Concerns and thoughts with where modding goes from here?

[Xenaero]

I believe "featured" mods will probably be handled manually between people at id and known and verified mod authors to ensure authenticity, based on a couple cases I've heard about, so no need to fret about imposters or some automated system being gamed!

 

That being said, I also wanted to chime in, modding ain't goin' anywhere!! Please don't let any quasi-political dustups on your Forum Of Choice™ influence your opinion on the direction or state of modding. Modding, mapmaking, composing, and all that jazz are far and away much more massive than just the introduction of a new technical standard or a re-release of Doom. There may be new toys coming to a Source Port near you, but apart from that, there's no reason to expect modding to change in any way.

 

Keep enjoying Doom and making cool stuff for Doom!! As a modder myself, I have no worries. :)

[Dweller Dark]

8 minutes ago, Endless said:

Eh, I don't think so. It could easily be abused by creating bots or fake accounts and spamming the like option. Plus, a lot of the WADs in the browser either don't work correctly or are stolen. Even the official add-ons had to be tinkered before being uploaded so that they worked fully with Unity, I think the same would be needed with the new port.

 

Good point. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad option, it'll just take time for the issues to be addressed before it happens. WADs not working or being stolen is partly mitigated by community members from Doomworld modifying and uploading them with permission from the authors, I'm sure Nightdive is working on improving the mod browser and some way of preventing bots/fake accounts, etc. Right now, it wouldn't be a good idea to implement, but later on it could be.

[sponge]

Featured Mods will be absolutely getting new entries in a way that is hopefully easier and faster for us to work through, instead of the couple of releases a year that it's been for a while now. They'll still get a QA pass before release, and I'll be verifying it is the original uploader as much as possible (or in the case of community projects, at least a person that appears to be a main contact for the project.) It also means there won't be stuff like Batman/Mario/Simpsons Doom getting featured, but it should open the door to stuff like D2TWID (with it's Keen secret level) and D4V getting featured.

 

I've already reached out for stuff like Valiant, and Struggle: Antaresian Legacy. Ancient Aliens is also on the top of my list after hopefully a client update first. There's a lot of mods I've loved that were not available due to BOOM/MBF support that are now open to us to feature.

 

I can't imagine very much will change to the wider community. The Unity port didn't bring upon this great renaissance of vanilla/limits removing/DEH modding, and I don't know why this would be any different now. The official ports have the largest audience, but it is largely not one that is engaged with sites like DW/idgames. I can only see it funneling more people to third party sites as some people who are interested are looking for more.

[LadyMistDragon]

1 hour ago, Thaumaturge_Tanishq said:

If I added Custom Textures, Monsters, Musics and Gameplay Sounds all together, does it even called a Mod? Or Partially Convertible Mod? 

If the gameplay is still recognizably Doom, than no.

 

I think once you start adding custom weapons, the equation might change a little but even then, monsters and textures don't constitute mods by themselves, they're just adding on to what's already there.

[JackDBS]

On 8/14/2024 at 3:48 PM, Faceman2000 said:

I just want the new weapons and monsters to get widespread acceptance. :(

 

I can take or leave anything else haha.

The new enemies and weapons probably aren't gonna get accepted. It would probably disrupt Doom II's near perfect balance too hard. Also, the Tyrant is just a MiniCyber that has been used since like Magnolia in 2018, and countless wads use the same concept of just recoloring a cyberdemon. The Shocktrooper is just an Evil Marine from Scythe II but slower and much less health. Scythe II came out 20 years ago and dozens of wads already have them. Although, some of them lower the health of the Evil Marine to something more manageable like 100 HP (which is exactly the same as the Shocktrooper), and only one wad I have seen decreased the speed of them however it is not released yet. The Mindweaver was already a similar concept in antares031's Struggle, where the Arachnotron was modified to have a chaingun. I think the community would much rather continue what they're doing with these enemies by just recoloring cybers, modifying the player sprite using a translation tag, and just using the arachno, instead of using the new sprites because holy fuck they're cursed and look wrong. That Tyrant is fucking ugly. The other enemies don't really have new purposes that needed to be filled. The new weapons also wouldn't get accepted because really a lot of mods don't like fucking with the weapons because it would disrupt game balance very hard that some people don't want to deal with. The Calamity Blade could be used for heavy slaughter maps but it whins up too much that requires modification for it to be a fun weapon to use, like the BFG, which still triumphs as the perfect slaughter weapon. As a slaughter enjoyer myself, I would be dead before I use that thing in a map unless it is faster.

Edited August 16 by JackDBS

[Gothic]

I don't think acceptance matters if it's optional content. If the new monsters/weapons are gonna be used, that depends entirely on the mapper.

[june gloom]

While I think there are some good arguments on both sides of this issue I do generally agree that while Bethesda might not be making any stupid moves now, that doesn't mean they won't later, and I think there are some legitimate concerns about a large corporation entering into a space that up until last week was almost wholly the domain of dedicated creators producing bespoke works, some of which didn't even need the original games to function. But it's important to remember that modding has always existed in something of a legal grey area; the most effective defense for it is "fair use" but that only applies to the United States, and in any case, like far too many things in America the existence of that legal concept is subject to the whims of an increasingly distant, corporate-friendly Supreme Court. Google v. Oracle was a relatively recent affirmation of fair use, but as we've seen with Roe v. Wade, decades of precedent don't seem to matter to this court and there's always the chance of the other shoe dropping.

 

I also want to point out that even if Bethesda tried to wrest control of the modding scene out of our hands, they wouldn't be the first to do so. id Software themselves attempted it back in 1994 with the Data Utility License, essentially trying to assert control over editing tools and anything that might be created with those tools:

 

Quote

Any Distribution by you or anyone that buys the Utility from you of the data manipulated by the Utility is prohibited.

 

In other words, you wouldn't be able to upload any mods you made, they'd be for personal use only. Obviously nobody paid attention to this and id Software to my knowledge never pursued any action over it, but I think the existence of the DUL if nothing else should belie the supposedly "mod-friendly" view of old-school id Software. It's telling that their next move was to just license or hire prominent modders to make commercial products for them.

[Faceman2000]

55 minutes ago, JackDBS said:

-words-

That was a lot of words to tell me what I already know.

 

As far as “roles that needed to be filled” goes, there’s an argument to be made that Doom DID need a low health flier or an area denial monster or a less-tanky Cyberdemon (I’ve seen people argue that it needs all of those before) certainly as much as Doom needed any of Doom II’s monsters added.

 

I know it’s not going to happen and I know all the reasons why it’s not - that’s fine. But it makes me sad cuz I like new monsters and these are the first new official monsters in thirty years.

[Quasar]

59 minutes ago, june gloom said:

In other words, you wouldn't be able to upload any mods you made, they'd be for personal use only. Obviously nobody paid attention to this and id Software to my knowledge never pursued any action over it, but I think the existence of the DUL if nothing else should belie the supposedly "mod-friendly" view of old-school id Software. It's telling that their next move was to just license or hire prominent modders to make commercial products for them.

While it's certainly vague, it's believed generally that this is saying you shouldn't be distributing the game's IWAD or executable files, as those are the data acted on by tools. It wasn't their intent to shut down non-commercial mod distribution. They were however known to be upset at the time about things like DeHackEd back when it effectively only generated a modified EXE and people were distributing them whole. Once it transferred to text-format patches that became something less (albeit not "nothing") of a concern.

[june gloom]

 

4 minutes ago, Quasar said:

it's believed generally that this is saying you shouldn't be distributing the game's IWAD or executable files

 

While I can certainly see how it might be interpreted this way, I suspect that it might be wishful thinking. Of course, this is all somewhat moot today, but it does set a precedent, which was the point of my bringing it up.

 

Has a lawyer (ideally one with the relevant expertise) ever looked at that language? I'd be curious what they'd say.

[ItsPower303]

I don't think modding can "go" anywhere it's not like a person, it can't just leave! :3

 

But in all seriousness I doubt modding will be in trouble, in fact I think with the new legacy of rust stuff it's only going to get very slightly bigger.

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

Yeah. The system needs to be changed. So many users uploading WADS without the original author's knowledge. Hell, I know a person somewhere that uploaded someone else's mod because they couldn't find the directory where mods are downloaded and stored so that he could play it in the port...

 

Umm... speaking of which... can someone tell me where that directory is? Please?

 

EDIT: Before anyone starts to say anything, I deleted it. And for those wondering out of curiosity, it was Fernito's "TNT Phobia". Felt guilty, but I didn't know how to delete it until I learned that there was a site. If Fernito comes across this, I apologize. Gave credits, but I still feel gross about doing that. Just wanted to get this off of my chest.

Edited August 16 by YeOldeFellerNoob

[Horus]

17 hours ago, sponge said:

Featured Mods will be absolutely getting new entries in a way that is hopefully easier and faster for us to work through, instead of the couple of releases a year that it's been for a while now. They'll still get a QA pass before release, and I'll be verifying it is the original uploader as much as possible (or in the case of community projects, at least a person that appears to be a main contact for the project.) It also means there won't be stuff like Batman/Mario/Simpsons Doom getting featured, but it should open the door to stuff like D2TWID (with it's Keen secret level) and D4V getting featured.

This is good but it’s not the Featured Mods section that is the cause for community concern, rather the wider Mods section where anyone can upload anything without credit/permission and so on. Since you are here it would be appreciated if you could please share what are the planned developments in this sphere.