Relation to Doom, the game

NiuHaka said:

Well, to be fare to all those who don't create their own content, it isn't really as simple as you are trying to make it sound. This kind of thing takes talent, skill, experience and a great deal of time to accomplish.

I am a professional designer and I can still attest to the feeling of euphoria you can get by just creating a great map that uses all vanilla or even assets quickly ripped from other games. You have still created something. You just didn't create your own canvas and paints.

I think there is a difference between the way you approach this and the way much of the community approaches this. It seems that you create things for the community while people, such as myself, create things for themselves. You will feel accomplished when someone loves your work. I will feel accomplished when I love my own work. I can see how that can be frustrating for you.

Then we come back to the earlier point, of knowing what you get yourself into when you take on a big project like that. There are plenty of people (myself included) that enjoy making sprites and textures, its all a matter of organizing modder with a simular interest and working together on creating original content.

I'm not frustrated when somebody loves their work, ofcourse. I'm frustrated by the fact that somebody presents nothing more then a tray of poo (just an extreme example), and the community proceeds to praise him for it. To me thats the wrong order of things. I'm not saying you have to satisfy the community, they have nothing to do with it. Art is personal (like it should be). I just wish some people would take this 'art form' a little more serious sometimes.

It's Sturgeon's Law: "Nothing is always absolutely so."

Or, "99% of everything is shit".

Thing is though, there have been many occasions where a mod has been branded as amazing purely because it contains new resources/features, even if it plays like crap. New textures/weapons/enemies are great, but they are not necessary to make a great mod. Don't get me wrong, I love to see new content, especially enemies, but I wouldn't discount a mod just because they weren't there. I make sprites, I'm a regular contributor to R667, and I love it when I see something of mine appear in a mod (unless it's another AEoD knockoff, of course). Because of that, though, IMO what you're suggesting isn't as clear cut as it sounds.

I agree that the best projects are those that which are taken more seriously and are done with a degree of organization, but the fact is, it's still a hobby. There still needs to be that element of fun. Once it becomes SRS BZNZ is when it stops being fun to do, and that's when the drama starts and the project fails, regardless of how big it is or what it contains. I've witnessed a few projects go this way in my time.

Agentbromsnor said:

I'm not frustrated when somebody loves their work, ofcourse. I'm frustrated by the fact that somebody presents nothing more then a tray of poo (just an extreme example), and the community proceeds to praise him for it. To me thats the wrong order of things. I'm not saying you have to satisfy the community, they have nothing to do with it.

I assume you're talking about the Doomworld community? Even accounting for your qualifier of providing an extreme example I don't recall this occuring. Whilst not always matching my taste, I think the community here has a good handle on quality control.

Perhaps, reading into your posts on this thread, if I substitute your extreme example "a tray of poo" for "map replacements only" I can see what you're trying to say (correct me if I'm off the mark). This (hopefully) will never change. There is a healthy proportion of vanilla purists on these boards. That said, I'm not convinced these purists are biaised any further than perhaps allowing for the obvious limitations of working within the limits of the original game and applying extra credit for achieving something that's difficult in vanilla but run-of-the-mill for advanced or limit-removing source ports. They certainly wouldn't praise a bad level-set purely due to it working in doom2.exe. We're not that desperate for new PWADs yet ;-)

The last sentence I have quoted you on I agree with, although it goes without saying. Though posters here will give their honest opinion about what they prefer I have not much evidence to suggest there is that issue here either. In fact whenever people ask what sort of project they should make there answer here is always repeatedly "whichever, sort of project you want make."

purist said:

I assume you're talking about the Doomworld community? Even accounting for your qualifier of providing an extreme example I don't recall this occuring. Whilst not always matching my taste, I think the community here has a good handle on quality control.

Perhaps, reading into your posts on this thread, if I substitute your extreme example "a tray of poo" for "map replacements only" I can see what you're trying to say (correct me if I'm off the mark). This (hopefully) will never change. There is a healthy proportion of vanilla purists on these boards. That said, I'm not convinced these purists are biaised any further than perhaps allowing for the obvious limitations of working within the limits of the original game and applying extra credit for achieving something that's difficult in vanilla but run-of-the-mill for advanced or limit-removing source ports. They certainly wouldn't praise a bad level-set purely due to it working in doom2.exe. We're not that desperate for new PWADs yet ;-)

The last sentence I have quoted you on I agree with, although it goes without saying. Though posters here will give their honest opinion about what they prefer I have not much evidence to suggest there is that issue here either. In fact whenever people ask what sort of project they should make there answer here is always repeatedly "whichever, sort of project you want make."

No, you're pretty much on the money there.

Agentbromsnor said:

Then we come back to the earlier point, of knowing what you get yourself into when you take on a big project like that. There are plenty of people (myself included) that enjoy making sprites and textures, its all a matter of organizing modder with a simular interest and working together on creating original content.

I think I get it... I think. It's not quite clear to me though.

It seems that you want more collaborative work between mappers and artists in creating larger projects which include custom maps, sounds, music, sprites & textures? If so there is a whole gamut of reasons from communication lag to creative differences that cause these things to be difficult to organize. It isn't the same as having a team of professionals who are held together by a biweekly paycheck. Can you imagine a successful game studio who's entire staff works remotely? I can't.

Despite my pessimistic view of what you desire (Maybe???) I would LOVE to see you and others organize something like that. I think that seeing a new TC is something everyone would like to see happen.

scalliano said:

It's Sturgeon's Law: "Nothing is always absolutely so."

Or, "99% of everything is shit".

Thing is though, there have been many occasions where a mod has been branded as amazing purely because it contains new resources/features, even if it plays like crap. New textures/weapons/enemies are great, but they are not necessary to make a great mod. Don't get me wrong, I love to see new content, especially enemies, but I wouldn't discount a mod just because they weren't there. I make sprites, I'm a regular contributor to R667, and I love it when I see something of mine appear in a mod (unless it's another AEoD knockoff, of course). Because of that, though, IMO what you're suggesting isn't as clear cut as it sounds.

I agree that the best projects are those that which are taken more seriously and are done with a degree of organization, but the fact is, it's still a hobby. There still needs to be that element of fun. Once it becomes SRS BZNZ is when it stops being fun to do, and that's when the drama starts and the project fails, regardless of how big it is or what it contains. I've witnessed a few projects go this way in my time.

True. I think a project (any project) has the most potential to succeed when it is ran by a tight group of people that are organized in their specialities and tasks. Ofcourse, it still has to be fun, and I'm always telling people that if their project isn't fun to work on anymore, then why put more effort into it? I will say that in some aspects, you HAVE to put hard work into though. Just repetitive tasks, like removing bugs, or programming every sprite (just to name some things) can be sort of tedious tasks. I can kind of see that if you don't have some kind of expectation of the final result in mind, that it can be frustrating to work on and less fun.

NiuHaka said:

I think I get it... I think. It's not quite clear to me though.

It seems that you want more collaborative work between mappers and artists in creating larger projects which include custom maps, sounds, music, sprites & textures? If so there is a whole gamut of reasons from communication lag to creative differences that cause these things to be difficult to organize. It isn't the same as having a team of professionals who are held together by a biweekly paycheck. Can you imagine a successful game studio who's entire staff works remotely? I can't.

Despite my pessimistic view of what you desire (Maybe???) I would LOVE to see you and others organize something like that. I think that seeing a new TC is something everyone would like to see happen.

Yes. Thats what I meant earlier with my comparison to the Half-Life community. Most projects (at least the serious ones) have been worked on by a group of people with different specialities. I guess at this point, some people would argue that its becoming more like work and less like a hobby in this way, but I do believe it leads to better results if a project is ran by multiple people that all do their share and have different contributions, and most important of all: they all share the same ideas and motivation.

I would love to help people out. I don't have loads of time to spare, but my speciality lies in graphics design since that is also my daytime occupation. Something like weapon sprite designing sounds like fun to me, but then again I don't really have a demo-reel of things I made for Doom, so people would have to take my word for it, or I would have to send them some stuff I designed in PS or something.

If I was for example planning to make an episode or megawad of Doom maps I would be delighted for contributors to make textures, music and art to my spec.

The problem is the ratio lays heavily in favour of mappers against artists/composers. It's easier to map than it is to make good artwork and music, therefore I need either a good reputation or good work done up front in the project before I'm likely to find collaborators. Even then, it is likely I would have to make compromises:

• The completion of my PWAD would have to be delayed to allow for the availability of artists and composers. Not to mention allowing time for them to finish their work.
  
• I may have to revise my vision of the project since I'm relying on someone else to produce the assets. They are giving away their free time and there are limited alternatives to go to should creative differences arise.
  
• I may have allow for worse quality resource replacements for the same reason as above.
  
• I may have inconsistencies in art/music direction due to my collaborators ceasing work on the project.

Add to this the issues NiuHaka mentions about keeping a team working together remotely and for free along with the fact the existing Doom resources are pretty good to begin with and you can see why most mappers do not, nay can not, produce work with vast original material.

The obvious way around this is for a team to start together from the outset with a common goal. The problem though is deciding on a direction that everyone agrees with to the point of giving up their time to work, having to rely on the other team members to continue working and somehow organising the whole thing. You might have noticed from reading various recent Community Project threads in this subforum that it's not an easy, certainly not timely, task even for projects that are not highly ambitious in terms of original resources (see: TNT2, Interception, Progfic - and that's just projects that actually look like completing). Look in the FreeDoom subforum if you want to see what happens when we try to do what you're suggesting!

So I agree, it would be nice for more original content in WADs. But unlike you I can quite happily live without it.

I never said it was easy, but yes I do think thats a proper way of doing a mod.

Proper, perhaps. Realistic, I'm not so sure. It can be difficult enough getting enough mappers together for a large project, let alone spriters, texture artists, 3D artists, musicians, coders and whatever other talent required for such a task. Even if that is achieved, there is still the issue of free time, which all contributors need. That's why Stronghold took six years to make, why TSoZD is still in the works, and why so many other large projects fall by the wayside. For every Stronghold, there's about ten Doomkarts, for every Genereations Arena, there's about a hundred Kiltron mods. It's a lot of time to invest "for the love of the game".

I said before, I'm sure we'd all love to see more total conversions for the engine (I know I would), but to dismiss a stock-based mod as "just another E1M1 remake" is deeply unfair. DTWiD notwithstanding, I haven't played an E1M1 remake in about 10 years, and I play a LOT of wads.