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LexiMax

The end of ZDoom

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From the forums:

I am hereby eschewing further ZDoom development. There will be no future releases. Consider QZDoom or GZDoom as replacements.


This isn't terribly surprising, considering how little Marisa (I think that's her name now, please correct me if I'm wrong) had been involved with development as of late.

Still, it's the end of an era. ZDoom was undoubtedly hugely influential port, and it appears that development will continue in GZDoom proper, with QZDoom now using GZDoom as an upstream.

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QZDoom master race reporting in! I think it's fine if there's one port that provides both software and GL options for players.

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Spectre01 said:

QZDoom master race reporting in! I think it's fine if there's one port that provides both software and GL options for players.



PrBoom+ has the GLBoom executable for OpenGL rendering.

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Yep, Zandronum also has a Software mode. It makes sense that a purely Software port becomes obsolete when there are very similar ones with more features.

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All things have to come to an end eventually... and what an amazing run it has been for ZDoom.

Sucks, but totally understandable.

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What makes you think this is the end of the world? ZDoom has spawned 3 child ports which are all alive and well and continue to be developed. The main issue here is that the name ZDoom is owned by Randi so the current ports cannot use it.

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Well, the topic title sounds overly dramatic perhaps. Even though it's technically correct.

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Graf Zahl said:

What makes you think this is the end of the world? ZDoom has spawned 3 child ports which are all alive and well and continue to be developed. The main issue here is that the name ZDoom is owned by Randi so the current ports cannot use it.

More than three I think :) But I agree, this sounds more like a changing of the guards than the end of the world. As long as you and the QZDoom devs are on good terms and working together (and it sounds like you are) then it seems like things will probably just continue as normal.

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It saddens me a great deal to see ZDoom go. It might sound a bit strange, but ZDoom was my first Doom source-port and I've seen it grow quite a bit throughout the years before I finally registered on the forums.

With that said, I do think that with Graf and his team the future of ZDoom-forks is in good hands.

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Sad to see it go. ZDoom is a legendary source port, the first I ever downloaded. Best of luck to Randi and his future endeavors!

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fraggle said:

More than three I think :)

In all fairness, ZDaemon doesn't exactly do anything to further the *ZDoom capabilities, and Odamex does literally the exact opposite of that. You can't really count them in this sort of context.

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For those that are worried, GZDoom now works with ARM, and is actually *faster* than ZDoom. I recommend compiling with clang 3.9, and using the software renderer (obviously). You can do this by typing (without quotes) "+set vid_renderer 0" on the command line. the framerates are so much higher.

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Arctangent said:

In all fairness, ZDaemon doesn't exactly do anything to further the *ZDoom capabilities, and Odamex does literally the exact opposite of that. You can't really count them in this sort of context.

The only point I was making was that ZDoom has spawned many child ports over the years:

ZDoomGL
GZDoom
CSDoom
Skulltag
ZDaemon
Zandronum
Odamex
QZDoom

Those are just the ones I can name OTOH. Some of those are dead now, and of those which are alive, not all of them are keeping in sync with current ZDoom development. But ZDoom's codebase has certainly led to a garden of different derivative source ports.

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fraggle said:

The only point I was making was that ZDoom has spawned many child ports over the years:

ZDoomGL
GZDoom
CSDoom
Skulltag
ZDaemon
Zandronum
Odamex
QZDoom

Those are just the ones I can name OTOH. Some of those are dead now, and of those which are alive, not all of them are keeping in sync with current ZDoom development. But ZDoom's codebase has certainly led to a garden of different derivative source ports.



Obviously there have been other ones. But I said '3 ports which are alive and well and continue to be developed'. If you add 'are kept in sync', it's really just GZDoom, QZDoom and Zandronum which remain.

The rest is either dead or does no longer sync, so for the current situation they are not really relevant.

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takensorryuser said:

Since GzDoom now works with ARM... would it be possible to port this over to the Raspberry Pi 3?

Yes. Based on conversations between Csonicgo and Eruanna, I believe it's actually already possible to compile *ZDoom for the RasPi, but you need to disable a few things.

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The topic title does seem a bit dramatic. Its not the end of ZDoom. Plenty ports aren't very actively developed and some of them dont receive updates for years. You can still download them and they are still used by plenty people and some of them aren't even faulty or anything. I dont think the ZDoom community is at any risk of being severely hurt by this considering how booming and rife with content it is. ZDoom transcended many boundaries that most Doom source ports have, and initiated the growth of many other actively developed source ports that followed in its footsteps. The legacy of ZDoom will live for a very long time.

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I remember "death" of Edge source port. Some other people bring the development under another name and so on. Open source can bring endless life if people interested.

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ZDoom is such an icon. I could hear my grandma saying, ZDoom.

What I'm worried about is people making QZDoom maps with OGL that don't work in software mode.

At any rate, I can see the convenience of using one port as opposed to two. Good luck to all involved. ...and thank you for years and years of jumping, crouching, freelook and all that has always been ZDoom.

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Well this was an interesting turn of events, although I don't think it really means much of anything. Take a look at Boom and it's feature set that we still use today. It was superceded by PrBoom, and now GZDoom will functionally replace ZDoom.

Also, as long as ZDoom remains open source, can it really actually "die"?

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everennui said:

ZDoom is such an icon. I could hear my grandma saying, ZDoom.

What I'm worried about is people making QZDoom maps with OGL that don't work in software mode.



Uh, people have been making OGL maps for GZDoom for the last 10 years...

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EarthQuake said:

Also, as long as ZDoom remains open source, can it really actually "die"?


If it stops being used a "foundation" for new ZDoom-derivative ports because development on it ceases, there's a risk of them diverging into incompatible branches, having differences in areas such as the scripting engine, the gameplay etc., simply because there will no longer be a common template that dictates the minimum feature set for everybody, at least for a while.

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Open source rarely actually dies. ZDoom is survived by GZDoom and QZDoom (actually, I'd hope the former gets to take over the ZDoom name, but that's not my decision...), both of which are alive and well, and well deserving as the new base ports.

I don't follow it very well, but from what I gathered, GZDoom is already being treated as QZDoom's upstream. Sounds good to me.

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chungy said:

I don't follow it very well, but from what I gathered, GZDoom is already being treated as QZDoom's upstream. Sounds good to me.


QZDoom is more or less an experimental testbed for refactoring the software renderer. Once that part is complete there's really no reason to keep two ports around, but right now all that experimentation would just get in the way of organized stable releases.

The reasons for keeping ZDoom and GZDoom separate had nothing to do with the desire to keep two ports, but to keep control of my own release schedule, which was far less sparse than ZDoom's. From an organizational standpoint it was a shitty way to do stuff.

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I'm not seeing a negative to this. Randi's interest in ZDoom has obviously waned over time and it seems like in the last few years she was, quite frankly, more of a hindrance than a help. The official ZDoom releases were so few and far between they were meaningless. We've lost literally nothing since GZDoom is a super-set of ZDoom. Graf Zahl seems to have been the de-facto head of development anyway, only without the authority to bless things as Official(tm).

That said, Randi's work over the years was amazing and the effort it takes to work on something like this in your free time for as long as she did was monumental. I'm very, very grateful she decided to cleanly end it and not just gradually let it fade into nothingness which would have been much worse for the community.

It would be kinda cool if she released the name too, so the eventual merger of GZDoom and QZDoom can be called ZDoom 3.0 or something. The name still has a lot of value as a brand even if it rationally doesn't change anything.

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