About the idea of a Fork

[esselfortium]

Danfun64 said:

@esselfortium: So are you saying that it's impossible for the proposed fork to have both standalone-ness and a stable, future-proof demo system like any format that PrBoom+ supports?

Not without also forking PrBoom+ or Eternity Engine to make source code modifications to suit a standalone game rather than a Doom mapset.

[Danfun64]

Why mention the eternity engine? It doesn't have any real multiplayer support at all.

[esselfortium]

I listed Eternity because it has demo compatibility and a more advanced featureset than PrBoom+.

You didn't mention multiplayer, and I didn't consider it because there's virtually zero audience for multiplayer using ports other than the big three. There would be no sense in building a new game using PrBoom+, particularly not for the sake of a nonexistent multiplayer audience, considering all of the options that would be lost as a result, compared to what would be available in GLOOME.

[Danfun64]

My love for future-proof coop multiplayer demos certainly puts me in the minority. That I admit.

PrBoom+ is just as bad as Eternity when it comes to multiplayer support.

Crispy Doom, Boom (Dosbox) and MBF (Dosbox) are the only standard ports which allow multiplayer demo recording. (I'm not counting Chocolate Doom, since Crispy Doom has almost every Chocolate Doom feature and, among other things, fixes the menu desync bug.

Then you have ports like Odamex, Doom Legacy, and Doomsday. It's possible that each of them will be able to have a stable demo protocol, but they will only be viewable on their own ports.

Then you have ZDaemon, which is fairly stable demo wise, but is closed source.

Then you have ZDoom 2.X.X ports, like Zandronum. Despite how advanced they are, they have no stable demo protocol. Demos recorded in one version can only played in the same version.

One of the reasons I find stable coop demos important is because Freedoom is the only FLOSS fps with monsters that is close to completion. The closest thing right now is the far from complete Open Quartz (and by extension, Xonotic, which uses OQ models)) and Blasphemer and Zauberer (Neither of which are as complete as even Open Quartz.)

Cube 2 doesn't support coop. Neither does Cube 1, but at least its demo protocol is stabilized, while Cube 2...umm... Disregarding those issues, Cube and Cube 2 have non-free assets, so they don't really count either.

However, we are talking about a *fork*. Since Freedoom isn't going to go away anytime soon, I guess I should be satisfied with what is available.

[fraggle]

fabian said:

I see. I have mistaken the discussion about the fork as kind of ripping the project out of the current maintainers' hands screaming "you are doing it wrong!" Apparently, I was mistaken and now I understand your incentives for the fork. Thank you!

No, Freedoom as it stands can continue as it is today. But I think there is great value in the idea of a fork and I think we should consider it to be a huge opportunity rather than a threat.

But to address what you say: in considering the possibility of a fork I think we should ask some hard questions: are the current maintainers a good fit for a project like this (why is an art project being run by programmers?), and: are we doing it right? These shouldn't be questions we should just shy away from asking.

And I don't want to offend either Jon or Chungy when I ask that, as they're the other maintainers who have run this project since I handed it off. Particularly under Chungy's maintainership, I think Freedoom has really blossomed in recent years. It's been really impressive to see.

But in the end, the three of us are programmers and I think we should be asking why an art project like Freedoom has been and is being run by us. The results of this leadership are fingerprinted on the project: I'd point to things like the fact we use deutex (a crufty old command line tool that nobody else really uses nowadays), the fact that it's impossible/difficult to build Freedoom on Windows because the repository uses symbolic links (check out Sodaholic struggling with this the other day for an example of how this causes problems), and even the fact that we use Git to maintain the project (I doubt many megaWADs do this). I suspect that to most other people doing Doom stuff, Freedoom looks like a very weird project.

But more important is the effect on creative direction. I think that has a lot to do with why so many threads devolve into these long timewasting bikeshed discussions (this is my favorite example). We've got the technical side covered just fine but nobody's really in charge of how Freedoom should look, how it should play, etc.

I'm certainly not calling for Chungy to step down or anything like that. But regardless of the whole fork discussion, I think it would be a really good idea to "formally" appoint someone as a creative director for the project: someone who can decide, "this is the story we're going with", "this is how things should look and play", etc. We have historical precedent to see that this is a good idea, because Protox did it with FreeDM and now FreeDM is in a much better shape than it used to be.

Yes, I did play BTSX and I agree with you that it is one of the most impresive and enjoyable works of Doom modding that I have ever tried. However, I don't see how this example should relate to the fork?

Because the BTSX folks have a track record of delivering projects with strong creative direction in a much shorter timeframe than we have. BTSX isn't Freedoom but it's a large project of a comparable scale. If you think BTSX is an example "what [...] Freedoom should turn into" then we should pay really close attention to what they have to say.

[boris]

fraggle said:

I think it would be a really good idea to "formally" appoint someone as a creative director for the project: someone who can decide, "this is the story we're going with", "this is how things should look and play", etc. We have historical precedent to see that this is a good idea, because Protox did it with FreeDM and now FreeDM is in a much better shape than it used to be.

That'd be great. I haven't really kept up with the Freedoom development for the last couple of years, but I was quite surprised that even after 15 years it has apparently not been decided if the player is wearing gloves or not.

The maps, for example, are a jumple of randomness. And it's seems to lack decisions even in some things you wouldn't really need an creative director for. Like "episode" themes (for Phase 2), weapon progression, monster progression, or if maps should start like the last ended (or not).