Xeriphas1994

Wow. A post and a like seem totally inadequate to this moment. I hope AndyO never regrets the decision and now has time to do things long delayed. DSDA exemplifies the ideal goal of a database, which is bringing humans together. I don't know if maintainers think about that while debugging on weekends. :> But Doom speedrunning is still a community after 25 years because of people like AndyO, who have worked and worked to ensure things are preserved after the original thread is buried and sharing links break. P.S. LOL @ the previous news update being the launch.

There is a project to add Perdition's Gate and Hell 2 Pay to /idgames: see here and here. @Jon, this would be amazing if you could complete it, but I do recognize your TODO spans the observable universe already. :>

Oh man, DMADDS. I remember downloading that from Doomworld, hoping it would fix some horribly buggy shovelware level I was playing.

FWIW: What about an API query that takes the md5 (or 8.3 filename perhaps) of a WAD and returns its ID? For the bot, that means a one-time code update to replace Andy's IDs, then subsequent runs make two passes, one to retrieve the IDs and one to get the records. If the IDs later change again (backend upgrade or whatever), it keeps working. As a bonus, it could prevent associating a demo with the wrong version of a megawad.

Unless you want to patch the source yourself and recompile, I'm guessing you don't. CnDoom and Crispy have a millisecond timer.

According to me, the Extra Large version is 9.91GB compressed, 24.32GB uncompressed. The OP is correct that it appears to include large chunks of other sites (e.g. Fandom Wolfenstein). In theory, this is not necessary because backups are available elsewhere, but I understand the advantage of making this self-contained, and with all embedded content visible immediately.

March 30, 1994: DEU 5.0b4 is released, launching the era of vanilla modding. It's hard to picture the internet being small, but it was. Faced with a technical problem, the count of community members with tools, time, coding skill, and great ideas might be zero! So you waited, checking store shelves, playing Tetris and E3M6 again. Suddenly life changed and there were new maps. Pour one out for the developers -- everything achieved by reverse engineering and with lawsuits being seriously discussed. Carmack and Romero may have brought strong ideals to the workplace but, like anyone else, were overruled. It's also hard to imagine content being scarce, but it was (especially if paying by the minute). Each precious file was grabbed and worn out, without first comparing it against the entire world. Yes, I thought AURORA1 was bold and inventive. You learned to get around bugs too, instead of posting rants: the author might not spend much time on the internet, and your local shaman couldn't figure out that special effect or subroutine. Nowadays, strict vanilla is a regular practice for few, but I hope everyone can agree with Peter Gabriel: it was a healthy part of growing up. Further, a hundred scripted megawads can be googled in 0.7 seconds, and haters are only a tap away for your WIP, so are people too intimidated to release small works in 2019? That would make me sad. Does anyone play 1994 levels who missed this period entirely? :D What do you like about them?

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat! Someone actually figured this out without getting firewalled? Amazing. At last we're on the road to distributed backups of irreplaceable history.

Are these what you want?

Oh, I wish that were true! When this project completes, I hope Ling will make scrapes available so I can start transcribing everything.

Last I checked, 90% of these were missing too (ignoring doomworld.com as a special case).

Here are the Wayback Machine links currently on doomwiki.org. It would be wonderful to have a backup like this, since nothing lasts forever (my reading of the Internet Archive FAQ is that it's already on borrowed time, but others disagree). If you're able to investigate other archiving services, this plus this is more comprehensive, though you have to click around a bit to find the original URLs. Hope that helps!

Presumably the same way other games were beat in the 1990s. But for Doom levels specifically, even back then some editors had visual modes and search functions, in case you got completely stuck. (If you didn't have internet, it might take a few trips to the computer shop to find an app you liked.)

Please see here for complete instructions.

Logic? The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three are timeless. Action platforming? Some people still like Bio-Menace (check the credits for a possible explanation). You didn't specify the OS, so I'll also mention System's Twilight and Bill the Demon for posterity.

It doesn't. doomwiki.org has always assumed that port development requires sustained effort and significant skill, therefore any project that even reaches a beta release should be documented for posterity. If someone wants to put in the time to update the history narrative and links, then they'll be updated. (inb4 Quasar: "for completeness the genealogy boxes should also be double-checked" :> If I'm misunderstanding you, feel free to post here so the details can be worked out.

Unless someone knocks on our door with a team of consultants and an endowment, nothing that's hard to imagine. (See posts by Quasar in this thread.) All access from the EU would be blocked, and that's assuming MancuNET's hosting provider doesn't respond even more drastically.

Infinite Imp Theorem: every possible vanilla trick, no matter how brilliant, was already done by accident in a shovelware map.

FWIW I agree, and by the same reasoning, I hope you aren't actually considering List of notable WADs fair game for article creation (as your earlier post comes close to implying). That list is a wiki page like any other -- anyone can add anything, and if it's related to Doom and matches the existing table formatting, it will be approved. It might help to remember that the title used to be "List of WADs" (per our archaic written rule that says anything publicly available is notable), and it was renamed in advance of a planned discussion to hammer out a notability guideline, which fizzled out with no definite conclusions.

Well, the text file later turned up here, if that helps.

I think this should be a sticky because it comes up multiple times per month. (Examples found in 10 minutes with my scrollwheel: 1 2 3 4 5). Of course the answers given would be broad; someone could still start a thread about E2-themed slaughter minisodes with Halo-style shields and TNT textures. Best Doom mods is a very common search term on the wiki, also, though our current article is only a beginning.

TNT31.WAD and scripts for quick -recordfromto launching. :>

Thanks to @Xymph and @Eris Falling for patching my sloppy language. (Anyone who reads the bot threads on the wiki knows this isn't a new thing...) #7 says "appear" because I hadn't clicked every single link to check the WAD formats, so I suspected I might miss something. In the time it took me to post, Eris and others then added a mass of new DM content. DM content makes me very happy, FWIW, because it's been the single biggest hole in the wiki since ever. Even red links are rare, which is why it's not a category above. Yes, I understand that actual DMing is more fun than researching and writing about it. :> Xymph is totally correct about the custom things, and I do intend to help with them -- it seems wrong that the more creative a mapper was in the 1990s, the less likely the map is to have data! (I swear I understood all that frame table stuff at some point, even though I only used it to document id's contributions.)

This has been mentioned repeatedly, so I made a thread. What follows is mostly my opinion, but if anyone wants to pitch in and help, I hope I can save you some confusion and redundant effort. First, for clarity, this is a machine-generated document with no human input. (You don't submit topics for approval on the wiki; you can just start a page, even without an account.) Like any automatic list, it can be immensely labor-saving, but you also have to think a bit before bum-rushing it; the database server has no common sense. :> Things that people should do 1. Newfangled Doom gameplay/universe Examples: Kinetic mine; Automap; Argent Breach; Demon Destruction 2. Person articles (modern) Examples: Getsu Fune; joe-ilya; gaspe; Looper Mappers have been near the top lately, owing to the flood of megawad writeups (two links per person per slot). In fairness, the caveat for WADs also applies: there is no standing agreement that everyone on every high-profile release is automatically notable. OTOH someone might map only occasionally, yet deserve an article for other community contributions (port developer, musician, stream/podcast host, ...). 3. WADs and mods (overview pages) Examples: RTC-3057; Skulldash; Blade of Agony; Rip It, Tear It, Smash It!; Strife: Absolute Order If you include links to individual maps, please ensure the names are exactly right (including capitalization) so that XymphBot can detect them easily. Things that people should do, but only if they have tons of patience and access to offline sources 4. Person articles (historical) Examples: Haggay Niv; Daniel Lindgren; Phoebus; Rand Phares Crowdsourcing is most important here. Primary material is almost gone (old forums, Usenet, personal websites) and even Quasar is not an expert across all time periods and community divisions, so we can only proceed by pooling everyone's memory. COMPET-N runners are an especially tough case, some having numerous links (one per record) yet a largely private existence due to the more competitive atmosphere back then. 5. General community history/expanded universe Examples: doom2.net; Totally Unauthorized Guide to Doom II; cdrom.com 6. Technical history Examples: RMB; LMPC; AmigaDoom; GetWAD; Savegame slots 5 and 6 corrupt other files This is separate because the research is highly specialized. You often have to read through code to understand what's going on, documentation and context being quite sparse after all these years. Some knowledge of 1990s network architecture (yikes) is occasionally helpful as well. Things that people should probably not do I say "probably" because this is an all-volunteer project. No one, including moderators, should tell you not to do something if it improves the site and you enjoy it. You can even create map pages if you strongly desire them; the bot operator is also a volunteer, and as awesome as he is, he doesn't have unlimited resources for us. Be warned however that it requires punishing attention to detail, a bargeload of time, and that you can feel satisfied by the act of pasting and saving all by itself (because you normally get no feedback whatsoever, especially on older maps). I thought I had those things, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Anyway. 7. WADs and mods (individual maps) These appear to be non-vanilla formats that XymphBot can't handle yet. It is gradually learning to do so. While I never wish to take Xymph's hard work for granted, we have seen that once tested, the bot can process maps with incredible accuracy, even more so than previous editors who used scripts. Development is intentionally a slow, careful process because we want to avoid ever dragooning humans into a large cleanup (which is extremely demoralizing, as Wikipedia editors can tell you). All that said, heavily scripted mods may be an exception. It's hard to imagine any bot able to parse arbitrary control structures across all known executable versions! Please feel free to expand Community Is Falling 3 or Urban Brawl, for example. 8. Names linked once from a talk page or noticeboard IME these are almost always brainstorming and speculation, not serious to-dos. A few turn out to be important, but at first glance it's difficult to tell the blue goo from the gray, especially with historical topics. I don't think it harms us to leave them on the list pending a more complete discussion thread. The exception to this and #9 is a page that once existed, but was deleted. It is so difficult to delete anything that you can assume it was complete garbage, and shouldn't be linked. (Even then it makes me anxious, because I'm editing other people's signed posts.) 9. Non-mainspace pages Linking to hypothetical discussions seems like overkill to me, but it's true that newbies have difficulty finding them, and sometimes don't even realize that a template or image can have a talk page. MediaWiki has open bugs to filter maintenance lists by namespace, like the search feature does, which would avoid all this clutter. 10. Typos and sabotage Some are obvious, yes, but some are actually a bit tricky without experience of MediaWiki's infrastructure -- it's easy to accidentally replace one typo with another. Unless you know what you're doing, please spare yourself the stress. I personally have yet to see blatant vandalism in the link list itself (per the IRC conversation), so I guess the last round was already cleaned up by the time I returned. Yay!