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sponge

Doom 2 Tournament at QuakeCon

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Figure I'd throw this out here for those who aren't following, but we're running a little Doom 2 tournament at QuakeCon this year:

http://www.quakecon.org/2013/06/quakecon-tourney-update/

I haven't really been involved with the Doom/Doomworld community since I was around 12 years old or so as the posts in my post history probably indicate (I'm too afraid to look at how embarrassing they are) but for anyone who's in the Dallas area, this might be a good year to come by and check it out. I'm pretty excited to see how this goes, since we've never ran the original Doom games as tournament games.

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Awesome! If only I had spare cash to fly my ass out to Quakecon I'd so be in on this. Hope everything goes well! Be sure to record the matches!

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hey Quakelive Sponge.

can you tell us what mode (duell, tdm, cft) and what port (original, zdaemon, zandronum) will be played?

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please get chewy there or the tourney doesn't matter. D:

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I am posting for JKist:

Hey sponge,

running doom at quakecon is a great idea! you might not be aware but doom has a high level competitive scene.  Here are a few examples if you want to see it in action:

http://www.justin.tv/kblair/b/284941711

http://www.justin.tv/kblair/videos?page=2

http://www.twitch.tv/red_nexus/videos?page=3

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4020770

The quakecon news has stirred a lot of interest.  FYI, depending on the details of this tournament, people living far away from the dallas area are thinking of attending.

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I live in Canada, and am highly considering going depending on the information that comes out.

Which version, vanilla/port, which maps, is it duel etc. are some important questions to be answered.

I would definitely like to book my flights as early as possible.

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I am also considering attending as well depending on the details regarding the platform and game mode. It's only a 3 and a half hour drive from here. : )

I'm quite positive that it'll be a duel tournament and I'll have to start playing and practicing again. The sooner the details come out, the better it is for all the folks with long distance travel plans.

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I also am considering attending but, like others, I don't have that much interest if the tournament is going to be treated like a scrubby joke event. Even though it's Quakecon, I hope that you guys at least run a tournament respectful of what is commonly used in the current competitive community. We don't have hundreds of top level players, but we do have standards that go back many years like the communities for qw/q2/etc have. We also have a pretty dedicated group of players that takes winning at this ancient game seriously.

I, personally, would like to see it run on Odamex (current engine used by the oldest and most successful Doom league of all time) and for it to have a fairly classic rule set similar to what is used by the current players. What I don't want to see is Zandronum, which is barely Doom at all, played with a bunch of weird settings on bad maps. As someone else said to me earlier, "it [would be] like announcing a quakelive duel tournament.. and running Instagib Duel on dm17..."

The Doom community is old but the skill level continues to increase in competition. If it ran with the right settings, it wouldn't be surprising to see a congregation of the continent's top players together for the first time in a long time (to whoop some n00b quake players' asses)!

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I'm from Dallas and have plans to attend this year. I'll have to look into this!

EDIT: This is going to be BYOC, isn't it? Because in that case, I'm out. I'm an extremely clumsy, forgetful and irresponsible person and should not be dragging a computer around.

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I think Ralphis hit the nail on the head. I help run the ZDDL which is the top 1v1 doom competition in North America

http://cdevastation.com/zddl/

You can use it as an example of how doom is competitively played nowadays. The league started a number of years ago when the competitive standard in doom was zdaemon 1.08, but don’t be fooled by the name. We plan to run our next season on Odamex. ZDaemon 1.09 has been abandoned by the competitive community for a variety of reasons, and skulltag/zandronum has never been taken seriously. Odamex on the other hand is a port by the players for the players, and fully supports top competition.

Ralphis is completely correct that this game has a very hardcore following. In addition to many of the top North American players who are considering attending, a few Europeans have mentioned they are trying to scrape together money to attend this event if it looks promising. None of these players North American or European have sponsors that cover travel and hotel costs, yet many still want to attend for an event which few are predicting to have a sufficiently large prize. This says a lot about how serious the players are in this game and the type of event you could have if run correctly.

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That's a great write-up by Alexmax. And a good map-pool too.

As was stated by JKist and Ralphis, the platforms that mimic real classic doom to the highest level are generally Odamex and ZDaemon. They have newer features to help with playing like callvote etc, while not effecting gameplay.

Chocolate-doom is another interesting option, which mimics doom2.exe perfectly, but unfortunately doesn't have good features for spectating/callvoting last I checked.

I think Odamex would be a great option for a competitive LAN tournament.

I must admit I am a bit concerned, if there is going to be a doom tournament with reasonable settings/gamemode etc. I will 100% be travelling there from Canada. But being so close to the tournament date, with no details announced, and the BYOC already sold-out it seems, what options are there? I see the site says that normally all walk-ins can find a seat, but is this always the case?

You're running a tournament that most likely has generated more interest from top doom players than you expected, many players from around the world are now ready to travel for this tournament. It's a great thing in my eyes that you've not forgotten about DooM, and hopefully all this interest shows how serious the community is about participating in a great tournament, even though the game is 20 years old.

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not to delve into politics: don't pick boo and pobla8 from alexmax's maplist, they're overrated bad maps. especially boo has no place in a decent, self-respecting map pool - it is broken and imbalanced.

(also stay the hell away from zandronum as a port of choice for 1on1, heh. it is broken and imbalanced. oops!)

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Hello Sponge!

I will not stoop so low as to defame and attack other ports to influence your decision. Instead I would strongly advise you to stay away from all client server multiplayer ports (Odamex, ZDaemon, Zandronum) to not become a pawn in a stupid port war.

Since the Doom 2 tournament will be played on LAN, there is no need for a client/server port. Instead, I'd go with chocolate doom to stay faithful to the original game, to sidestep the hassle to set it up correctly, and to not get involved in politics.

Regarding ZDaemon 1.09 not being supported by some "competitive" people: We removed a rendering option that was not present in the original game and we considered a cheat. Namely, to disable the weapon being drawn on screen. This changes oldschool gameplay in vertical maps significantly. We offered to allow it only for mouse look enabled servers, but were told it is 'useless' in that case, which amplified our suspicions regarding its usage. The competitive scene is still active as can be seen here and here.

To put some of the other posts into context I would like to mention that Ralphis is the Project Lead of Odamex and Alexmax is an Odamex Programmer.

Whatever you decide on I wish you guys a lot of fun at the Quakecon and it is great to see classic doom receive some recognition again and a bit of a revival. In the end the doom community as a whole will benefit from this tourney.

Full disclosure - Kilgore and I are ZDaemon developers.

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Like Phenex said, I don't really plan to delve into idiotic politics in this thread but I have to ask them an important question:

Seeing as how you've banned almost all of the top players in North America, will you ban all of Quakecon's ips when you see Ralphis versus jkist3 (two players you've banned for political reasons mind you) in the finals? With some minor Zandronum exceptions, ZDaemon is the only engine that does this sort of thing.

I cannot recommend Chocolate Doom only because its ease of use and lack of relevant features. Even if the QCon tournament were to use Odamex, Zandronum, or ZDaemon, all three of those will offer an experience to attendees and hosts that will make much more sense to them with their client/server structure. All three of those engines have basic c/s features that allow players to browse a server list to check who is playing, scoreboards, fraglimits, timelimits, spectate, etc. Chocolate Doom has none of these and some people unfamiliar with the game's deathmatch mode will become frustrated very quickly. Chocolate Doom is a great engine made by a great dude, but definitely not the right choice for this event.

And some extra disclosure - I am a project lead on Odamex. I, along with many ZDaemon players who started the project in 2005, work on the project because we believed in a different path.

However, when it comes to talking about the subject of tournaments and actually playing the game of Doom, the difference between my opinion and yours is that I'm one of the top players in the northern hemisphere over the past decade. I've also been involved in running the most successful Doom tournaments and leagues of all-time. There's a very real possibility that top players like myself, JKist, Devastation, and a number of other high level players (details pending) attend this event so I think that opinions from people like us are pretty valuable.


Non-Quakecon Related Edit. Don't read the following if you don't care about stupid things unrelated to Quakecon or playing the game:

Kilgore asked:
Why don't you tell people the truth? that your beef with ZDaemon is purely political in that you tried to impose your will over the developers (it started with a ban that your pal Ralphis didn't like), and when this didn't work, you started this jihad of yours? wasn't that Odamex's only reason of existence?


Odamex's pre-GPL repo dates back to the Summer of 2005 when a collection of individuals (me, deathz0r, Toke, Russell, manc, Alexmax, and others) decided to do something different (have a GPL multiplayer engine) when you closed the source to your engine, ZDaemon, in July 2005. I was banned, by you, in the Spring of 2006 after contacting id about GetWad. Odamex was started to offer a major GPL source port in the multiplayer scene, not for a "jihad".

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I agree that delving into politics was a poor choice, and may end up confusing. There is definitely a lot of research that the organizers need to do in order to make an informed decision. And it's not a light task to do in such a short time.

If we're listing credentials, I have played competitive doom since 2001, playing on the natural doom2.exe and learning there. I've played what I believe to be every relevant port (ZDooM, ZDaemon, prboom, Skulltag/Zandronum, Odamex, Chocolate-doom), and have played competitively on Odamex/ZDaemon primarily. I have been involved in running huge big tournaments (ZDDL, And LAN tournaments), and have attended a few internationally attended LAN's in Washington DC and Toronto.

As much as I would prefer as a player to see chocolate-doom, as it mimics doom2.exe perfectly and the experience will be the same, I do agree with Ralphis. It will make it more difficult for those players not familliar with doom.

Similar to this approach is simply describing how to run DOSbox and doom2.exe v1.91 over LAN. This will also cause confusion for people not familliar with doom however.

The next best client/server options that are heavily populated, and would be familliar to all players based on server list, scoreboard etc. are ZDaemon, Odamex and Zandronum.

I believe Zandronum should be taken out of that equation for the simple reason that if you're looking for a doom tournament, you want a port that can actually play doom as closely as possible to the original. Both Odamex and ZDaemon have features/flags that can make it true to the original gameplay, unfortunately Zandronum does not have this. Zandronum's core physics have been manipulated over time, to the point where even on it's closest settings it will be different and "off".

So it comes down to Odamex and ZDaemon (remember this is my opinion!). I cannot make an informed decision on which should be used.

I have not played Odamex on LAN, where I have played an older version of ZDaemon on LAN.

Odamex can play doom2.exe demos perfectly, displaying the correctness of the physics/features.

ZDaemon has been more heavily populated over the past 10 years, Odamex is new on the port scene.

Successful competitive tournaments, with very high level play has been played on both Odamex and ZDaemon.

I hope this post brings more to the table in order for Quakecon to make an informed decision on how to run their tournament. I try to not be biased in my post by politics.

Good luck to Quakecon, it'll be fun, and I look forward to attending.

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Wow, a Doom 2 tournament? Incredible! I live on the other side of the planet so I probably won't be there, but this is awesome news nonetheless.

To echo some points made earlier, I sincerely hope this isn't treated like some little dumb game from yester-year having a joke tournament, but thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case. (Which is excellent! Makes me wish I could get there that much worse..)

Also, I'm sure all of your oldschoolers know that it is possible to run the Vanilla executables with networking enabled on most any system these days - I'm quite frankly pretty surprised that anything else is being considered, and this is coming from a lover of all ports regardless of the direction they've taken. I've never been on the cempetitive scene, but I've always been lurking in the shadows of the community, and I really wouldn't understand picking any one port over the vanilla executables, because then accuracy of emulation is a non-issue. (Now, If only DOS Box was truly flawless.. But still. I'd pick that over a port any day for a real Deathmatch. I really wish there was some way to get a DOSBox vanilla master server up or someshi, but I know that's just a pipedream, likely for technical reasons I can't wrap my feeble mind around.)

EDIT: I suppose use of a source port is being considered for newer players who are less familiar with the old network Doom setup.. But I'm fairly sure they'd all be wiped off quickly regardless of things like that. :P

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phenex2 said:

If it is supposed to be a classic doom tourney i dont see what features are missing from choco doom that people had in classic doom tourneys when they played doom2.exe. It is different when ctf is supposed to be played, but I doubt there will be enough players for such a tourney.


Like I said to someone earlier, I guess it's great if you want to enroll most of the tournament players in a class the morning before and teach them about how to play the game under 1990s rules, like "DON'T HIT THE EXIT SWITCH BEFORE YOU REACH THE FRAGLIMIT". It isn't going to be fun in a room of hundreds of people if others want to watch and know what is actually happening. If they want to cast this tournament or anything like that, doing it in vanilla itself just doesn't make sense in 2013 (and I'm probably one of the only deathmatchers left that prefers playing vanilla over anything else).

Other than that, it's all good homes! Everyone will find out soon enough what the Quakecon guys are gonna do. Until then, hail to the king baby ;]

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I will (most likely) attend as long as we don't play something like ReMooD. It isn't very expensive to go, and I think this type of tournament needs a good group of dedicated, active competitive doomers to make it worth having again in the future.

I don't think it really matters what port we play. As long as it isn't ReMooD. Did I already say that?

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I will take this moment to state I hope you pick a good curveball map so players will be on equal ground when it comes to getting prepared for the tournament. Having map01 or a map like Dwango5 01 will be a snooze fest and the spectators will resort to counting the tiles on the floor to pass time. I will whore out staph1.wad as a potential candidate since it was created with old school game play in mind and it was not made in the stone age aka the 90s.


Unrelated:

[removed to keep thread on topic]

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In my opinion, I highly suggest not taking the vanilla route. Ralphis pretty much nailed it on the head.

Deathmatch has evolved greatly over the last two decades and the Doom community has done an excellent job of keeping the gameplay up to date, yet preserved the game's original mechanics well. With a modern source port like Odamex or ZDaemon, you get that compromise between the old and the new with many options.

I look at this event as an opportunity to breath some new life into this community, as well as a chance to dust-off some of the communities rock stars to show some of these newfangled kids how DM is done. However, the original engines multiplayer setup has become dated and I don't feel it's going to win the hearts of the modern tournament players. I know this becasue, well, even though I've played this game since my single digits, I don't like going the vanilla rout when playing multiplayer becasue ports like ZDaemon has spoiled me.

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Well shit, I really wanna go to QuakeCon now, but can't afford it this year. Good luck to participants!

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I think it would help Sponge if the options he has are clarified:

So if you want a strictly vanilla oldschool doom tournament:

Go with Chocolate doom - a windows port that nearly perfectly resembles the original vanilla doom executable behavior.

OR you could even get a set of old nineties computers running DOS, and run DOOM2.exe directly on that (might be a little tricky to set up though).

Or, you could also use dosbox, although I have no idea how reliable lan gaming is using dosbox.

If you want to maintain the oldschool behavior, but desire more modern features to make it more palatable to modern gamers (such as higher resolutions, client server architecture, advanced mapping features and different game modes etc..):

Go with Odamex or ZDaemon, it probably does not matter much at all which of these you go with as they are fairly similar in many respects. Other comments in this thread can provide more detail as to their differences if you are interested.

I should also note that if you want to attract the very best talent from the doom community in the US (and possibly elsewhere) to have a serious and highly competitive doom tournament, then this would be your best option.

If you are not concerned too much about recreating vanilla doom precisely, and just want something fun and accessible to modern gamers:

Go with Zandronum, it has lots of rendering options and modern features capable of modernizing the experience significantly. You can also still set it, with the right compatibility flags, to be fairly close to vanilla gameplay if you would prefer, although of course it will not quite be as close to original doom gameplay as ports like Odamex or Zdaemon can be.

With the options clarified, I hope this helps you with the organization of the tournament and any difficult decisions regarding such.

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On topic: Over a dozen IDL players have verbally expressed serious interest in attending today so that's exciting, going as far as starting to make hotel arrangements with each other. Hoping it comes to fruition

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"DOOM tournament cancelled on account of massive source port flamewar."

Not really, but seriously, come on people.

I'd be nervous about using programs based on educational-use-only, no-commercial-exploitation licenses at any event that has an entry fee, though. Depending on the individual license terms, it may or may not be legal. Zandronum and ZDaemon are both burdened with such licenses, whereas Odamex is free software. Perhaps something to consider.

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The non-commercial-use-only restriction is one of the primary reasons IDL pushed to get away from ZDaemon. It's not just entry fees, it's selling swag and advertising too (which QuakeCon does in spades). You can't setup a Lion King viewing where you charge admission and sell concessions; you can't use BUILD code where you charge an entry fee and sell t-shirts. It's really not complicated, but it is a huge, fatal drawback.

Odamex has great netcode (much better than Chocolate Doom - no freezing because of sync). Odamex is totally free, open, and unencumbered. Odamex has tournament features. Anyone is free to setup an Odamex server or join a game without agreeing to some onerous TOS agreement, and no tournament administrator has to worry about banlists or whether Player Registration works or not. For example, could I register for QuakeCon if it used ZDaemon? What about Ralphis?

I simply wouldn't consider anything else.

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I think Odamex is the clear winner. Zandronum has troubles with input lag (the sort that can cause the game to fail to register a shot) and ZDaemon requires registration to a server not all all participants can access. Oda's whole intent is to serve up classic, old-school multiplayer goodness anyway, so it's a right fit there.

Also, it's great to see so many folks interested in flying all the way to Texasland for this. I'll still most probably definitely attend and participate, even though it's astronomically clear how badly my ass is going to get kicked. :P

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Quasar said:

I'd be nervous about using programs based on educational-use-only, no-commercial-exploitation licenses at any event that has an entry fee, though. Depending on the individual license terms, it may or may not be legal. Zandronum and ZDaemon are both burdened with such licenses, whereas Odamex is free software. Perhaps something to consider.

I'm not sure the non-commercial clause is applicable to tournaments. Strictly speaking the EULA for almost every game includes a non-commercial clause, but they're used for tournaments nonetheless.

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Blzut3 said:

I'm not sure the non-commercial clause is applicable to tournaments. Strictly speaking the EULA for almost every game includes a non-commercial clause, but they're used for tournaments nonetheless.

Usually based on the fact that all the participants have paid their license fee for the game, and the game sold with its ability to netplay as an advertised included feature of what you were getting for that payment.

IANAL, of course, but it seems to me that the terms of commercial exploitation could be construed to include public exhibition and event organization where the product is a central attraction. If you don't have the money to hire a lawyer who can tell you yes or no for sure, would you rather take the chance or the sure thing?

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It will be incredible if the tournament was hosted on odamex or zdaemon considering the high amount of skilled duel players from both those ports. The tournament that day would be totally ultimate for the multiplayer community.

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