We need convenience

yo i'll map for a vanilla fork

I think all the unpleasantness surrounding Doom Legacy made a certain developer a bit too jumpy.

That said, I don't think it's very important to improve engine compatibility of Freedoom maps, because Freedoom seems to struggle as it is. Producing something that doesn't look like a Frankenstein monster cobbled together from old amateur assets and new less amateur assets is the most important thing. Whether the resulting wad is Boom-compatible or an 3DGE exclusive won't matter all that much, as long as it allows you to play vanilla PWADs (without cringing your face off).

esselfortium said:

For once I'm going to agree with wesley (!) and say that I think a fork of Freedoom would be a great idea. It's probably the only way at this point to clear out all the ancient stuff and junk tradition, and get some creative direction and new leadership in the project.

Most of the base assets for PWAD compatibility already exist and are "good enough", so it would make a good base to fork Freedoom to be a new game (something without "Free" or "Doom" in its title) with new levels and its own stylistic identity based on raymoohawk's artwork. The PWAD-compat stuff can stay as-is since it's already there, and the focus can be on making the built-in campaign itself worthwhile and unique.

I think this could be a great project, and I'd go to the extent of saying that if it has sufficient momentum I'd support seeing it replace Freedoom entirely.

Personally I'd support handing off the entire project to new maintainers, throwing out any or all of the existing resources, throwing out all our existing procedures, and even alienating existing contributors if in the end it meant a better Freedoom. And really that's all that should matter. It's obvious the project could be improved a lot.

The only thing that I'd ask is that any such fork (or change in direction) remain open source licensed. I know from past discussions with you that this is something you don't personally agree with or perhaps understand the need for (coming at this from the direction of an artist rather than a programmer). But the goal of Freedoom from the start has been to create a game that's entirely freely licensed. Without that one feature the whole thing in my eyes becomes a waste of time because we end up back at step 1.

Freedoom is BSD licensed so there's nothing I can do to stop you from making a fork that isn't open source - all I can do is politely ask you to consider that this one aspect really matters to others. But without it, it can only ever be a fork. I'd hope that we can reach some consensus that allows us to work together rather than as separate projects.

Nah, I do understand the reasoning for a freely-licensed project full of freely-licensed content.

It's disheartening, though, to see Freedoom content being ripped and sold by opportunists who had no involvement with it, and to my understanding there's no real way to deal with that other than by producing a better product and distributing it for free. Making Freedoom into something presentable that stands on its own two feet and has its own identity would be a big help there, in addition to the other obvious benefits.

As it is right now, it feels like regardless of intent, Freedoom's effective function is to be a pile of resources for other people, rather than to be something to play for its own sake. If Freedoom became something that could stand on its own rather than hiding in Doom's shadow, being a free resource would automatically become a useful secondary function instead of the main purpose of its existence. Or maybe I've got cause and effect mixed up there, but you get the idea :)

i'm fully with fraggle on this one. freedoom badly needs a reboot (and a vanilla one preferably), but only if it is to remain under the same license. in my case at least i dont think i'd want to continue my involvement in the project should it become closed source. i actually share JPL's vision of the doom engine making a come back in the indie scene and having a freely lisenced set of assets designed for the engine is part of making that vision a reality

that said i agree with essel that freedoom needs to be have it's own identity, but it can do so while maintaining pwad compatability and being free and open content

essel is there any way you could help us make freedoom a more cohesive whole?

esselfortium said:

Nah, I do understand the reasoning for a freely-licensed project full of freely-licensed content.

It's disheartening, though, to see Freedoom content being ripped and sold by opportunists who had no involvement with it, and to my understanding there's no real way to deal with that other than by producing a better product and distributing it for free.

Yep, and I totally understand why that's offputting for contributors such as you who might otherwise find a project like this very attractive.

I want to emphasize this because I'm not sure I did enough in my previous comment: to see someone of your stature talking about forking Freedoom to make something better is really, super-exciting to me. I would love to see what you could do with a project like this, having seen what you've done with eg. BTSX and other projects.

Ultimately Freedoom is an art project that deserves to be run by artists and I'm acutely aware that it's been run by programmers for far too long. I believe that's at the heart of most of its problems. We've seen some big improvements to the project over the past few years in terms of improvements in quality, but I think we need management changes to take it to the next level.

Whether the maps are vanilla, Boom or limit removing doesn't particularly matter to me as long as the end project is a better Freedoom.

The open source issue is the only red line I have. But I'd love to work with you on a project like this contributing what I can (Freedoom does have a significant amount of code associated with it, which is probably how it's been able to masquerade as a programming project for so long).

Why do we need a fork? What's wrong with refining one set of content?

@fraggle and raymoo:
I'm interested in, at the very least, cheerleading for you guys :)

I'm not entirely confident in what sort of commitment I could make beyond that, because my spare time isn't exactly what it used to be and I've already got plenty of project stuff on the table. I don't think I'd be an effective project leader, with that in mind. To effectively lead a big project IMO means being capable of doing basically everything yourself if it comes down to it. I don't want to be in a position where I'm just whining about the way things are without putting in the effort to change them.

I would be very interested in seeing such a project come to fruition, though, and it's great to know that you two are interested as well! So... tentatively maybe?

I would definitely approve of a Freedoom successor with better artistic and creative vision. One of the biggest problems really is the name (and it bugs me every time someone writes it as "FreeDoom" -- it highlights a serious issue with the conception people have of Freedoom). My biggest concern is the same as fraggle: that it remains open. Scalpers selling it on mobile platforms or what-have-you is an unfortunate consequence. I almost wonder if a copyleft license would alleviate that, but probably not; it's still trivial to legally sell copyleft programs/games without violating license (the engine is proof enough: it's GPLv2).

If I might say, the compatibility goal with Doom is also probably not that valuable. I'd rather see something (Freedoom or a fork of it) turn into a well-rounded game without the baggage of being compatible with Doom, which is also limiting it to feeling like a mere copy, no matter what kind of artistic directions might be taken so the graphics and story doesn't really resemble Doom, the level structure and game play will always give it away.

Getting rid of the compatibility target is definitely something I'm not willing to do with Freedoom (but I think a fork should). There's enough controversy over the engine target for the levels; I personally believe the project has been hurting by not being vanilla, but it still remains Boom-compat because of tradition (and also I can't edit levels in any significant capacity, that's not my skillset. would have to have more people onboard with converting/replacing levels for vanilla...).

The main reason for the last two paragraphs: Are there actually any contributors to Freedoom that don't also own Doom? Freedoom is sometimes highlighted in the free software and open source communities as a cool little game, but for those that don't play Doom, the PWAD compatibility probably doesn't matter to them anyway. If compatibility didn't exist, I really don't think buying Doom is a major hurdle nor any kind of ethical obstacle. A large part of the free software and open source mentality (both RMS and ESR have been vocal about it) is keeping users away from the harm built into the nature of proprietary software and services; rather than being at the mercy of someone else, it's entirely about empowering users with total control over their software, and preventing the abuse a developer can use over users through software.

Art doesn't have this issue. Yeah, it's nice for free art to exist, and Freedoom is an example of that. But at the same time, Doom is not difficult to obtain and even for the die-hard free software zealots that will not run proprietary software, you can buy it on GOG.com and extract it without running a single piece of such (yeah, it comes as a Windows EXE installer, but it can be extracted with innoextract. or just install it in Wine for the not-super-paranoid). Doom is a game, it's art, it can run under free engines just fine... I've kind of come to the opinion that asking people to pay a handful of dollars to play mods for it really isn't a tall order. With that opinion... it's hard to avoid thinking that some of the fundamental reasons Freedoom exists in the first place comes down to pointlessness.

I remember asking about the "vanilla" thing early on when I first joined, and the general response was "just because" and "we're not doing vanilla".

I'm glad that attitude is starting to change, and hopefully by lowering the requirements for levels to simply vanilla we can get closer to seeing a full set of levels for Phase 1 and Phase 2 that can actually be completed (in the sense of being able to play through all of them in one sitting, excluding secret levels).

As for the forks... why not just keep Phase 1 and 2, and create a Phase 3 for unique content? Have Phase 3 be its own project, with boom maps and different monsters, or whatever, but still have it linked somehow to Phase 1/2. It could be the "Doom 3" we always wanted, or something like that, and we'd still have Doom 1/2 compatibility (with Phase 1/2, not 3, of course).

Also, raymoohawk has single-handedly revamped most of the monsters, and I have to say "thanks" for that. I'm still hoping for a new "arch-vile" at some point, but I'm happy with what I've got so far.

Everyone else, thanks for your contributions to the project. I remember trying to play Freedoom something like 7-8 years ago, and it just plain sucked. It's like night and day now, and I hope things keep getting better.

edit: I love the compatibility aspect of Phase 1/2, BTW. It can pretty much function as a complete replacement for the Doom 1/2 IWADs now (it would be silly to throw away everything that has already been done). The only thing that might improve compatibility is if the maps were vanilla compatible so it could work with just about every Doom port, and not just the boom compatible ones.

Also, having a downloadable, free, unencumbered version of "Doom" available allows me to play Doom maps and mods at places where I may not necessarily have access to my genuine Doom IWADs, and I may not want to cough up money every single time I want to play it, and I do not want to torrent Doom. Freedoom offers a nice compromise. Besides, "pointless" or not, the vast majority of the work has already been done (to get it to a functional, stable point). While there may be room for improvement in some areas, it seems a bit harsh to essentially say that people have been working on a "pointless" project. I tend to think of Freedoom as a sort of Doom 1.5 and Doom 2.5, like what you'd get if Doom was constantly being updated over time, while still retaining compatibility with the old school stuff.

Greetings to all the participants!
I would like to express an opinion as a person does not play the original "DooM". I love opensource; so I was interested Freedoom, as well as the fact that I like the old-looking game. What did I know about the game is that the goal of developers - to make a game compatible with the doom-engine and mods. Is it bad? I think no. Freedoom is a great game and I want to play it more.
I tried to play freedom with mods: eternal and requiem: and I was not disappointed. Compatibility with mods expands horizons of small game with a small number of levels; freedoom turns to the whole world. This does not mean that freedoom is some non-self-project: no It is a complete game with its graphics and levels. And these are the components from release to release better.
The game has its own spirit, and probably the name no longer fits it. But why call it a FORK? The unique old-look game, boom-compatible - that's what I call freedoom.

I'm not opposed to unique content at all, or a name change, or a total style change. I just don't think a fork is necessary, I feel a reboot can simply be a change in direction within the current project. If there were two Freedooms, it would split efforts. Sure, they can borrow from one another, but why?

I think we should develop a unique texture set on top of the existing PWAD compatibility set and reskin the levels to not be so Doom-y. I support a name change as well, though I predict a lot of bikeshedding if the maintainers approve changing it and it's left open to discussion.

What would an ideal new name be, anyhow? What about Zam? (as in those Zamanthyte lizard creatures)

Regarding textures that weren't in DOOM2.WAD: I don't think it's a good idea. Even Final Doom stuff should've been kept separately. Not only you're getting a very poor substitute for Final Doom IWADs, you're also creating potential incompatibility: if someone will make a level using Freedoom 2 as a resource pack, it may not work with DOOM2.WAD.

I'd keep that in mind for the original project at least (assuming it will be forked).

Sodaholic said:

What would an ideal new name be, anyhow? What about Zam? (as in those Zamanthyte lizard creatures)

Perhaps we could name it after one of the Lovecraftian immortals?

It's said that some of them reproduce by mating with mortal humans, and their offspring eventually become immortal, and live in the sea with the other immortals. They are called "Deep Ones". It's not a terrible analogy for what we want "Freedoom" and/or the fork to be: immortal, like the original Dooms that birthed it.

Maybe something simple like "Dagon Phase 3". I think Dagon is still technically subordinate to Cthulhu... (And as an idea, maybe the maps could take place underwater...in cities under the sea. We don't have to go to Mars to make things terrifying.)

edit: Angry Saint brings up a good point. There are many horrifying entities that can potentially be referenced for naming the project. I personally like the Lovecraftian stories because there is something, at least to me, terrifying about the idea of gods from other dimensions living on the same planet as us.

A mapper here who contributed with one map and is working on a second one.

I see no problem in rebooting the Freedoom project, if this can guarantee a more solid and coherent vision of the project.

It is ok also in switching to vanilla maps, even if I'm sad my map would be discharged because boom.

Just please decise this so I can now how&waht to map.

Just kidding, take your time.

For the name, instead of Lovecraft (always Lovecraft!) I would take inspiration of C.A. Smith, another good author not well known.

Cool name are Vulthoom (Martian equivalent of Satan) or Alila (the "queen of perdition and goddess of all iniquities," worshipped in central Zothique) or Vergama.

esselfortium said:

I would be very interested in seeing such a project come to fruition, though, and it's great to know that you two are interested as well! So... tentatively maybe?

Totally understand, and I certainly don't want to pressure you into signing up for anything your heart's not in. All I'm saying is that if you want anything like a vote of confidence, you've got it from me.

my thoughts on the potential reboot are that we should have a proper replacement for each iwad (including plutonia and tnt). hopefully once i complete the bestiary people will be more willing to map for the project.

also including aditional textures is good for the project because there would be freedoom exclusive pwads while freedoom would still play pwads for the original doom. can we go vanilla and still have more textures than the original games?

i also think the difficulty of the maps should be increased to more modern standards.

frithiof said:

I'm glad that attitude is starting to change, and hopefully by lowering the requirements for levels to simply vanilla we can get closer to seeing a full set of levels

I don't understand that logic.

The requirements aren't lowered when going Boom->vanilla; they are increased. Now mappers have to test for limit breakings, visplane overflows, etc., and they have to use more complicated workarounds such as self-referencing sectors instead of documented features like height transfers.

If a Vanilla direction/fork is taken, I would back it.

One current gripe for me is the use of extra textures in Freedoom.

If the Freedoom WADs were more inline with doom.wad and doom2.wad, it could be used as a freely usable merge target for playing mods and such.

Also for those saying "They will just use Doom anyway!". Freedoom being what it is has a special spot because it is MORE than shareware and is not non-free. If it were lighter it could be distributed with source ports more easily. An example would be 64Doom which is a port to the Nintendo 64 where the stuff is in ROM, having a Vanilla compatible stuff without extra textures would make the IWAD light enough to be included in the ROM and playable.

Splitting the TNT/Plutonia textures out would add a phase 3 and 4.

I am not saying that everything should be wiped out and started fresh, but it could use the existing resources and levels since much work was put in them.

----

As per chungy's "FreeDoom", if you look at the title screen it says FREEDOOM. Where "FREE" is yellow and "DOOM" is blue. So due to the color variance it would be "FreeDoom". So the alternative titlewise might be to have it say "Freedoom" with actual lower case letters.

----

How about CC-BY-SA 4.0?

This enables FreeDoom to be used in commercial projects (so it is DFSG compatible). It is share alike which means that the WAD must be released similarly.

If people do use FreeDoom's resources however, they would have to credit and permit redistribution of those assets.

In recent years, in my opinion, the art on this project has improved in leaps and bounds, but maps have been neglected. The existing maps vary wildly in quality.

That said, I am very against the idea of changing to the vanilla format. This would be a massive backwards step for the project. While the maps do vary in quality, there are many good maps that use high levels of detail and boom effects, and these would have to be removed or heavily crippled. And what would be the advantage? I don't really see Chocolate Doom compatibility as a high priority. We have more creative freedom with the current map format.

I can only speak for myself, but I would be disincentivised to map for the project now because there's the very real threat that everyone's work could be thrown out tomorrow.

What mappers should be focussing on is making new maps, improving on existing ones and replacing the bad ones.

Jewellds said:

I can only speak for myself, but I would be disincentivised to map for the project now because there's the very real threat that everyone's work could be thrown out tomorrow.

There can be a Vanilla compatible level set being a drop in replacement for the plain IWADs (with no extra textures), then there could be another WAD with Boom enhanced levels and such.

EDIT: To clarify, the Boom levels would be a PWAD which could be used as a -file in Boom compatible ports. So that way you get a free set of new levels to play which are Boom compatible without throwing anything away. Those set of levels would be freely distributable as is the current Freedoom.

This could really be done for all levels.

i'd like to clarify that i wont continue to participate in the project if the license changes, specially if it is made share alike, wich would pretty much guarantee almost no one wants to reuse freedoom's art

also if possible i think new freedoom exclusive textures should be made and used in the maps, with the standard textures kept in solely for compatability purposes and occasianal use (tho i dont know is this is possible in vanila)

i dont think a phase 3 and 4 is unrealistic once the new sprites are finished, this community spits out highquality megawads in a regular basis

I wouldn't multiply entities without a very good reason.

iwads for good final doom compatability seems reason enough imo

Oops, that was about separate Boom and vanilla versions, but you posted before me.

whoops sorry about that XD

I have no strong feelings on compatibility goals for Freedoom itself, but considering its goal to be a drop-in IWAD replacement, being port-agnostic would be nice.

For a fork, though, here's my personal take on it:

A new game project is forked from Freedoom. Because this is a new game rather than a Doom IWAD substitute, it doesn't share Freedoom's PWAD-compatibility goal. GLOOME is used as its engine, so that it can be easily packaged as a standalone game without requiring any familiarity with Doom source ports, and so that more can be changed from the standard Doom behavior to reflect that this project is a new game rather than a free-software Doom clone, as Freedoom itself already fulfills that niche. Freedoom's open license is used for the new project as well, making them fully license-compatible with one another and allowing resources to be shared between them where applicable.

The project should be lead by experienced artists, to get the project off the ground and enable it to develop toward a coherent direction. The new project's leaders decide on its name, backstory concept, what its main themes and locales will be like, and get its monster/weapon behaviors functioning. A small but usable resource wad is created to begin with, including a set of new textures for mappers to start playing with. New textures are created rather than incorporating Freedoom's IWAD-clone texture set. (A few of Freedoom's existing textures do have elements that can be recycled to speed the creation of the new content.)

After this is done, the project is opened to public submissions. The game is developed similarly to other mapping projects, with a centralized creative direction and quality control, rather than Freedoom's pure democracy. Like normal, maps and other assets are solicited from community contributors, with continued oversight from the project leaders.

Rebooting the project would be a good idea if it meant a better result in the end. I'm not too sold on the idea of dropping the pwad compability goal and changing the license though. Those are two of the most appealing points about Freedoom, for me atleast. It's a free game that can run all of doom's mods, and it's flexible license gives you a base for building your own game or mods. It really is a shame that people take that as an excuse to just rip the resources of the project and sell them without adding much to it. But I've also seen it work, most recently with Sgt.Mark's Starterpack, that uses a mixture of modified and original maps. And of course, Nocturne in Yellow, which used Freedoom as base but is a completely different game.
Regarding a possible fork, I'm gonna echo what essel said above. I think that's the perfect direction a fork project of Freedoom should take.

I think vanilla should eventually be targeted, though feel that limit-removing may be better suited to the short term as an intermediary. Boom stuff can be cut without worrying about rendering limits during the first pass, and then rendering limits can be the focus of a second pass.

And while vanilla can be limiting, you don't have to worry about brushing up against the limits as long as you're working in modest detail.

Regarding textures, I feel that WADs built on Freedoom should be played in Freedoom. The texture set already includes unique D1 textures in D2 and vice versa, so any maps made by mixing those would already have issues with regular Doom IWADs. The Final Doom compat set shouldn't be split off. A set of unique, non-compat related textures would really give Freedoom a look of its own outside of cloning Doom.

I'm against the idea of unnecessary IWADs such as phase 3 or 4, phase 2 is enough to cover things because Final Doom was just a Doom 2 reskin. Going further with that, FreeDM might be better as a PWAD.

Sodaholic said:

I'm against the idea of unnecessary IWADs such as phase 3 or 4, phase 2 is enough to cover things because Final Doom was just a Doom 2 reskin.

With new switches and animations that can't be added without screwing with the old ones.