Apparent lacking popularity/legacy of (G)ZDoom WADs

[Tristan]

While writing the Doom Wiki articles for Threshold of Pain (which I'm somehow supposed to finish at some point) I noticed something. No records on DSDA. At all.
KDiZD is also lacking - though I guess this could be due to the sheer size of those levels. Winter's Fury is also completely devoid of any demos.

Of course, this is most likely due to the fact that backwards demo compatibility on (G)ZDoom is very bad, so speedrunning is not a good example by itself.
However, I do wonder, do people still play these? The impression I got from Winter's Fury is that it was released, there was about a week or two of people playing it, and then not many people bothered again, which is a shame because it's a really good set of levels.

Of course, I could be wrong, but if not many people play these, however frequently, what is the reason for it? Is it because these WADs are very different to Doom in terms of gameplay? Do some people just not like (G)ZDoom? Is there a lack of replay value to them?

[Ribbiks]

if you found yourself with a lot of free time and some aptitude in using the idgames api (or alternatively tedious text parsing), you could aggregate number of votes for wads (is it possible to get number of downloads?), stratify by year/port, see if gzdoom wads lag behind averages. I'm hesitant to agree with the assessment otherwise, seeing as zdoom and hefty gameplay mods still seem to be very popular (albeit moreso outside of dw)

Eris Falling said:

do people still play these? The impression I got from Winter's Fury is that it was released, there was about a week or two of people playing it, and then not many people bothered again

aside from lack of speedrunning attention, which can be substantially attributed to the required port, what gave you this idea? how much hubbub do you expect to see about random wad X long after its release?

[ArmouredBlood]

There are no demos, because like you said, the compatibility is horrible. I liked threshold of pain and winter's fury, but it's not worth it to make demos that go out of sync unless you bundle the version you use with it.

[Rayziik]

I think a better reason for the more cinematic wads like Winter's Fury is precisely that, they're very cinematic and tedious to demo. At least in my opinion. That's the second reason I won't be demoing them anytime soon, the first being that my pc blows hard enough to be unable to record GZDoom whilst it runs.

[Tristan]

Ribbiks said:

zdoom and hefty gameplay mods still seem to be very popular (albeit moreso outside of dw)

I'd never considered that actually. Perhaps these advanced WADs & mods are still often played.

As to what gave me the thought, it's not so much I expect to see people posting about it X number of days after release, I just sometimes wonder if the majority of people play such projects once and then that's it.

[cannonball]

wads like winters fury are popular along with the more classic and boom megawads. Just look up winters fury on youtube and you will see a lot of video playthroughs for it.
just for example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2HcGIIs9YI&list=PLUVidTKdc0Hr__cxp1IXIOkE6aPYR4-2B
Demoing zdoom/gzdoom wads are a real pain as the demos only work on the specific port and even more annoying the specific version of the port.

[Tristan]

Oh that's interesting, I knew of Larzuk's playthroughs but as far as I could remember those were the only ones. Seems I'm mistaken.

Spoiler

Yeah, while I think said WADs do deserve the attention, I did ask this because I joked that after my GZDoom project, which should be released in about 264 years, I'll do something else, maybe GZDoom, but perhaps a simpler engine "because no-one'll play it otherwise" While it was intended as a joke, it did get me wondering.

[Phml]

I just sometimes wonder if the majority of people play such projects once and then that's it.

You're likely right, but this applies to everything out there. Most gamers don't replay stuff. Most gamers don't even finish their games.

[Larzuk]

Eris Falling said:

Oh that's interesting, I knew of Larzuk's playthroughs but as far as I could remember those were the only ones. Seems I'm mistaken

There was only one other youtuber, that I could find, that had a playthrough of Winter's Fury by the time I started mine. I haven't checked if there were anymore since then.

There could be quite a few reasons why others don't pick up on them. One being the general size of the projects are pretty big and some people just don't want to download something that big. Another reason is due to how demanding gzdoom projects can be on a computer compared to say something vanilla. The list can go on...

Eris Falling said:

As to what gave me the thought, it's not so much I expect to see people posting about it X number of days after release, I just sometimes wonder if the majority of people play such projects once and then that's it.

To be honest, I think they are more popular in places outside of DW. I have noticed, after the initial release of most wads on these forums, that most of the specific threads get posts for a few weeks and that's it. Maybe an occasional bump here and there from time to time. Also, the wads are still being downloaded even though no one posts in the particular thread.

[Suitepee]

Well now I know that Winter's Fury exists, guess I'll take a look at it. I need some interesting ideas for future Doom wad LP's past Switcheroom.

[Vermil]

Currently the Doom(world) community is heavilly into Vanilla/limit removing maps and mods.

That said, IMO Winters Fury specifically, is a fine mod, but is very much a play once mod; it has no real re-playability.

[TimeOfDeath]

I searched /idgames "Whole textfile" for Winter's Fury and had no results.

I record on zdoom maps sometimes, but I don't play gzdoom because it's GL and this comp can't even play glboom.

[Suitepee]

Vermil said:

Currently the Doom(world) community is heavilly into Vanilla/limit removing maps and mods.

That said, IMO Winters Fury specifically, is a fine mod, but is very much a play once mod; it has no real re-playability.

I'd have said the Doom community was also into Brutal Doom stuff as well.

Took a little peek at this wad, seems an interesting story-esque creation. I might consider covering Winter's Fury in the future as a Let's Play/livestream after I finish doing Switcheroom and Realms of Chaos.

[Pieruskwurje]

TimeOfDeath said:

I searched /idgames "Whole textfile" for Winter's Fury and had no results.

Winter's Fury isn't currently on the /idgames archive. You can find the link to the doomworld thread here.

In my opinion, Vermil is right to say that it has no-replay value (unless you have a burning desire to collect all 8 of the logs), and furthermore it wasn't designed for speedruns. However, like many other games that share the same atmospheric style, it works great for playthroughs and such. At the time of posting, I can count three complete playthroughs on youtube, so it's not like it dropped off the face of the planet.

More to the point, how much popularity can you expect a doom mod to get? The only ones that seem to stand out as being 'famous' all throughout the doom communities are the classics, such as HR2 and AV. I can imagine that many of you have played these through, or at least revisited them in some way or another many times. The fact that they can continuously be revisited, have easy access to a quick download then insta-play, and the ability to speedrun along with playing co-op is what makes them so much more compelling. They are open to a very wide audience.

Of course, there is the occasional mod which reaches out to the deep, dark corners of the internet to collect and bring with it a loyal fanbase dedicated to their one true doom mod savior, like the whole Megaman 8-bit DM thing.

From my own point of view, I can still play through Winter's Fury again and again and have fun playing through each time, but the amount of times I have played each level and knowing that it was my hard work and labor which made it always inspires me to continue playing, regardless of it always being the same. Obviously that's not something that other people would get while playing. I would love for my own mod to be more popular, but I am kinda stretching the limits of my expectations saying that. It already won a Cacoward, has 2000+ downloads and a few playthroughs, so I am happy with that result. Really, I am just glad it wasn't a miserable failure.

[Gez]

You cannot use the demo recording scene as the single point of measure of some mod's popularity. Demo recording is a niche in itself, one that is mostly focused on the stable platforms given by vanilla and Boom.

Another niche is multiplayer. Deathmatch and CTF maps for example. Don't expect to find any demo for such maps, regardless of engine.

Demo recording on ZDoom is not very developed because backward demo compatibility is not maintained and ZDoom modding is generally focused on the latest bleeding-edge features (which have been added, sometimes, at the request of the mod author) offered by development builds rather than the latest official version. If you do record on ZDoom, because of the lack of backward compatibility, it's better to use an official version so that it's relatively simple for people to obtain the same version to run the demo. But if there's currently no official version that can run the mod? Do you tell people to get "SVN build r4321"* despite it not existing longer than a couple weeks on the DRD Team server?

(* ZDoom now uses Git rather than SVN, but that's not relevant.)

[scalliano]

First up, I'm honoured that ToP is getting a full map breakdown on the Wiki. Cheers!

As for the topic at hand, I've played WF around 5-6 times now, LoS around the same and UTnT easily more than 10 times. I've come across a couple of ToP playthroughs (usually with some mad weapons mod on the go) and there's at least one playthrough of the ToPII demo. I think it's unfair to say that (G)ZDoom mods don't get the same level of coverage, given that port-specific mods are even more niche than vanilla mods.

[dew]

Gez said:

Another niche is multiplayer. Deathmatch and CTF maps for example. Don't expect to find any demo for such maps, regardless of engine.

i'm probably reading this wrong... are you saying there are no demos for multiplayer?

[Gez]

dew said:

i'm probably reading this wrong... are you saying there are no demos for multiplayer?

No demos on DSDA and Compet-N.

To be clear I was talking specifically about speed demos, which are a bit pointless in a deathmatch or CTF context. Unless you play against bots I guess. Which would basically lead to basically the same portability/compatibility problem as ZDoom demos, since there is no stable, fixed standard bot engine.

[Creaphis]

I've long assumed that the time spent creating a Doom project is typically greater than the total time spent playing it by the rest of the world's population. But is that a problem? You enjoyed making it, you got some decent creative experience, and somebody, somewhere, enjoyed playing it. Good enough.

[Memfis]

There are some deathmatch demos on DSDA and lots of coop demos. DM demos are here: http://doomedsda.us/deathmatch.html , Coop demos are in the usual tables.
I don't know if there are any other multiplayer demo archives (please tell me if you know any) but there are tons of demos in the ZDaemon Tournament forum. Just a few days ago I watched some CTF demo with dew, evo and others, it was really neat even though I'm a total CTF noob and I probably don't understand many things there.

[WH-Wilou84]

Gez said:
[...] Which would basically lead to basically the same portability/compatibility problem as ZDoom demos, since there is no stable, fixed standard bot engine.

Actually ZDaemon is good enough for that. I recall that back in 2007 we had a little competition within our clan [THE] ( the objective was to kill as many bots as possible on ZDCTFMP2 Map 13 within 15 minutes - I still have some of our demos here ). Now this doesn't really count as "speedrunning", but time factor was there for sure. And it can be considered stable enough, as the demos were recorded with version 1.08 of ZDaemon six years ago and they're still watchable today with 1.09.

@ OP : The lack of demos doesn't mean that these wads are impopular. They're just less played by people who like competition. In essence, these wads won't get many demos, or any at all ( they're designed for (G)ZDoom ), but many people do like them and are eagerly awaiting the big releases such as TSoZD, Demon Eclipse etc.
I believe that Vaporware's case will be interesting on that matter ( when it's out of course :p ), as it will be an "advanced" wad designed for a port which maintains demo compatibility. Or so I think.

Eris Falling said:
KDiZD is also lacking - though I guess this could be due to the sheer size of those levels.

Map size isn't too much of a factor for interested speedrunners - we've seen demos for Eternal Doom, Sunder, Jade Earth, Deus Vult... And I'm sure there will be demos for Vela Pax and Hellbound once they get a proper release.

[Gez]

[WH]-Wilou84 said:
a port which maintains demo compatibility. Or so I think.

I wouldn't be absolutely sure about demo compatibility between EE versions. Demo compatibility with vanilla will stay, but EE-specific features may change or be removed as needed and I doubt Quasar will want to maintain too much baggage. (The fact that major features such as FraggleScript and its successor Small have been removed already should prove it.)

And yes there is at least one map for Eternity on the idgames archive which uses FraggleScript and therefore hasn't been playable on recent versions of EE for several years now.