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Quasar

Disappearing history

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Quasar said:

I believe my first sentence answers that question :P

Haha excellent, that should cover that eventuality unless say some mass event happens which wipes the wiki and all existing backups around the world.

Anyway, maybe it might be worth compiling a list of files or data that are currently missing or desired and from there scour through our respective hard drives / floppy disks / compact disks / USB sticks / ZIP drives in order to be able to locate anything which is currently not available at present.

It might be worth for example drawing attention to the historical files which are currently believed missing as I believe that somewhere out there somebody will have a copy of them.

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The Green Herring said:

Back on topic, regarding /idgames, it is true that an alternate and easier process of uploading to /idgames would be a good idea so that more people are inclined to do so. However, this same process would also have to address the ways trolls could abuse it, such as people uploading stolen WADs using other people's names and email addresses (which is why Ty Halderman started doing upload verification). A new upload process would also have to ensure it cannot be used to trash the server. There is much more you need to address when designing such a system than one would think, and as far as I'm concerned, a system should not be used until all of its potential issues are taken care of.


An idea would be only allow uploads from verified accounts? Sounds like a headache at first verifying all legitimate uploaders, but after all that would be done, it seems like a reasonable system to prevent misuse.

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I think verified accounts has been suggested before. Would help keep the crap out, though some might see that as one hoop too many to jump through.

Quasar said:

  • NewDoom and its forums
  • raven-games.com, including the hosting of a number of Heretic/Hexen series mods (especially some unique things for their sequels)

I have most of that offline, apart from the forums and some files from their FTP server.

  • doom3.filefront.com - while still "up," this site which hosted a ton of Doom 3 mods is now blocking downloads behind privacy-invading ads and surveys, making them effectively inaccessible

Adblock Plus and NoScript to the rescue!? I downloaded around 200 of their Doom 3 files yesterday without seeing a single advert or survey, in fact nothing more annoying than the 5 second countdown.

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Memfis said:

Hmm, are you sure? I remember asking a very hardcore collector and even he had only like 3 of these levels. Maybe Grazza had everything since he was a Compuserve guy but I'm not sure about "people".


No, I'm not. Though I do find it unlikely that Bob had the only extant copies. I went back and re-read some of those threads asking about Odessa, and it's kind of unclear what was allowed - saying where you could get Odessa 1,12,13 off of shovelware CDs seemed to be ok, but talk of uploading them to idgames or elsewhere and sharing the links was not (because Ty would reject them in the first case, because of the permissions in the second case, I assume).

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Gez said:

The "no levels based on IWAD levels" rule was there purely to prevent the archive being flooded by noobish E1M1 modifications where you have two cyberdemons in the nukage courtyard and a stuck spider demon on the blue carpet. (Admit it: that was your first mod. And you would have uploaded it to the archive if you could have.)

That rule should certainly allow for exceptions when the result isn't noobish. Maybe have the uploader contact an archive manager first, like for files above the size threshold.


Well excuse me. I had three cyberdemons in the nukage courtyard.

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Gentlepoke said:

Anyway, maybe it might be worth compiling a list of files or data that are currently missing or desired and from there scour through our respective hard drives / floppy disks / compact disks / USB sticks / ZIP drives in order to be able to locate anything which is currently not available at present.

It might be worth for example drawing attention to the historical files which are currently believed missing as I believe that somewhere out there somebody will have a copy of them.


I think a good start could be searching the Wads & Mods forum for works not present in idgames (like those gggmork wads, for example, or some wads in the Trying to find a WAD thread) and that also have disappeared from their hosting sites (mediafire, dropbox...).

Also, I think it's worth mentioning that Bob Evans apparently has the Compuserve stuff saved, I'm still hoping for something regarding that.

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With regards to the wiki, what I would like to eventually do is host a read only live backup on redmars.org, behind a do not crawl robots.txt, synced nightly. This would give me confidence that not only were backups working regularly but what was being backed up remained practically useful (ie could be restored). If something did happen to mancunet, it would be a flip of a switch (or two) to activate a live main instance.

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7hm said:

I went back and re-read some of those threads asking about Odessa, and it's kind of unclear what was allowed - saying where you could get Odessa 1,12,13 off of shovelware CDs seemed to be ok, but talk of uploading them to idgames or elsewhere and sharing the links was not (because Ty would reject them in the first case, because of the permissions in the second case, I assume).

The text files for Odessa 1 & 13 (on the Demon Gate Mega Collection CD) contained the following line -

"You MAY NOT distribute this WAD file in any format. Available only on Compuserve for downloading."

So I'd say it's fairly clear-cut as to what was allowed, with the folks at Lasersoft Inc. probably too busy to check the Copyrights/Permissions in all 2904 text files.

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I hate when people have those "may NOT redistribute" lines in their Doom wads - Looking 10-20 years into the future, they'd see that's just ridiculous and will only doom their wad to obscurity and no one will ever get to enjoy it.

(pun intended btw)

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If I ever release a solo map, the terms will say that it cannot be distributed except by mailing it on 5¼ floppies, and that it can only be played on computers powered by a Cyrix-brand processor, running OS/2. (Or DR-DOS.)

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I can meet all the requirements except for OS/2, would GeoWorks Pro be an acceptable alternative?

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Memfis said:

Maybe Grazza had everything since he was a Compuserve guy but I'm not sure about "people".

Sadly, I do not have a complete copy of the CompuServe Action Games Forum file libraries. Of the stuff that I did have at the time they closed, pretty much all the worthwhile files that allowed redistribution have now been uploaded to the Archive by myself or others. As far as I recall, all worthwhile stuff that didn't allow redistribution (e.g. Odessa, of which I only had a few files in any case, not the full set) has been relicensed by the authors and is now in the archive.

There might be a few files remaining in my collection that might arguably be worth uploading, but I never saw much point uploading totally broken files. I went through it all in a fair amount of detail, so doubt there are any missing gems. On the other hand, I probably only had about half the files (maybe fewer), so the complete collection from Bob Evans would no doubt contain a lot of important lost stuff.

tl;dr: I don't have a vast collection of unknown gems.

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Gez said:

The "no levels based on IWAD levels" rule was there purely to prevent the archive being flooded by noobish E1M1 modifications where you have two cyberdemons in the nukage courtyard and a stuck spider demon on the blue carpet. (Admit it: that was your first mod. And you would have uploaded it to the archive if you could have.)

That rule should certainly allow for exceptions when the result isn't noobish. Maybe have the uploader contact an archive manager first, like for files above the size threshold.


What about this heavily modified full set of IWAD maps I did? It's not a final release but I feel something with significant change put into the levels should be appropriate on the archives.

And for the ZDoom and Zandronum members who also wander around here: For crying out loud, UPLOAD YOUR FINISHED PROJECTS TO /IDGAMES!

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Hopefully Doomworld will be the next, Just to be able to see the disappearance of some annoying people here (Including Myself).

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DMGUYDZ64 said:

Hopefully Doomworld will be the next, Just to be able to see the disappearance of some annoying people here (Including Myself).


I know some people that I'd like to see disappear...

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The Green Herring said:

However, the rejected WAD in question was a collection of custom palettes, including the UDM3 palette, whose text file had a title, an email address, and literally nothing else. In the absence of any other information, it appeared that the author was trying to claim someone else's work as their own. In the further absence of anything substantiating this, I could only cite UDM3's permissions as the reason for rejection.


I think it would have been wholly appropriate in such a case to simply state the rejection reason as you explained it here. "Contains others' work without credit (e.g. UDM3 palette) - please re-upload with appropriate credits in the text file" would have been much clearer, instead of contriving a reason out of existing precedent that was sufficiently obfuscated to cause eyebrows to raise and require further explanation on the forums later.

Remember, you make the rules now, you don't have to contort yourself through others' legal loopholes. :)

Gez said:

The "no levels based on IWAD levels" rule was there purely to prevent the archive being flooded by noobish E1M1 modifications where you have two cyberdemons in the nukage courtyard and a stuck spider demon on the blue carpet.


Ah, I haven't just made that up then. Do you have a source for this paraphrased quote? I've been looking for one - I played the-end.wad a couple of years ago which could be accurately described that way, but I couldn't find anything.

Gez said:

That rule should certainly allow for exceptions when the result isn't noobish. Maybe have the uploader contact an archive manager first, like for files above the size threshold.


I agree the rules regarding modified IWAD levels could be clarified/relaxed. I also thought it was just to prevent such trivial modifications, but then the Switcheroom debacle occurred, which -- useful as it was eventually (the updated Switcheroom was superior to the original release IMO) -- left a sour taste at first.

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Tompig said:

I'm a lil out the loop, why would anyone refuse to use idgames, just makes sense to put it all into one place dosent it?

Many people use Speed of Doom, UAC Ultra, BtSX, Memento Mori, as the measuring bar for how good a mapset is. Even mapsets like Whispers of Satan get bashed for it's shortcomings, and newbie Zdoom projects get it the worst.

I can understand why this could be intimidating to mappers who don't have thick skin and aren't confident in their work being a 'masterpiece'. :P

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Doomkid said:

IWAD-inspired/remade maps

I don't think those were ever rejected. The rule clearly is against maps where you start by just loading the IWAD map in the editor and edit it from there. There sure is a history of those, but they are hardly worth keeping.
Yet, thanks to shovelware CDs, a lot of them are saved. There are a bunch of E1M1 on them with merely changed sector properties, sidedef properties and/or thing placements. This surely has to do with the lack of any node builder when the first editors appeared, and therefor that was pretty much all you could do with them.

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Zed said:

Also, I think it's worth mentioning that Bob Evans apparently has the Compuserve stuff saved, I'm still hoping for something regarding that.

I think the window of hope for that has expired since he never came back or offered to send a copy to anybody again. Biggest lost opportunity of the decade. It's just the kind of thing I think of when bringing up this topic.

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Here are some I know that aren't uploaded:

Tom Sanner's WADs. There are tons of them he didn't upload that I remember downloading back in the day. No idea where those went, if they're still online.

Yoghurt's Legacy Mods and sources. Includes CajunBot and the DoomWars mods. I can't get in touch with him. FILE NAMES WERE: cj097.zip , ybot048.zip, cj098.zip EDIT: 0.98 binaries found at ftp://ftp.farlep.net/pub/Windows/games/doom/cj098.zip with no source. Oops...

Submissions to the 10Sector contest that didn't make the final wad. I think "10sector2" was around somewhere. No idea where it is now. Might be in the doomworld site mirrors?

SLIGE is not in the archives. At all. Source code might be lost. Someone a few months ago (might have been me) found the sources in a source dump in github somewhere, along with some other source port sources. EDIT: Found and mirrored on GitHub

DWANGO wads aren't in the archives. As popular as these were (and still are), it's a shame that they aren't uploaded. Ditto with all other "map compilation" packs played these days on the major multiplayer source ports.

A "Greenwar 2 lite" that was passed around in protest of the Official Greenwar II release. I may be wrong on this one, but I do remember it being discussed. Might not exist.

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Csonicgo said:

Tom Sanner's WADs. There are tons of them he didn't upload that I remember downloading back in the day. No idea where those went, if they're still online.

http://www.oocities.org/teeprint/wads.html
http://www.oocities.org/teeprint/zips/

You can also find a some wads here that may not be available in other places:
http://www.doomworld.com/3ddownloads/sda/wad/
It's Opulent's old SDA wad archive, which until recently was behind the 3ddownloads "wait wall".

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