they may not be there next year, or 5 years from now, or 50 years from now. and ideally we'd want this hobby to last a very long time. we have to think longterm.

 

and the thing is, we've already seen these kinds of changes. the main person who seemed to push for gpl-ing code at id software was apparently john carmack, despite his other flaws. and with him gone, and with microsoft's purchase of bethesda, the future for modding feels more and more uncertain all the time.

 

and this isn't about id software being "evil". microsoft arguably is and possibly so is bethesda but also i don't think the current situation is any deeper conspiracy or any such thing. nightdive is mostly a force for good, insofar as any company can be.

 

but even if i trust xaser to be very well intentioned (which i legitimately do, i really do), it's not just about him, it's about whoever his boss's boss's boss is. not just today, but also tomorrow. and even if gooberman doesn't make a single cent off this, he still signed some type of contract with somebody, and at the end of the day, to put id's name on this thing, someone at id is going to sign off on it one way or another.

 

this is about precedent, and giving them power. giving up power to any of these organizations on a long timeline is a mistake, even if there are only positive intentions right now. we've seen lots of other perfectly good companies go to shit because they got bought or people were fired and so on and so forth. it's not a lack of trust to say that just because i trust sponge, i don't inherently trust the next person who has sponge's job if he were to retire, leave, be promoted, be fired, be demoted, and so on.

 

and it's not that i think the next person will be inherently evil either, it's just that their incentives are naturally in conflict with ours. the realities of the corporate world mean that someone in the chain is focused on things like shareholder value, return on investment, covering their own ass legally, etc. and this stuff is simply not the things that the community as a whole cares about or should care about. and again, this someone ultimately will have some responsibility somehow or another over any standard that bears id software's name like that. "financial incentives" is not some rumor-mongering. it's not an accusation of malice, "selling out", bribery, or anything like that. it's just the actual reality of working with a corporation on this stuff.

 

and that's the rub, i think one of the big sources of misunderstanding, of "community members" vs "employees" or in gooberman's case we might say something less specific like "stakeholder". i think some of the folks at least, i know myself in private conversations, have made this distinction not to other, but to talk about that difference in stakes, incentives, power, and having someone above in the chain who signs off on stuff one way or another.

 

again, it's not about trusting individuals! i'll briefly mention graf zahl here. he's not involved in this in any way as far as i know. i mention him because you all know i have a lot of beef with the guy. you all know that i don't trust him. you all know that i dislike him very much. you all know that i'm of the opinion that he does significant harm to the community. but i still would rather have him in charge of anything than anyone who works for an organization that owns parts of doom and has a financial interest in it. i'm serious. leximax and altazimuth, i know we haven't talked in a minute, but i really do think y'all are great people. i've never had a conversation with either of you where i felt mistreated or wronged (unless you count this one). but i'd rather graf zahl than any corporation that has real power.

 

legality aside, i think a further reason i personally am unhappy with implementation of community work like MBF21 is that MBF21 is the result of a large amount of community work. it's based on decades of work by a lot of different authors on boom and various other ports, and a lot of that work is based on the expertise of people who spent a lot of time and energy mapping for doom. and it strikes me as wrong that ultimately id software will get to make a profit on that without paying the majority of the people that actually did the work required for MBF21 to exist (even though i know some work at night dive). i understand what a clean-room implementation is, and i understand that gooberman did not intentionally copy any code, but the thing is that MBF21 is so much more than code.

 

id software ultimately benefits tremendously from the existence of the doom and quake modding communities, and their games would really truly would not exist without us. every game they've worked on since ultimate doom has involved people they hired from the community, who learned design on community tools, and partially with the help of the community. the entire fps industry has been tremendously influenced by piles and piles of games that were worked on by people who came from the doom and quake communities. and not just obscure stuff either, we're talking about unreal (and ut), basically every valve game, thief 2, several of the cod games, etc. people involved with the games industry play doom wads. the community is basically free advertisement, free training for their new recruits, free inspiration for their existing employees, free assistance with searching for new hires, etc.

 

so it makes me a bit sad when they also get to profit off our work and expertise, and the existence of the ID24/MBF21 implementation in the new rerelease allows for a lot of the problems with the problematic uploading-thing to be worse.

 

What should/could id/nightdive/beth/ms do to do right by the community?

- the people who posted in this thread on the nightdive "side" could make it clear that, hey, they get it, they understand the concerns, and they understand we weren't trying to be be frivolous or haters for no reason or whatever the hell. like even if you disagree

 

- the old iwads should simply be free to download and redistribute. if you think this is impossible or ridiculous to offer their games for free, consider that many games like starcraft, several command & conquer games, gta2, and even bethesda's own elder scrolls: arena are given away for free. starcraft and command & conquer 1/red alert even had a commercial remaster after, while continuing to allow free distribution of their games.

 

- the iwads should be given some specific license that describes ways that users are allowed to modify or distribute or use them (while not mentioning restrictions - outside of maybe understandably forbidding some commercial use). i can understand something as permissive as CC0 being troublesome for their work on future new-Doom games, but there's some middleground here. right now many mods we make and post are in a zone of grey-legality in all sorts of ways, as derivative works of iwad data, and the my understanding of it is that the legality of it is mostly held up by informal promises in emails sent by people who no longer work at id software. this isn't some accusation of malice at the current id software, but you can never predict the future, and we all want this hobby to be around in 10 or 30 or 100 years, right? they were bought by microsoft indirectly not too long ago, who knows how they will be bought or sold next, and how that will affect things.

 

- id/nd should release much of the kex doom code as gpl, and not just the bits in r+r. "we can't because we call other non-gpl code in other libraries". so strip that code out? this is how doom's code was released in the first place. the dmx library is still to this day closed source, and references to it were removed in the original linuxdoom release. as several folks have pointed out dual licensing is an old practice in the industry.

 

- id should make a formal promise to the community to not interfere in the open source development AND modding, with some amount of legal force behind it. again, it is possible for games companies to make a binding promise to the community about their future releases, such as in the case of magic: the gathering's much-maligned "reserved list" policy.

 

In conclusion:

i think that you should want at the last 4 points i listed too, or something similar. and not just idly, if you have the ear of anyone who has the power to make decisions about it, you should speak about it. especially if you work at nightdive or id software and you do care about the community. even if you don't agree about my perspectives on the id24 situation in particular, those last 4 points should still be a desirable goal to you. and the thing is, it is a possible goal.

 

if this all doesn't go anything like how i would like it, then i hope i'm wrong. if i'm proven right, then i'll be real fucking sad about it.

 

and also i'll just say, i hope everyone involved gets some fucking rest. life is hard.

as a final note, there is one group of people i DO wish malice upon:

if there are any "drama youtubers" reading this thread in order to make a video, go fuck yourself. and fuck the harm you cause for clout and patreon money. i hope you never sleep at night

Edited August 14 by anotak

[esselfortium]

I think that those are absolutely desirable goals, though I also assume that they're probably way outside of the scope of what a handful of contract programmers and level designers can likely accomplish. "We want to support these popular community port features and lay out some new ones for the future" is presumably fairly easy because Bethesda has no real stake in that beyond "will this help keep our most dedicated players happy? i guess? okay!", whereas something like "we want to completely relicense the game for free" is a vastly harder sell, unfortunately, no matter how old the game is. (To be clear, I'd love to be proven wrong.)

 

I absolutely agree that the legal gray zone that mods operate in is Not An Ideal Situation and it would be great if it could be somehow addressed, but I think the fear has always been "if anyone asks about it, they get KDiZD'd", or in other words, "the official answer from the legal team will be the one thing you absolutely do not want to hear, and you can't lean on ambiguity anymore once you've heard it".

 

Personally, I don't feel that these things need to be a prerequisite for adoption of this set of mapping and modding features. But that's just me. (And again, I do think they're all good goals! I'm not trying to say otherwise!)

 

In the interest of transparency, I will say that I am speaking from the perspective of someone who's spoken face-to-face with the developers of ID24 and the new update over the past week (and last year, and in 2019). I've known and trusted them for a very long time in this community, for whatever that's worth. My honest feelings are that it's less that anyone holding purse strings at Bethesda suddenly became very invested in what "Boom/MBF21" means (they absolutely do not know or care what that means), and more that some prominent community figures, some of whom have helped spearhead community standards before, took this as an opportunity to get some remaining features they wanted into the official port while they had the chance, while carving out a way that hypothetical future official projects could avoid stepping on community toes. (And to be clear, the alternative to this is not "hypothetical future expansions can't happen" -- that is not really a power we have; the alternative is "whoever id contracts in another however-many-years unknowingly steps on community toes and it becomes extremely annoying for community port maintenance").

 

If things do change down the line and a future feature standard is pushed that does somehow meaningfully encroach on the community (I do not consider reserving a tiny 0.001-percent slice of the dehacked space's total 4 billion indices a meaningful encroachment, especially when considering the much larger slice carved out for future community standards), I would fully expect to see ports reject it then.

[anotak]

30 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

I think that those are absolutely desirable goals, though I also assume that they're probably way outside of the scope of what a handful of contract programmers and level designers can likely accomplish. "We want to support these popular community port features and lay out some new ones for the future" is presumably fairly easy because Bethesda has no real stake in that beyond "will this help keep our most dedicated players happy? i guess? okay!", whereas something like "we want to completely relicense the game for free" is a vastly harder sell, unfortunately, no matter how old the game is. (To be clear, I'd love to be proven wrong.)

 

there was a point about this that i written down in my outline and then forgot to actually include in the final post, which was the following:

 

if we sincerely believe that these things are impossible because the folks in question are not capable of reducing the power of id software in any meaningful way, then we should not trust anything they do to expand id software's power either, no matter how minor or seemingly innocuous.

[esselfortium]

2 minutes ago, anotak said:

 

there was a point about this that i written down in my outline and then forgot to actually include in the final post, which was the following:

 

if we sincerely believe that these things are impossible because the folks in question are not capable of reducing the power of id software in any meaningful way, then we should not trust anything they do to expand id software's power either, no matter how minor or seemingly innocuous.

As I said above, I do not believe that this expands id Software's power. It explicitly places limits on their power, limits that did not previously exist. Without ID24's specific range carveouts, any future Doom expansions would simply be occupying the same dehacked spaces that community ports are already using. It doesn't grant the company anything that it couldn't do previously.

 

I suppose the alternative here is if they had hardcoded everything and not released a spec.

[LuciferSam86]

Afaik actor logic is harcoded and it is in the spec 

[D4NUK1]

The community should make id25 Unreal 5 compatible for the Ray tracing and DLSS compatible.

[Andromeda]

1 hour ago, anotak said:

gooberman makes the claim that id software fully owns the components of chocolate doom that interface with his r+r code that was used in the kex port.

I'm probably completely wrong about this (and thus fully expect my post to be removed as was my previous one in this thread), but I interpreted what he wrote as the kex port not having any code that was first written for chocolate doom.

[anotak]

31 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

As I said above, I do not believe that this expands id Software's power. It explicitly places limits on their power, limits that did not previously exist. Without ID24's specific range carveouts, any future Doom expansions would simply be occupying the same dehacked spaces that community ports are already using. It doesn't grant the company anything that it couldn't do previously.

 

I suppose the alternative here is if they had hardcoded everything and not released a spec.

 

sorry, i should be clearer, it's not about the carveout. i actually agree with the carveouts, and wish other ports had done something like that. it's about the way the implementation was done, about id's name being on it, etc

 

my brain is a bit fried and i don't know if i'm expressing myself well in this post, compared to the long one i spent a long time thinking about and editing and finishing up.

i'm going to step away from responding for a little while because i don't want to go back and forth quickly on this, i think that's part of what's lead to the misunderstandings etc

 

essel i consider you a friend and i hope you have a good day

[esselfortium]

Just now, anotak said:

essel i consider you a friend and i hope you have a good day

Thanks, you too. I have Covid from QuakeCon (fffffffff) but I'm recovering.

[bofu]

20 minutes ago, LuciferSam86 said:

Afaik actor logic is harcoded and it is in the spec 

 

Sort of. It's very possible (and, according to the spec, this is by design) to modify the actors via DEHACKED, it's just that the negative index space isn't supposed to be used by mod authors to create new things. Questions about how that can possibly be enforced aside, it would be just like editing an Imp or Zombieman in DEHACKED.

[Quasar]

15 minutes ago, Andromeda said:

I'm probably completely wrong about this (and thus fully expect my post to be removed as was my previous one in this thread), but I interpreted what he wrote as the kex port not having any code that was first written for chocolate doom.

Completely accurate. The Doom code integrated with Kex is the Vicarious Visions / Nerve Software branch which originated from the Linux Doom source, the same one used for all previous builds of Doom Classic and other console builds of Doom.

[Redneckerz]

14 minutes ago, Quasar said:

Completely accurate. The Doom code integrated with Kex is the Vicarious Visions / Nerve Software branch which originated from the Linux Doom source, the same one used for all previous builds of Doom Classic and other console builds of Doom.

This is actually news to me, that the OG Xbox port is essentially where the console renderer started, before being integrated in Unity and now Kex. It certainly isn't mentioned on the Wiki (the Xbox page, atleast)

 

As far as i get it, ID24 is merely a (code) extension to that renderer with Boom/MBF/MBF21 included as opposed to the Unity port, which had DeHacked support implemented by Fraggle's work (Embedded patches).

 

Very interesting. If there is anything more you remember about it, i'd love to hear it.

[Quasar]

4 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

This is actually news to me, that the OG Xbox port is essentially where the console renderer started, before being integrated in Unity and now Kex. It certainly isn't mentioned on the Wiki (the Xbox page, atleast)

 

As far as i get it, ID24 is merely a (code) extension to that renderer with Boom/MBF/MBF21 included as opposed to the Unity port, which had DeHacked support implemented by Fraggle's work (Embedded patches).

 

Very interesting. If there is anything more you remember about it, i'd love to hear it.

Yes it's mentioned, follow the genealogy links at the bottom of each page. You seem to be conflating "renderer" with "game engine" by the way. The renderer used in the Kex port is entirely new, written by GooberMan. It uses a multithreaded architecture to paint the screen in multiple horizontal zones in parallel, which is the only way to get acceptable performance at 4K while still maintaining a software renderer. The game code is still 90% the same as the previous Doom Classic based on Unity. The additions to game code since the Unity version are largely to bring in the Boom/MBF compat.

[Redneckerz]

4 minutes ago, Quasar said:

Yes it's mentioned, follow the genealogy links at the bottom of each page. You seem to be conflating "renderer" with "game engine" by the way. The renderer used in the Kex port is entirely new, written by GooberMan. It uses a multithreaded architecture to paint the screen in multiple horizontal zones in parallel, which is the only way to get acceptable performance at 4K while still maintaining a software renderer. The game code is still 90% the same as the previous Doom Classic based on Unity. The additions to game code since the Unity version are largely to bring in the Boom/MBF compat.

As usual i am blind. This sounds like perfectly sound, thanks for replying :)

[Trov]

Here is one more actual-standard-relevent concern I have:

 

Quote

ID24HACKED

Special items previously had the ability to remain in the world on collection as a hardcoded feature of certain multiplayer modes. A thing is now able to explicitly define this behavior for single player, cooperative, and deathmatch modes.

I think many ports may not be interested in dispensing with the concept of the classic deathmatch 1.0 (weapons stay, items do not respawn) and deathmatch 2.0 (everything does not stay and does respawn) rules as Nightdive Doom does, but this ID24 specification kind of implies that there is only one "deathmatch" (likely the Nightdive interpretation of 'weapons stay, items respawn')

 

Possible solutions:

• The explicit "deathmatch" per-item stay specifications should be specified to be for a separate deathmatch mode (perhaps "deathmatch 3.0") separate from 1.0 and 2.0 rather than deathmatch broadly
• or specify that 1.0 and 2.0 or a particular port may override this per-item stay behavior based on settings or their own gamemodes
• Or, is it intended that the 'item stay' bit is specifically to allow more things to stick around in deathmatch 1.0, with the provision that some ports may alter deathmatch 1.0 to respawn non-staying items rather than them being gone forever? In this case I think clarity in the spec would be helpful.

 

Now upon thinking about it, does it even make sense for anything other than weapons to stay after pickup? How does this work with a medkit for example? Would the player pick it up every single tic they are standing on it?

Maybe the same considerations for cooperative.

Edited August 14 by Trov