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Shadow Hog

Just how many Doom WADs or mods are there?

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The subject of "most-modded game" came up on NeoGAF earlier today, and it got me to wondering how many Doom WADs/PK3s have been released into the wild. Tried looking for some hard figures; obviously we can't count the number of WADs people made for private use or WADs that were never even partially finished and put up for release, but surely we could start with "number of files on idgames/" or something. Yet, I can't seem to quickly find a figure for even that statistic...

At any rate, I find it hard to believe Skyrim would beat Doom out - possible, but hard to believe. (For the record, Skyrim has about 36235 (ignoring adult mods) on the Skyrim Nexus, or 24751 on the Steam Workshop, which covers the two most popular places to get Skyrim mods from - and there's almost certainly overlap between the two.)

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Well, its kind of a big gap since Doom was released and Skyrim was released, so I would say that there would be many more Doom WADS than Skyrim mods.

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I mean, in my head, the answer is almost certainly Doom due to seniority and just how friggin' easy it is, relatively speaking (with ample documentation for practically any facet you'd want to modify), although serious contenders would include any post-Morrowind entry in The Elder Scrolls, various The Sims games, Quake, Half-Life (I'm not sure whether 1 or 2 has more - mods for Garry's Mod would count for HL2, for what that's worth) or one of the Unreal Tournaments.

EDIT: I noticed that WAD Archive cites it hosts 43,000 WADs, so there's at least a starting point.

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On http://elmaonline.net/ there are almost 300 000 Elastomania levels in the database, a lot more than Doom has. Of course this stuff isn't really comparable since you can make a fun Elma level in just a few minutes.

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Shadow Hog said:
EDIT: I noticed that WAD Archive cites it hosts 43,000 WADs, so there's at least a starting point. [/B]

We don't host them, but 43,069 is the exact number in the database at the moment. Out of that there are roughly 133,976 maps. There are more out there and a few new ones are added every couple of days

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Well making extra content for a game isn't the same as modding it.

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VGA said:

Well making extra content for a game isn't the same as modding it.

It does for the sake of this argument.

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I've been working on a batch file that runs wadwhat on all the wads in my directory and total all the monsters to find out how many doom monsters to kill in every wad ever.

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Well back in '94 '95 there were whole CDs filled with usermade content. Imagine what the total must be today.

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Shadow Hog said:

we could start with "number of files on idgames/" or something.

Roughly 13,206 - if you exclude docs/, historic/, idstuff/, the non-Doom wads from levels/, lmps/, newstuff/, roguestuff/, source/, a bit of stuff from themes/, all but the dehacked patches from utils/ and of course the .txt files.

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WadArchive said:

43,069 is the exact number in the database at the moment.

I wonder what proportion of that number are sloppy automatic conversions of D1 levels to D2 and IWAD maps with random Cybers/Spiders thrown in. You know, like most of the D2 WADs in Maximum Doom.

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Shadow Hog said:

For the record, Skyrim has about 36235 (ignoring adult mods) on the Skyrim Nexus, or 24751 on the Steam Workshop, which covers the two most popular places to get Skyrim mods from - and there's almost certainly overlap between the two.

Where's the catch? What do such typical mods look like, and what does it take to create them?

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I remember there being too many anime themed mods on the Oblivion nexus, I wonder if it's the same for the Skyrim nexus.

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Some years ago, I wondered if you could somehow find a way to measure the total area of a map and convert it to real-world units; then you could calculate if all the WADs available for download would contain enough playing area to cover the entire Earth.

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JudgeDeadd said:

I wondered if you could somehow find a way to measure the total area of a map

I seem to recall that Fredrik had a program to calculate this. But I may have imagined it, as I cannot find any reference to it now.

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I suspect the mapping output could grow exponentially if the doom community were less scrupulous about good looking levels and flowing gameplay. Granted, it buffers the window of new releases to feature mostly "I'm still learning" maps and some other really great wads, which means the mods we see for doom are more often than not significantly greater than the original Doom we started with, in terms of quality, complexity and volume.

I still think its a shame that doom mapping seems like a hobby limited to people who are good at it. Anyone can do it. And there are far more members in this community than there are those who have made and released a single map. I feel as though the doom community is passively making many people here feel their ability to create levels is far inferior to the standards we've come to express on these forums. Joe Ilya tune up project is the worst indirect example. Its a public shaming to newbie mappers and an incorrect representation of who we really are.

I know Joe ilya started the project but but he was egged on by mountains of negative posts and public scrutiny.

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Yeah, that thread has a lot of terrible posts with people demonstrating condescending attitude, as if they were better people because they think they can map better, acting like they're doing him a service by "improving" his maps. Btw the project wasn't joe's idea, he started it because several posters suggested it in the Lost Maps 2 topic. Doomworld often seems like a machine that gives same boring feedback again and again, trying to turn everyone into a maker of nonlinear interconnected run-and-gun maps or whatever is the latest trend, well I've said this before a few times already.

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This is why stuff like cchest existed ten years ago. I really think it would do the community better if there were more projects were folks of all levels of practice can try their hand. High caliber projects are great and all, but it is adding an element of insularity to an already aging community.

Kind of why I try to accept all maps that aren't blatant trolls into MAYhem and the like.

fwiw, joe-ilya tune up is one of the most unqiue projects in existence right now. I have some qualms with how it is being run, but I am legitimately glad it exists.

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RjY said:

I seem to recall that Fredrik had a program to calculate this. But I may have imagined it, as I cannot find any reference to it now.

I don't recall writing such a program, but it should be a trivial programming exercise: just add the area of all subsectors. Though you might have to worry a bit about weirdness resulting from mapping tricks, broken maps, or broken node builder output...

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40oz said:

I know Joe ilya started the project but but he was egged on by mountains of negative posts and public scrutiny.


It's refreshing to see someone wanting to improve their work, albeit begrudgingly. It sucks getting a map rejected from a project but it gives opportunity to create something better based upon feedback. But it could've been handled better.

The alternative is usually the author refusing to abandon their ego and insisting their work is the best shit ever until they turn into a Sperg-Lord.

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SYS said:

The alternative is usually the author refusing to abandon their ego and insisting their work is the best shit ever until they turn into a Sperg-Lord.

But the thing is that nowhere did Joe ever act like his work was the best shit ever, unless I'm missing a post or something? The concept of an author having to abandon his style in order to appease a bunch of people over the internet "otherwise he's egocentric" is quite an abstract one, and not in a good way, unless ofcourse he's trying to get a map accepted into a community project... that's a whole different story then.

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Memfis said:

Doomworld often seems like a machine that gives same boring feedback again and again, trying to turn everyone into a maker of nonlinear interconnected run-and-gun maps or whatever is the latest trend,

I don't think it's a trend. I think it's simply a matter of the fact that linear or simplistic or slow-paced (etc) maps are overplayed and less capable of giving an exciting experience anymore, and straying away from these aspects seems like a step in the right direction to make the map enjoyable for experienced players. Besides, those who give this feedback speak only for themselves and their own preferences.

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DeathevokatioN said:

But the thing is that nowhere did Joe ever act like his work was the best shit ever, unless I'm missing a post or something?

SYS might have had another mapper in mind.

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Skyrim might not be there in numbers quite yet but I'm confident it's going to surpass the total amount of Doom WADs relatively soon. Skyrim already has around 1/3rd more mods than the total amount Oblivion has accumulated in its now nearly 10 year old life.

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frankly all the shovelware compilations boost this number with vapor - both of the collections I own on CD feature the same levels over and over ad nauseam, arranged in to "best-of"s without real credit given to the authors.

Then again, I imagine some amount of these Skyrim mods simply alter a bar on the HUD, replace flavour text, add ego player houses and so forth, all very easy to do with the in-built editing tools.

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