Will the Doom community eventually die?

[Aliotroph?]

@Sodaholic: I was talking about the far future. Yeah, we might have software so good that it can work out a lot of compatibility issues for itself, but either way the playability of Doom in the future will depend on the work of a lot of programmers or a lot of people rebuilding ancient hardware.

@GoatLoard: Binary isn't going away. Not that it matters. Any general purpose computer can be programmed to run any other general purpose program assuming its speed, memory and I/O are up to the task. We had non-binary digital computers in the past (eg. ENIAC) and with some work we can run their programs or emulate the machines themselves (there's an ENIAC-on-a-chip project), but it does take effort, and like you mentioned, care to preserve a copy of the software in the first place.

[Ed]

I used to think it was right around the corner.. but as it becomes harder and harder to make so much as an add-on level for newer games, I find more people are attracted to Doom's simplicity and ease of modding. Eventually, yes, Doom will finally be laid to rest.. but so long as stubborn old bastards like me that refuse to buy into modern FPS games are around, I don't see that happening for quite some time.

Plus Doom 4 is coming out.. sometime. There's your shot in the arm.

[magicsofa]

Sodaholic said:

Just feels lonely when you're only one of maybe 15 to 20 people in an online community.

I've found communities of much larger numbers to be more lonely, since it can be hard to get to know people. I suppose this is more true of multiplayer gaming, as I've played a lot of obscure games online with a small playerbase and it's nice that the majority of names you see are not just-another-player. I like these forums for being a solid but manageable-sized community.

[Megamur]

Ed said:

I used to think it was right around the corner.. but as it becomes harder and harder to make so much as an add-on level for newer games, I find more people are attracted to Doom's simplicity and ease of modding.

Very much. DOOM is right in the middle between simplicity and complexity. It's a lot more flexible than, say, Wolfenstein 3D, but not as hard to mod for as Quake or any number of other true-3D games. You can pull off some rather ambitious projects with it, but you can also just tinker around and do simple stuff without too much effort.

[yellowmadness54]

these whole "will {doom related subject} die" threads are becoming quite asinine. I mean, I remember making one, and someone else has, too in the mean time (too lazy to go find them, though).

If the game hasn't died yet, its community won't either.

Not to mention this forum has plenty of new members every day.

[esselfortium]

There are something like 20 megawad projects being either developed or released in 2011. I think we've got plenty of life left in us.

[Blastfrog]

yellowmadness54 said:

Not to mention this forum has plenty of new members every day.

But I'm sure they're far more rare now than they were in the first half of the 00's.

esselfortium said:

There are something like 20 megawad projects being either developed or released in 2011. I think we've got plenty of life left in us.

Yeah, good point. Still, my question is; how long will that last?

[Megamur]

Sodaholic said:

Yeah, good point. Still, my question is; how long will that last?

Who knows? There is no possible way to effectively answer that question.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Sodaholic said:

But I'm sure they're far more rare now than they were in the first half of the 00's.


Yeah, good point. Still, my question is; how long will that last?

Exactly 2 years.

[GreyGhost]

GoatLord said:

but I think it's more likely that future computers will have no interest in running old software.

They'll provide software migration tools - that's assuming the hardware/OS manufacturers want to hang on to their big corporate and government customers.

I expect the community will eventually die or transmute into something else (Rageworld maybe?) but that won't happen while Zenimax/id consider the franchise to be a money-spinner. Technological change is at worst a temporary barrier, so long as source code is available or legacy operating systems/hardware are documented well enough to be emulated and community members are willing to rise to the challenge.

[Du Mhan Yhu]

I think based on the date where the most users online bit is.. It's around the time Doom 3 came out. So, maybe things will be more active once Doom 4 is released. Am I wrong? Or was there just more users back then?

[Quasar]

From the fact that emulation and virtualization are a fundamental basis of some of the forward-looking trends in computing, I don't think that a sudden break in compatibility is going to be a large problem again. In fact I think it is something that future engineers will find desirable to avoid at any cost.

And then this will happen :P

http://dresdencodak.com/2007/09/21/metropolis/

[Blastfrog]

skaman86 said:

I think based on the date where the most users on line bit is.. It's around the time Doom 3 came out. So, maybe things will be more active once Doom 4 is released. Am I wrong? Or was there just more users back then?

Hadn't thought of that. Seems like a likely possibility. If that's what boosts the community's activeness, then I hope id keeps making Doom games, even though the originals are still the best.

[Du Mhan Yhu]

Sodaholic said:

even though the originals are still the best.

Without a doubt.

[hex11]

There's still quite a few people who play and create roguelike games and text adventures (interactive fiction), even though those genres originated on ancient mainframes, using old languages with punchcard and teletype interface.

Heck, I still play the original Rogue, well the version distributed with every release of OpenBSD:
rogue-clone: Version III. (Tim Stoehr was here), tektronix!zeus!tims

Newer games have come along, with more features and prettier graphics, but its simple and effective gameplay is still very strong...

[40oz]

I'm not sure it really matters to me if the Doom community dies. I care more about Doom than I do the people who play it. Doom will never be dead to me.

[Remilia Scarlet]

No, only the players.

[exp(x)]

40oz said:

Doom will never be dead to me.

Until you die.

Eventually everyone who was alive when Doom came out will be dead. There might be a community after that, but I doubt it.

[gggmork]

Eventually the universe will achieve heat death. There might be a community after that, but I doubt it.

[exp(x)]

Exactly.

[GreyGhost]

I wonder what internet access is like in the Lake of Fire?

[GooberMan]

GoatLord said:

I'm not sure that's such a great argument. You can still watch silent films from the 20s because a group of people have painstakingly transferred the film reels to a digital format and distributed it via DVD and Blue Ray.

I saw The General and Modern Times, both silent films, projected from 35mm prints for the first time on Boxing Day last year. They weren't crusty old prints either.

(Added a whole bunch of Wiki links to make sure we're on the same page and you don't try another short sighted argu- oh, what am I saying, that's your specialty.)

[hex11]

Maybe there is an alternate universe where Tom Hall's vision of Doom became the published game, Quake was the medieval-fantasy game they first talked about, and Romero never had to leave and go make Daikatana. Also, Microsoft didn't exist and everyone was running NeXT computers.

[fraggle]

GoatLord said:

But if we stop using binary, how easy would it be to transcribe Doom's code to a modern OS? I know quantum computing is still decades away from being mainstream, but it operates on the basis of using values between one and zero instead of just one and zero. I can't help but wonder how that would effect running binary, or if it would effect it at all. It's entirely possible that there will always be a way. Hell, it may not even be a software issue. It may be more an issue, as was previously pointed out, of the format in which the code is stored.

This made me laugh. No, quantum computing does not involve abandoning binary representations of data, and in fact has nothing to do with "values between one and zero" (technically we already have that, it's called analog!). From what I've read it also seems unlikely that quantum computers are going to "replace" the type of computer that we have now, either, so it will most likely never be "mainstream" in a consumer sense.

Why the obsession with quantum computing, by the way?

[NightmareZer0]

Everything has to come to an end sometime...

[Snakes]

I knew I'd seen this question somewhere. Not surprisingly, the community hasn't shrunk since that post and doesn't seem to be going in that direction. It may die one day, but it's not in the immediate future and not worth wondering about. What would kill the community is the continual creation of threads with a negative connotation pertaining to the state of the Doom community or how modernism is destroying the fun of the game. Any time a thread of that variety is posted, the slew of responses range from sarcastic to downright silly because most of us understand that these questions and complaints are, largely, silly.

[Jodwin]

Thanks to high level language ports, it's extremely unlikely for Doom to die due to technical changes in computers.

[deathbringer]

I think there's more ongoing (and likely to be released) major projects around now than there was 5 years ago. Mostly community projects, because it's easier to get lots of people to make one map than it is to make 32 on your own.

Also there will always be one or two people who are "wired up wrong" out there who obsess over stuff that was around before they were born, or even before their grandparents were born. I bet when we're ancient one of us will run across some twenty-something who thinks Doom is amazing even though he was born in 2050

[Hellbent]

If you go to http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=10000 and then successively change the number at the end of the url and reload the page, you can get a sense of the popularity in the last 12 years.

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=10000 2/99
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=11000 12/00
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=12000 5/03
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=13000 11/04
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=14000 12/05
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=15000 5/07
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=16000 2/10

In almost 2 years (from begin of '99 to end of '00) you had 1000 uploads to newstuff. Then the next 1000 uploads takes almost 2.5 years. 1.5 years for the next batch of 1000 (so doom modding popularity exceeds '99 levels with arrival of doom3) and '05 saw more activity than '99. 1.5 years for the next 1000 and 2.75 years for the 1000 after that. And it will probably return to old form (where it was in '99) when Doom 4 comes out. :D Our activity for '08 and '09 was almost as high as it was from '01 to '03. Basically uploads have remained pretty steady for the last 11 years when you take into consideration the release of Doom 3.. We produced the same number of uploads to /newstuff in the last 32 months as we did in the 30 month period from 12/00 to 5/03. So.. no, Doom modding is not on the decline.

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=15562 1/09
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=16562 9/11 In a little more than the last 2.5 years we've gotten 1000 uploads. And it seems to me there are more multi-level uploads today than there were back in the day (although I'd have to check that).

Funny thing is, I used to worry about the decline of doomworld and the doom community ten years ago, back when I was mapping for Greenwar I was like "man, I wish I was doing this project back when Doom was popular" ...in the last year I've finally realized that the game isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and worrying about its decline back then, as it is now, is quite silly.

[Mr. T]

GoatLord said:

But remember how I mentioned punch cards? They're completely useless now, even though they contain information on them. You would have to go through an enormous amount of trouble in order to make use of one. That's because computing fundamentally changed when we introduced keyboards which could type instructions out to a monitor. Likewise, this business of mouse and keyboard, and binary code, won't be around forever.

I think it would be quite trivial to build a punch card reader with the correct specs (which is why we have specifications in the first place right?)