Is Freedoom heating up?

[selliott4]

Just as I was becoming concerned that people were loosing interest in Freedoom there's been a huge increase in activity in git. There are 40 commits for August so far. Go Freedoom!

PS: Now that people are actively working on it if one of you with commit access could check in the result of "make fix-map-names" that'd be great. It will get "make test" to pass cleanly. I could submit a PR, but it's changes to binary files, so it's easier to just do it rather than trust/examine the changes to those binary files in a PR.

[Hideous Destructor Guy]

Do you mean this? It's the only PR I can find searching for "fix-map-names" and it looks like it's been merged.

[fraggle]

I think the commits are because of the manual I recently wrote and submitted. 

[Datacore85]

Seriously, the shotgun's sound, the 'Mancubus" and "Archviles" should be reworked. They are ugly.

 

The problem with freedoom is that it is difficult to know who is the leader of the project....And this project need a discord server to advance.

 

Because irc is desert and almost nobody go here. It's also easier to exchange ideas and work.

Edited August 27, 2019 by Datacore85

[Jon]

If freedoom added a discord there'd be two deserts. Irc is empty because there are not many active contributors. 

[selliott4]

35 minutes ago, Hideous Destructor Guy said:

Do you mean this? It's the only PR I can find searching for "fix-map-names" and it looks like it's been merged.

 

Yes, that is the PR that added script to fix the map names that I wrote, but it hasn't been used. It should be easy and low risk (it literally modifies only 2 bytes per WAD), so I think running it periodically is a good idea.

My motivation - the map names in the WADs in the "levels" directory do not matter very much except that wad2image, which I previously added to Freedoom, creates image files based on those names. So currently things like "make wad-image-diff", useful to see changes to maps, produces files with confusing names. See "make wad-image-help" for more info.

[chungy]

Yeah, part of it is fraggle's manual, part of it is me paying attention to Freedoom a little bit more than I had lately.

 

I already noticed the PWAD names being inconsistent with their placement in the WAD, but I was opting to put off fixing them (as well as rebuilding nodes) until a new release is being readied; it's harmless to do so now though.

[The Maverick013]

2 hours ago, fraggle said:

I think the commits are because of the manual I recently wrote and submitted. 

Now, that's a fine loooking manual. Mine looks like shit now.

[Xindage]

5 hours ago, Jon said:

If freedoom added a discord there'd be two deserts. Irc is empty because there are not many active contributors. 

I'm not so sure of it dude, discord would be great!

[Hideous Destructor Guy]

As someone who's got a Discord background tab right now and is now looking for the Pidgin button to figure out how to get onto the IRC (and re-learn how IRC even works), I will second that it could potentially help accessibility, however much I'd rather the Freedoom project not be dependent on a proprietary discussion channel.

That said, here's how I'm logging onto the IRC:

Starting Pidgin
Deleting old Discord stuff
Going into Manage Accounts... and hitting Add Account, selecting IRC
Search {freedoom irc} on DuckDuckGo, end up on Freedoom home page
Click on the "Talk on IRC", learn that a thing called Mibbit exists
Try using that
See a tab titled "OFTC banned Mibbit (dead)"
Go back to the Freedoom page, go to choose other application
Try to figure out where Pidgin.exe is stored (C:\Program Files (x86)\Pidgin), hit OK
Watch it do nothing at all
Hover over the link and manually type "irc://irc.oftc.net/", cut into clipboard, go back to Pidgin's interface
Type in a name, leave password blank assuming I'm not actually supposed to create an account
"Unable to connect: Error resolving irc://irc.oftc.net/: The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found."

...so uh here I am on the forum and the git

[fraggle]

I think a Freedoom Discord is a great idea. To give an anecdote: there's a Chocolate Doom multiplayer discord now that started up about a year ago and it's actually been quite successful in building a small community of players who want to play deathmatch on Choco. I can certainly imagine the same happening with Freedoom.

 

Not being IRC makes a big difference. IRC's pretty arcane nowadays, doesn't fit modern use cases and simply isn't what people are using.

 

7 hours ago, Datacore85 said:

Seriously, the shotgun's sound

I've been working a bit on improving the shotgun and pistol sounds over the past week. Recent events inspired me a bit. I've found quite a bit can be achieved by boosting certain frequency ranges and mixing in generated noise at particular points. It makes quite a difference and I hope to share more soon.

[Datacore85]

Hideous Destructor Guy: Try Hirc

 

Free Client for irc.

 

https://hneel.home.xs4all.nl/software/hirc.zip

 

fraggle:

 

I can create a discord server if you want. It's easier for send Maps and files.

[chungy]

4 hours ago, Hideous Destructor Guy said:

I'd rather the Freedoom project not be dependent on a proprietary discussion channel.

That's part of why a Discord channel hasn't been made, nor do I use Discord.

 

I mostly disagree with fraggle's assessment of IRC, but one part is irrefutable: it is not common and popular anymore, and hasn't been for the past ~4 years. Maybe we should just bite the bullet.

[Datacore85]

We can always try, if it does not work we can remove the server discord.

[Hideous Destructor Guy]

I'm willing to give IRC another try, the problem seems primarily to be that a lot of unsophisticated users these days will have no idea how to use it. A comprehensible step-by-step as to how to get onto the Freedoom IRC channel linked on the homepage (instead of the current direct link to the URL) would help a lot of people get past this barrier.

At this point the benefit of adding Discord seems to be purely speculative right now. After all, everyone responding here obviously already has access to the forum, while I've never seen anyone on Discord ask where to discuss Freedoom. Meanwhile about 90% of the "servers" guilds I've joined on that thing I never check.

[YukiHerz]

I don't think it's a thing about being "unsophisticated", rather IRC is simply a bother to use.

[Snakecharmer]

14 hours ago, YukiHerz said:

I don't think it's a thing about being "unsophisticated", rather IRC is simply a bother to use.

 

Not really if you bother to learn how it works. But arguing what chat technology is the best is only a little more useless than discussing a free game on a proprietary chat service ;)

 

[fraggle]

I know how it works; I've written bots for it in the past, and I find it a bother to use too

 

The fundamental problem with IRC is that it's connection-oriented. This means that you can't - practically speaking - use it with any kind of portable device that's likely to regularly lose connectivity or change networks. The protocol was designed at a time that laptops and other portable computers were a rare, expensive luxury. Nowadays they're the rule rather than the exception and people are using phones and tablets as well.

 

Someone will now rush to tell me about how I can run IRC on a different machine and SSH to it, or use some kind of web-based client that keeps my connection. I know these exist; I've used them; they're workarounds to try to patch around the problem, and the fact that they're necessary is why I say IRC is "a bother to use".

 

I don't particularly like the idea that we're depending on a nonfree platform either but I'm pretty convinced that the trade-off is worth it. As I said in my previous comment - it's where the people are, and that matters enormously.

[Jon]

The windows people I know still use mirc, which surprises me because that was the most common client for windows 20 years ago. Still works apparently. 

 

For beginners these days on any platform I’d probably recommend matrix.org

Edited August 29, 2019 by Jon

[YukiHerz]

4 hours ago, Snakecharmer said:

 

Not really if you bother to learn how it works. But arguing what chat technology is the best is only a little more useless than discussing a free game on a proprietary chat service ;)

 

I'd say typing a non-argument that adds nothing to the topic is even more useless.

Edited August 29, 2019 by YukiHerz

[Hideous Destructor Guy]

What would add to this topic, though, is if someone could post a step by step tutorial on how to log onto the IRC channel, and recommend a good free client for it. (My last attempt to get onto the IRC channel left me completely stymied at the Wikipedia list of clients, leaving me going back to Pidgin and getting that same "no data was found" error again until I gave up.)

[Jon]

29 minutes ago, Hideous Destructor Guy said:

What would add to this topic, though, is if someone could post a step by step tutorial on how to log onto the IRC channel, and recommend a good free client for it. (My last attempt to get onto the IRC channel left me completely stymied at the Wikipedia list of clients, leaving me going back to Pidgin and getting that same "no data was found" error again until I gave up.)

 

6 hours ago, Jon said:

The windows people I know still use mirc, which surprises me because that was the most common client for windows 20 years ago. Still works apparently. 

 

For beginners these days on any platform I’d probably recommend matrix.org

 

[Ferk]

18 hours ago, Jon said:

For beginners these days on any platform I’d probably recommend matrix.org

 

I think a lot of free software projects are using matrix.

Maybe a matrix-discord bridge could be set up if there's a need for a FOSS option: https://t2bot.io/discord/

[Snakecharmer]

On 8/30/2019 at 2:24 AM, Hideous Destructor Guy said:

What would add to this topic, though, is if someone could post a step by step tutorial on how to log onto the IRC channel, and recommend a good free client for it. (My last attempt to get onto the IRC channel left me completely stymied at the Wikipedia list of clients, leaving me going back to Pidgin and getting that same "no data was found" error again until I gave up.)

 

No problem, I use HexChat: https://hexchat.github.io/downloads.html

Now I'll explain this from memory so it might be a bit sketchy, I can elaborate if problems arise.

You'll get a list of IRC networks, choose the one you want to connect to and enter your preferred nickname and other info you'd be willing to share. Click on connect and the client will try and connect, this may take a minute or two because a lot of networks will scan your computer to make sure you're not an open proxy or other shady customer. After a successful connect I think you will get a prompt that will ask you what channel you want to enter (unless you disable this prompt like I have). Channels are usually prefixed with a #.

[Hideous Destructor Guy]

Thanks! I'll take a look at that...

[PopeRigby]

+1 for Matrix