Does anyone read the included textfiles in the wads and mods?

[Komenja]

If it has one, yeah, usually to doublecheck what settings the author wants on/off. If there’s extra bits like some backstory or behind-the-scenes stuff in there as well, that’s a nice bonus

[ChampionDesann]

I will always try to read the textfile if the wad has one just to make sure what the complevel I need to set DSDA to, or to see if the wad is designed entirely around pistol starts.

[Baron Von Gott]

It depends on what the wad is and where I get it. I don't get all of my wads here, sometimes I Google a rare wad and end up on some pretty wonky websites. I've cannibalized old CD-ROM versions of D!Zone yanking the wads out of the files or raiding Doomkid's massive vanilla wad folder. Sometimes a wad is just a wad with no .txt file to be found. I don't know who made it and have to guess the year of release by the file itself.

 

There's also junk files that I delete taking the .txt file with it. There's a cool site called "A Gaming Room" that I follow on YouTube and they provide links to new wads. Usually military weapons and cities. If you download a file from them, inside of the zip files are various shortcuts and links back to the site. If I have to unzip the file to run it (A pk3 perhaps?), I delete all the junk files and shortcuts and just keep the wad itself.

 

If a file is zipped and runs that way, I'll keep whatever files are inside including the .txt. Yes, I read them. The .txt files are like a snapshot of Doom history. Sometimes they're funny or relatable and almost make you want to have a chat with the wad author and pick their brain about their inspiration and style. Though I don't understand what all of the hate for co-op was all about in the mid 90s to early 2000s. Authors were very hostile about co-op back then for some reason.

[wons]

I read them for the sake of avoiding technical issues. Like what i-wad do i need for this, do i need additional files, what source ports, etc. etc. I also read the story of the wad if it has one or other additional stuff the .txt provides out of respect to the creator.

Also i like to know how much maps the wad has. To avoid situation where i got dissapointed when i finished No rest for the living .wad thinking it has more than 8 levels, or the opposite where i thought master levels has 13-15 maps instead of 20.

Also shutout to Nuts.wad's txt file for it's story. Hilarious stuff in my opinion

 

[prfunky]

My typical "got a new Doom wad" chain of events:

1) download it

2) open up the .zip to extract and grumble if it happens to be a .rar instead.

3) read the text file, if it exists

4) load up the wad in the appropriate Doom port, which I found out from

reading the text file!

 

In other words, I always read the text file first!

This is why I became frustrated with the individual who ran that site Wad Archive.

He put MY wad files on his site stripping them of the accompanying text files.

I complained about it and got quite a lashing about how I was being unreasonable

and how hard his life choice of maintaining the site is (was). Since that discussion,

I discovered the WADINFO lump. Ever since that discovery, I split my text into two

for inclusion into the wad itself. One is the majority of the original accompanying

text file and gets pasted into WADINFO. The other is the remainder I split off to

separately thank those whose resources or other help I've received into a lump

called CREDITS. I still include a text file where these two are merged but I've been

very consistent with this practice for nearly three years now.

 

Lately, on my Doom-consumer end I've begun a practice of keeping additional

information in the form of web pages about others' wads I've tried. So, if a wad I've

downloaded survives the migration from TryTheseOut to a dedicated subdirectory

of my Doom wads instead of the Recycle Bin, I do a search for the source of the

original release of that wad. Doomworld's search function here is very useful as

about 85-90% of the wads I try out have a posting there (here). I appreciate the

screenshots and keep them to remind me; "Oh yeah, that's right, this is the one that..."

 

[Laocoön]

I read the text files, mostly just to make sure I'm not trying to play a Doom II wad as a Doom I wad or vice versa. Often, if the wad doesn't work properly, it's because I've not read the txt. I've just made it a habit to read it.

 

It's nice if there is a bit of a story or a personal touch too, but I'm not going to read a novel.

[QuotePilgrim]

Sometimes.

To be honest I'm in the DOOM community nowadays mostly because I happen to be working on a project where I picked GZDoom as my game engine of choice. Back when I was playing the game more actively, however, I had a simple shell script that would pick a WAD for me at random from a huge collection that I had downloaded, so I would just run the script and immediately start playing. If it felt like I might be missing something, or it wasn't working with the source port I was using (PrBoom+, funnily enough), I would check the text file, otherwise I don't see why bother.

[Horus]

Whilst it’s good practice for players to check the textfile for complevel, map makers should add a COMPLVL lump into their wad to force the correct complevel.

[RHhe82]

I always glimpse thru them to see the intended complevel (which sometimes takes serious detective work, and in the end have to check DSDA archives or forum release post), and if there are other interesting notes.