Is Freedoom 1.0 in development hell? Anyone intrested in restarting the project?

[Wadmodder Shalton]

We all know that FreeDoom was designed to be a free & open source release of both Doom 1 & 2 with original artwork, but since the mid to late 2010s, development seems to have been slowed down almost tremendously due to lack of users in charge of the project on GitHub.

 

FreeDoom Phase 1 & 2, as well as FreeDM are really becoming the DOOM community equivalent of the troubled development of Windows Vista when that was under codename "Longhorn" where Microsoft had to restart development, and more ambitious DOOM community equivalents of the troubled development cycle of Duke Nukem Forever from 1997 to 2011 & DOOM 2016 from 2007-08 to 2016.

 

I'm presumably thinking that FreeDoom 1.0 is in development hell, and I'm thinking about wanting to restart the project from the ground up in most aspects, from repolishing the already included and work in progress graphics to redesigning the semi-completed maps or replacing most maps with better quality "contest-winning" styled ones.

 

Most of the existing assets can be here to stay with a possible project restart, while others should technically be scrapped altogether.

 

What do you think, should most of the aspects & assets be remade from the ground up, or do you think they should be kept? Your opinions here in this discussion.

[continuum.mid]

Freedoom's development is moving slowly, but I can attest that it's still moving forward. The maintainers (fraggle and chungy) are still around, so there are people leading the project, although it is true that they have been less active as of late.

 

Comparing Freedoom to other free/libre games, its development is not unusual. SuperTuxKart, for example, started development in 2000 (as TuxKart), was forked into its current form in 2007, and didn't reach 1.0 until 2019. SuperTux "Milestone 1" released in 2004, "Milestone 2" in 2015, and the game is still not 1.0. All of these projects were also fully playable long before reaching 1.0, and Freedoom is no different - it is fully playable and usable now. The main issue is polishing it to the point that everyone can agree it's 1.0 material.

 

Like most free/libre software projects, Freedoom's development is mostly done through contributions by its own community. If you want to help development move forward, join the Discord, make some assets you think would be useful, and submit them in a pull request on GitHub.

 

If you want to fork Freedoom, then as we say in the free software community, that's your GNU-given right. But good luck trying to recruit contributors other than yourself.

Edited April 18, 2021 by northivanastan

[P41R47]

1 hour ago, northivanastan said:

Freedoom's development is moving slowly, but I can attest that it's still moving forward. The maintainers (fraggle and chungy) are still around, so there are people leading the project, although it is true that they have been less active as of late.

Pretty much this.

 

Its not in development hell at all.

Its just that people enthusiasm with it is a little colder.

A few years back i helped solve a problem with the E4 sky that overrided any other custome sky on a pwad.

So yes, i can say that progress is being made, but really slowly.

 

New monsters were added on one of the last development builds and its certainly marvelous.

 

Also, last year or in 2019, i don't remember, someone proposed to make something what the OP is proposing, but bringing back again the hellish stuff that were scraped from Freedoom design.

There was some people interested on it, but there is no notice of it as of recently.

Edited April 18, 2021 by P41R47

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Also, the FreeDoom equivalents of Heretic & Hexen, Blasphemer & Zauberer haven't had any new releases for years, and are in a similar state of development hell & are suffering a similar development slowdown like what's currently happening with FreeDoom.

 

So I think, in my honest opinion, that both the Blasphemer & Zauberer projects should also be restarted & repolished from the ground up, from repolishing the already included & work in progress graphics to redesigning the semi-completed maps or replacing most maps with better quality "contest-winning" styled ones.

[continuum.mid]

35 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Also, the FreeDoom equivalents of Heretic & Hexen, Blasphemer & Zauberer haven't had any new releases for years, and are in a similar state of development hell & are suffering a similar development slowdown like what's currently happening with FreeDoom.

 

So I think, in my honest opinion, that both the Blasphemer & Zauberer projects should also be restarted & repolished from the ground up, from repolishing the already included & work in progress graphics to redesigning the semi-completed maps or replacing most maps with better quality "contest-winning" styled ones. 

I think that @Cacowad is still working on new stuff for Blasphemer, so I'd ask him first. @Cire (Zauberer maintainer) appears to be active too, although in this case nobody has done any work on that since 2018 as far as either of us can tell.

 

How about something like an "Open Mapping/Art Contest/Initiative" for these projects? The idea would be to create new assets and semi-speedmaps that are license-compatible for those projects (either CC0/Public Domain or CC-BY), ideally in partnership with the maintainers, but if not they could be used to promote forks.

Edited April 19, 2021 by northivanastan

[P41R47]

43 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Also, the FreeDoom equivalents of Heretic & Hexen, Blasphemer & Zauberer haven't had any new releases for years, and are in a similar state of development hell & are suffering a similar development slowdown like what's currently happening with FreeDoom.

To be clear, as it was already said, Freedoom isn't in development hell.

And it will not be, no matter how much you said it.

In 2 years there was 3 major releases for Freedoom, it just reached a step where only thing needed is polish the maps until they are all vanilla compatible and of ''contest-winning'' quality.

It would be far easier if monsters mappers like Skillsaw, Xaser or other wanted to map for it, but they are, as far as i know, not interested on it.

Blasphemer is in fact pretty stuck as there are not much people interested on helping on it.

It suffer the same as Heretic suffer, there is not much people interested on it.
So, why restart it? As they are open projects, you can improve them as much as you like. As long as you made something that is a better replacement for the already existing content, it will be aproved.

 

And to Zauberer happends pretty much the same.

 

Why restarting things?

Just help them become something better.

But if you insist on restarting them, go ahead, they are open projects and so, you can do whatever you like with them.

Best luck to you on making it better!

Edited April 19, 2021 by P41R47

[Shepardus]

Throwing out everything that's been done sounds like a good way to throw a project into development hell, not pull it out. I don't closely follow Freedoom development but by my understanding it's still chugging along, just slowly due to limited manpower. The project has arguably already reached a state of maturity despite not actually being numbered 1.0; there's always stuff to improve, but it doesn't suffer from gaping holes like missing levels. It also doesn't suffer from the issues that typically lead people to throw out and restart their projects, like feature bloat and crippling architectural problems, so I don't think you'd be solving anything by throwing out content en masse.

[continuum.mid]

4 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

Throwing out everything that's been done sounds like a good way to throw a project into development hell, not pull it out. I don't closely follow Freedoom development but by my understanding it's still chugging along, just slowly due to limited manpower. The project has arguably already reached a state of maturity despite not actually being numbered 1.0; there's always stuff to improve, but it doesn't suffer from gaping holes like missing levels. It also doesn't suffer from the issues that typically lead people to throw out and restart their projects, like feature bloat and crippling architectural problems, so I don't think you'd be solving anything by throwing out content en masse.

Yeah, I wouldn't throw out the existing content. If I were in fraggle's position I'd just review the existing pull requests, merge the ones that are ready, and maybe promote a new co-maintainer to help out.

 

The fact that "there's always stuff to improve" is precisely the reason that so many open source projects never reach 1.0, and that isn't usually a problem.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Heck, nobody bothered to even make a FreeDoom equivalent of Strife. While the source code to the original release is lost, the source code to the Veteran Edition is available, but since that's based on a reverse engineered engine, it doesn't count as a source code release of the original game.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Wadmodder Shalton

[continuum.mid]

1 minute ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Heck, nobody bothered to even make a FreeDoom equivalent of Strife. While the source code to the original release is lost, the source code to the Veteran Edition is, but since that's based on a reverse engineered engine, it doesn't count as a source code release of the original game.

I'm skeptical of the potential success of a "FreeStrife," as I don't know of any Strife mods or PWADs at all in the first place. Nonetheless, such a project could in theory target Chocolate Strife or Veteran Edition; they aren't the original source code, but they are a reverse-engineering project approved by the original developers, which is the closest thing possible.

[P41R47]

36 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Heck, nobody bothered to even make a FreeDoom equivalent of Strife. While the source code to the original release is lost, the source code to the Veteran Edition is available, but since that's based on a reverse engineered engine, it doesn't count as a source code release of the original game.

There is no content for Strife at all on idgames, just some GZDoom mods that can't be played nor in chocolate nor in veteran. So having a free version of Strife is kinda pointless by nowdays.

Maybe if some mappers start to map for the veteran edition, then maybe there could be an interest for making a free version of it.

Aside from that, there is not much to say around here.
Freedoom is alive and kicking, and its great mapset that just needs some polishing and extra manpower.

[TheHoodieGuy02]

The last approved commit for Freedoom was merged by fraggle around October 2020, and to this day, pull requests are still coming.
Of course, you still need to pack the whole repo into WAD, and the ones already prepacked dated back in 2019, and because it's an IWAD, the build process is more complicated than assembling PWADs in SLADE.

 

Actually I'm gonna try building it myself this night.

[MrFlibble]

You can grab very recent experimental builds from here, as @northivanastan pointed out recently. These are built from a fork of the main branch that includes new stuff like the Octaminator, new chaingun guard and a polished version of the Combat Slug (the sprite sets may not be final but these are much better than their old counterparts). Plus some texture updates and other tweaks here and there, I haven't really made a thorough comparison but the cool stuff is there. The latest build is from 30 March this year.

 

Freed∞m is being worked on but no longer actively here in the forums, as it seems. Discord should be the place to go. So hardly any "development hell", unless of course one is irked by the very fact that release version numbers are below 1.0.

 

FreeStrife has been discussed before. IIRC the general idea is that a) it's not worth the effort and b) unlike Doom, Strife is too complex a game for a libre clone to be a comparatively realistic task. Better spend this effort on a completely original game.

 

Also please do not forget, that Freed∞m started as a project at a time when legally obtaining a copy of Doom was becoming an increasingly complicated task. It was not the sole reason for Freed∞m's existence (another being a desire for a completely libre version of a cornerstone video game for FOSS purists), but it was rather important. Today, you can purchase every single idTech game for a reasonably low price from major online stores.

 

As it happens, someone already "restarted" Freed∞m as a different project with the aim of being more close to Doom.

 

Oh, and there's also The People's Doom, which I understand is still being developed too, but completely in the dark save from occasional sneak peeks posted by the project's main artist.

 

From what I know, Zauberer hardly took off save for some textures, a few sprites (none of which constitute a complete sprite set for any character or monster IIRC) and maybe some maps, so there isn't really a lot to "restart and repolish". Blasphemer on the other hand could use more attention, hopefully a new IWAD release pops up soon-ish. There's one artist working an a Maulotaur replacement now.

[Cacowad]

I mean, i'm here. I don't really play anymore and my mapping progress has been halted almost completely due to work, but i still manage to log in from time to time. I am not the most involved person anymore, but i'll make sure to be around as much as i can. 

[Wereknight]

I'd dissapoint you man there's no developement hell for freedoom. There's a slow reaching of the Horizon. 

Development is going slow, and all stuff discussion was repositioned to discord server.

[CBM]

If one wanted to help out with Blasphemer and/or Zauberer then how would one go about that?

[Paf]

nevermind i cant even draw 2 rooms now

Edited June 12, 2021 by Paf

[selliott4]

Software development is difficult to plan. Often the time needed increases dramatically, seemingly exponentially, with the scale of the project. Underestimating this phenomena can result in development hell. I don't think that's what is happening with Freedoom. Although there is software in Freedoom (the build system) it's mostly levels, graphics and sound which should be, in least in theory, easier to plan.

I wouldn't say that I'm a core developer of Freedoom, but I've contributed a few commits and as such I have some thoughts about how things could be done differently.

Currently there are 39 open pull requests. Some have comments, which is great, but many don't. There's a risk of folks getting discouraged when they don't receive any feedback. Even if it's just something like "I'm busy now, but I'll get back to this in a bit" or "Sorry, but this isn't the direction we want to go" would be better than nothing.

I don't understand the status of the 100 levels that make up Freedoom. I assume most of them are fairly stable and possibly a few may be replaced, but I'm not sure which. I was considering doing cleanup work to fix level editor warnings (unused tags, etc.), but I don't want to risk causing a conflict with trivial changes if there's a chance that someone is working on the level. A 100 row shared spreadsheet (Google Doc, etc.) would work well here. Just the level name and some status indicating the remaining work like "Done", "Minor changes", "Major changes", "Replace" and optionally a column describing what need to be done would be great.

I'm all for branching and tagging in VCS. It allows users in support branches to receive the critical fixes they need with a minimum risk of regression while development continues. However, I think the nature Freedoom is that there's relatively little risk of a serious regression. In spite of that Fedora 34, released two months ago, packages Freedoom based on the latest tag, which is v0.12.1 from 2019, so it's missing about a year of changes. Freedoom seems like a good candidate for tagging often and releasing often in the master branch to assure that the distros get the latest.

 

Anyway, those are my thoughts about how development could work differently.

[CBM]

freedoom is not in dev hell according to its team so that should be the end of it

Edited July 19, 2021 by CBM

[CBM]

On 4/19/2021 at 4:27 AM, P41R47 said:

There is no content for Strife at all on idgames, just some GZDoom mods that can't be played nor in chocolate nor in veteran. So having a free version of Strife is kinda pointless by nowdays.

Maybe if some mappers start to map for the veteran edition, then maybe there could be an interest for making a free version of it.

Aside from that, there is not much to say around here.
Freedoom is alive and kicking, and its great mapset that just needs some polishing and extra manpower.

freedoom needs some TLC regarding the sprites, textures and levels... I find all the levels are solid but each level has a lot of details that I want to fix and thus I created gzfreedoom

 

I have no idea what the status of original freedoom or its team is right now but I am making a gzdoom version of freedoom that was forked from the latest freedoom as it were approx one year ago

 

there is a lot to do so it takes a long long time when I am forced to do everything myself

 

I had to take a 9 month break and I am working on finishing e1m3 right now

 

thanks to the kind souls who helps me playtest gzfreedoom

 

I am using doomworld as the place to inform about progress on gzfreedoom

 

and I am not affilliated with the original freedoom team

Edited July 19, 2021 by CBM

[P41R47]

1 hour ago, CBM said:

freedoom needs some TLC regarding the sprites, textures and levels... I find all the levels are solid but each level has a lot of details that I want to fix and thus I created gzfreedoom

 

I have no idea what the status of original freedoom or its team is right now but I am making a gzdoom version of freedoom that was forked from the latest freedoom as it were approx one year ago

 

there is a lot to do so it takes a long long time when I am forced to do everything myself

 

I had to take a 9 month break and I am working on finishing e1m3 right now

 

thanks to the kind souls who helps me playtest gzfreedoom

 

I am using doomworld as the place to inform about progress on gzfreedoom

 

and I am not affilliated with the original freedoom team

in fact, there is no things as ''Freedoom team''.
Sometime ago there were a set of ''curators'' that tried to moderate the content and vanilla-fy it.

But i think they loose the interest and are busy with other projects.

So, if you have time and energy, you can take a map and help vanila-fying it, or, if you prefer, submit a map made by yourself that is mean to replace one of the maps that need fix or something.

If you map is good enough, and better thatn the already made for that slot, yours will be in for sure.

Freedoom is an open source project where everyone can help making it better.

As for what i know, only episodes that doesn't accept changes are Episode 4 from phase 1, that is the award winning and officialized Double Impact, given by the authors themselves, and the first 11 maps of phase 2, that is pretty much complete vanilla right now.

 

[CBM]

1 hour ago, P41R47 said:

in fact, there is no things as ''Freedoom team''.
Sometime ago there were a set of ''curators'' that tried to moderate the content and vanilla-fy it.

But i think they loose the interest and are busy with other projects.

So, if you have time and energy, you can take a map and help vanila-fying it, or, if you prefer, submit a map made by yourself that is mean to replace one of the maps that need fix or something.

If you map is good enough, and better thatn the already made for that slot, yours will be in for sure.

Freedoom is an open source project where everyone can help making it better.

As for what i know, only episodes that doesn't accept changes are Episode 4 from phase 1, that is the award winning and officialized Double Impact, given by the authors themselves, and the first 11 maps of phase 2, that is pretty much complete vanilla right now.

 

ah ok.

 

Well I want to have gzfreedoom completed and polished first, it will take time since I am only just finished with GZ'fying 3 out of about 100 maps so far.

I hope that when I am finished, I have learned enough about mapping so that I could create my own maps that can rival those already in freedoom.

 

My plan after finishing all 100 levels for gzfreedoom, is to try and use textures and stuff from existing repos for gzfreedoom to replace the textures and sprites that I don't like in freedoom, but with the original authorers accept of course since if they accept they would be donating work to an open source project.

 

I also have plans for making some 3D addons for gzfreedoom at some point down the line, but the levels come first, then textures, then sprites and then perhaps 3D models.

 

But I will try to incorporate improvements from freedoom as best I can

 

there are even some freedoom levels that were cut at some point that I might wish to add as bonus levels to gzfreedoom, because I really like some of them.

 

suffice to say.. I am in for a very very long haul with gzfreedoom, especially since any attempt at recruiting anything but playtesters has failed.

Edited July 19, 2021 by CBM

[continuum.mid]

7 hours ago, P41R47 said:

As for what i know, only episodes that doesn't accept changes are Episode 4 from phase 1, that is the award winning and officialized Double Impact, given by the authors themselves, and the first 11 maps of phase 2, that is pretty much complete vanilla right now.

I seriously doubt full level replacements would be accepted, but a lot of changes have been proposed and some accepted to make the levels more balanced or vanilla compatible.

 

I'm also not sure the first 11 maps of phase 2 are locked in, but they certainly shouldn't be the focus.

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

Just so you know, maybe they'll redo map 12, or they'll just simplify it, I reported on GitHub a visplane overflow next to the starting area and, well, read what they posted. Maybe they've already worked on the map issues on the experimental builds, but I can't check it right now

https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/issues/742

[CorianderCastor]

Just because something doesn't make sense, doesn't mean it shouldn't or can't be. The problem with Animosity is that Strife is Strife. It almost certainly requires much more planning and determination to see the finish line. Also: Breakfast Trek is a thing.

[P41R47]

45 minutes ago, northivanastan said:

I seriously doubt full level replacements would be accepted, but a lot of changes have been proposed and some accepted to make the levels more balanced or vanilla compatible.

 

I'm also not sure the first 11 maps of phase 2 are locked in, but they certainly shouldn't be the focus.

In words i read somewhere from Fraggle or other who is involved, if the submited map is better than the one already in, it is replaced.
Better, is a wide meaning word, so probably now things, after soo much work on them, are not in need of a replacement.

As for the maps being locked, i didn't meant that, sorry i worded it pretty bad, i just tried to say that most map of phase 2 first episode maps are completely vanilla, last time i checked, so those are less possible to be replaced.

Edited July 19, 2021 by P41R47

[CBM]

In a way I guess I can count my blessings for only needing to support GZDoom with GZFreeDOOM, since it seems Vanilla FreeDOOM has a lot of Vanilla compatible ports it needs to support, Some of which has Some Hard limits on geometri (like ChocolateDOOM). I am actually adding plenty of microdetailing on GZFreeDOOMs maps. Zandronium?, LZDoom and ZDoom support in GZFreeDOOM  is going to be coincidental, atleast at first.

Edited July 20, 2021 by CBM

[selliott4]

I've touched on this in my previous comment where I mentioned that many of the 39 (at the time) open pull requests didn't have any comments, but Freedoom development waxes and wanes in large part due to involvement of folks of who have write access to the repository.

I know everyone who is working on Freedoom is working for free and as such we're not entitled to anything. And I know Freedoom has been around for a long time and that some folks may be tired of it. Given that I'd like to propose a conservative approach to wrapping it up.

Freedoom has had all 100 maps for a while now. I've played through all of the single player maps and I've enjoyed them. From my perspective they are all perfectly playable. They may not be perfectly vanilla, but they're close.

I think Freedoom should have one final push where no maps are replaced, where only critical fixes are made for things like crashes in game engines, or playability issues that can be fixed with minimum risk and effort (not enough ammo, a game mode not being playable due to a barrier, etc.).

It seems like it should be possible to do this in a few weeks. Maybe set a date a few months from now, whenever key players are available. And then have a 1.0 release, declare victory, and never work on Freedoom again. From that point forward any additional changes can be via a fork and managed by someone else. Hopefully having the finish line in sight will be energizing.

I don't mean to criticize the more ambitious suggestions in this thread, but wrapping up Freedoom may be best. It's not like id Software has ongoing incremental changes to Doom 1 and Doom 2.

[MrFlibble]

3 hours ago, selliott4 said:

It seems like it should be possible to do this in a few weeks. Maybe set a date a few months from now, whenever key players are available. And then have a 1.0 release, declare victory, and never work on Freedoom again. From that point forward any additional changes can be via a fork and managed by someone else. Hopefully having the finish line in sight will be energizing.

It is my understanding that the people involved in actual development now mostly communicate via discord. Since I don't use that, I largely don't know the state of affairs, but I had the impression that plans about moving forward exist and are being carried out as the time permits.

 

I'm just saying because if you're making the above proposal based on knowledge of those plans, it's one thing. But if this is how you personally feel the project should go, then, well, maybe the actual developers have different ideas. For all these years, I don't remember anyone involved in this project making statements to the effect that releasing v1.0 was top priority - making Freed∞m better had always been at the forefront.

 

For example, you say that all maps are good, even though some may not perfectly comply with vanilla standards. I remember from old discussions that 100% vanilla compatibility was set as one of the goals at one point (and this is reflected in the current project readme), and you can see the work done in that direction in another thread. If you're suggesting to drop that goal, what is your reasoning for that?

 

3 hours ago, selliott4 said:

wrapping up Freedoom may be best. It's not like id Software has ongoing incremental changes to Doom 1 and Doom 2.

But Doom and Doom II weren't libre, open source community projects, they were done on schedule in a completely different environment. Besides, Doom actually had some not very drastic, but noticeable changes after the initial release, so I'm not sure the analogy can provide useful insights.

[continuum.mid]

It is worth noting that Freedoom's apparent commit inactivity has ceased, as someone did go through and merged or reviewed several contributions - including mine, so I now officially have made music for Freedoom. Also, all of the work needed for vanilla compatibility is basically done now as you can see in the thread MrFlibble linked. There's definitely progress being made towards 1.0.

Edited August 4, 2021 by northivanastan