Classic stuff vs Ports' features

[Gez]

40oz said:

No mouselooking and autoaim are crucial to the structure of Doom's gameplay though.

Vanilla Doom does feature mouselook. (Try it, setup controls as keyboard + mouse, start the game and then move the mouse to the left and the right. You'll see.) So how is its absence crucial to the structure of the gameplay?


The lack of jumping and up-down vision comes mostly from the simple fact that their previous game was Wolfenstein 3-D, which featured perfectly flat levels. It wasn't a conscious design decision not to have these things.

[Graf Zahl]

Thanks for proving my point, 40oz. That's precisely the attitude I was complaining about.

Does 'fundamentalist bullshit' ring a bell?

[Gez]

Use3D said:

Too bad there's no way to test your theory

Compare with the communities for games in the same genre and of the same age, but without source ports. Blood, Dark Forces, Terminator: Future Shock/SkyNET, etc.

[DooMAD]

All this purist vs newschool shit needs to die in a fire. The best thing about the game is that you can edit it and play it however the hell you want. Unrestricted freedom. How have you all managed to get into an argument about the entirely subjective view of the "best" way to play a given map?

Are you really going to cry yourself to sleep if someone's using jumping to "break" a map? And a mapper using port features to disable certain settings? Clearly crime of the century. Seriously, who cares? If you don't like the map for whatever reason, you can either edit it or play a different one. Simple. What's that? You've got an opinion on what is and isn't fundamental to the gameplay? Good for you. Again, no one cares because they've all got their own ideas of what makes and breaks the gameplay. Chill pills all round, plz.

[esselfortium]

Gez said:

Compare with the communities for games in the same genre and of the same age, but without source ports. Blood, Dark Forces, Terminator: Future Shock/SkyNET, etc.

I'm not sure if correlation equals causation here, considering how much more active Doom's community is today than Duke Nukem 3D's, which has mods and source ports of its own.

[printz]

Fingers crossed for the Jesus-resurrection power of DNF over the D3D community.

[Use]

esselfortium said:

I'm not sure if correlation equals causation here, considering how much more active Doom's community is today than Duke Nukem 3D's, which has mods and source ports of its own.

It's really Doom popularity that would have dictated it's longevity, not necessarily the addition of noisy source ports. The other two examples, Dark Forces and Blood have fairly small but active communities, probably a more close-knit thing more focused on enjoyment of the game and creating content, rather than altering it.

[Graf Zahl]

Use3D said:

probably a more close-knit thing more focused on enjoyment of the game and creating content, rather than altering it.

... which is more due to lack of options than the desire to do it.

[Catoptromancy]

I prefer the gameplay that maps were designed for. Zdoom maps get played on the specific zdoom version they were made for with all the jumping and freelook stuff enabled, compatflags 0 style. Vanilla/boom maps get played on the specific -complevel or -vanilla.

Mappers 15 years ago did not intend for some things to be jumped on or over. Some areas just needed a slightly too high ledge to block it off, but now it can just be jumped over. Impassible flags were not needed so were not used. Sure it may be fun to some people to do things on the map that breaks the flow of gameplay, but it still breaks intended gameplay.

Once things are officially in the binary they are then considered normal. http://www.doom2.net/doom2/cheating.html Half of those things listed are in zdoom, so what was once considered cheating has effectively become the standard and regarded as features.

wesleyjohnson said:

There was a couple of places in FreeDoom where you had to push a switch, run to another switch and push that and then run to the door.

I thought I fixed that map. I moved the switch much closer.

[FooAtari]

Use3D said:

It's really Doom popularity that would have dictated it's longevity, not necessarily the addition of noisy source ports. The other two examples, Dark Forces and Blood have fairly small but active communities, probably a more close-knit thing more focused on enjoyment of the game and creating content, rather than altering it.

This is pretty spot on IMO. I really enjoy games like Dark Forces and Duke 3D, perhaps more than Doom. But for most people those games are not Doom, they did not have the impact Doom had, were no where near as popular, were nothing like as significant. While the source ports play their parts, Doom's popularity and longevity is because of the simple reason that it is Doom.

As a side note, if anyone is interested, there is a port of the Dark Forces engine on the way, which is slowly nearing release. DarkXL.

[myk]

Phml said:
There might be something different about it in ZDoom, but in Boom it happens all the time. Play any slaughter map.

I haven't noted much of a difference, and from what I've experienced, cyberdemons get pushed off cliffs in ZDoom about as much as in Boom. I gather Gez just doesn't play as intensively as you do, nor does he have as many opportunities to compare the difference, considering you use both Doom and Boom behavior often. I guess the blockmap fixes could make some differences to BFG blasts sometimes, but that's about it.

DooMAD said:
Unrestricted freedom.

Yeah, it doesn't matter that the game has great artwork or gameplay, what really matters is freedom! Don't forget that freedom here can mean a restriction or impediment there, so there is no such thing as "unrestricted freedom". The main argument of people who want well-defined behavior to enjoy the game, for one, is that the addition of so many options has degraded their freedom to do so.

Are you really going to cry yourself to sleep if someone's using jumping to "break" a map? And a mapper using port features to disable certain settings? Clearly crime of the century. Seriously, who cares?

You're missing the point past some of the less relevant statements. It's not whether someone is using jumping but that jumping or the lack of it, or the engine quirks required for either, may break the game. It's simply that without a good framework to define settings between the engine and a level set, playing the game becomes a mess and it invites arguing between people that disagree on what's important. Had port features been implemented in a clear way in WADs where engines could easily detect the required settings (which is easy to say in retrospect but is a problem notwithstanding), this wouldn't be an issue, and it would have simply allowed ports to additionally and cleanly permit extra user-dependent options (such as to jump in a level "not intended" for jumping, or the like.) It's the circumstances that cause the arguing, not some flaw in peoples' personalities. Telling the arguing to go away when the circumstances remain is, on a much less serious level, like telling people in Sudan to calm down just because one can see there is some problem there but without addressing it. Some of the arguing is of poor quality, but the issue is real.