zdaemon status

[Redneckerz]

Since we are talking source ports and a variant on multiplayer ports and ZDaemon, a few words from the Wiki Well:

• Though Zandronum development is ongoing (slowly), there is a fork which sees more activity, QoL improvements, and Quake- style movement: Q-Zandronum.
• Among existing criticism regarding ZDaemon's licensing, another is that it does not support advanced features that are more or less standardized. This is true. But ZDaemon has a ton of custom stuff that allows it to do an awful lot. Thing is, this is scattered across ZD threads and pages. Till now.

[NationwideMoose]

ZDaemon is not dead. I don't think I have ever logged into my account and not found people playing on a server. Survival and duels pretty much all the time with FFA going most nights. There is also the many weekly events. I don't want to seem biased however all of the three main ports have their perks. I love Zandronum because of the compatibility with mods. I really like Odamex because of how faithful it is to DOOM. It also has the cool features like getting rid of the bright red screen when taking damage and making the gun model transparent. The updated software renderer is cool too. I wish more people played it usually every time I check the servers are empty. They don't have an account system either and it can be used with doomseeker. I don't understand why it isn't used more.

[forgettable pyromaniac]

16 hours ago, roadworx said:

-its gotten a huge boost in popularity. i'm seeing far more younger people being regulars in the classic doom section of dw than i ever have before, which kinda indicates that it's absolutely not dying and is in fact growing.

You could consider me part of that pack that's younger, I guess, but I'd like to think that I joined into the fray right before that all happened, but that was cuz I was trying to find the game for the longest time, cuz all i remembered was a zigzag room (E1M1) from playing it on a friend's Xbox 360. Finally found it like a year ago, played it. loved it, kept looking it up because I wanted more doom to play, learned about Doom 2, TNT, Plutonia, and this site, and then the rest was history :p
 

 

16 hours ago, roadworx said:

now, why multiplayer hasn't risen in popularity alongside classic doom, i have no idea.

Best guess would be that just downloading the unity port off steam is easiest, doing multiplayer requires a whole new port, knowing how to grab the wad file from the steam directory, ect, and I don't think a bunch of people would want to do that. Obviously some do, and they did, but not all.

[spwnSH4Rk]

I’m pretty new to doom multiplayer - deathmatch, survival etc - but it seems like the servers would benefit from people arguing less about WHY nobody is on and more people just coming together and playing the game.
Maybe some people see the constant shots taken between people who prefer sourceport A over sourceport B and get turned off by the strife instead of deciding to play the game themselves.

Maybe the constant attention to or pointing out that “nobody plays anymore” turns away new players. 
 

Just some food for thought here. 

[Flambeau]

Im eating your food.

 

I just got into multiplayer DOOM since yesterday and I enjoyed it every single day since then!

 

[Doomkid]

53 minutes ago, pWNsH4RK said:

Just some food for thought here. 

You make some great points. This whole thread was bait anyway - the dude was banned and is apparently a known troll. I can pretty much always find some DM when I'm in the mood.

Edited June 22, 2021 by Doomkid

[roadworx]

2 hours ago, forgettablepyromaniac said:

You could consider me part of that pack that's younger, I guess, but I'd like to think that I joined into the fray right before that all happened, but that was cuz I was trying to find the game for the longest time, cuz all i remembered was a zigzag room (E1M1) from playing it on a friend's Xbox 360. Finally found it like a year ago, played it. loved it, kept looking it up because I wanted more doom to play, learned about Doom 2, TNT, Plutonia, and this site, and then the rest was history :p

i'm part of the younger crowd as well tbf (i'm 20, so early gen z), but i started playing the game 2013/2014. i just wanted older games to play on my dad's shitty laptop cuz we were visiting my uncle up in upstate ny, and doom popped up when i was looking around, and...yeah. got it, played it, and loved it

 

3 hours ago, forgettablepyromaniac said:

Best guess would be that just downloading the unity port off steam is easiest, doing multiplayer requires a whole new port, knowing how to grab the wad file from the steam directory, ect, and I don't think a bunch of people would want to do that. Obviously some do, and they did, but not all.

multiplayer has been dead long before the unity port came out tho, that's the thing. that was released only two years ago, and as people have said before, mp has been stagnant for nearly a decade

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

I honestly don't like ZDaemon that much, it has pretty good features, but I don't think it's my style, and at least for me, Wine doesn't run it that well (Not that surprising since my computer is very shitty), and from what I've seen, Zandronum is a bit more active. I'm more an Odamex guy, even though it's the "dead port", I still have some problems with it, but it's more my style and it runs well with a bad internet.

Spoiler

And, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the account system, but to be fair, it's a good system of security for the port and I guess it's a quality of life improvement for the hosts

 

[Decay]

1 hour ago, roadworx said:

Multiplayer has been dead long before the unity port came out tho, that's the thing. that was released only two years ago, and as people have said before, mp has been stagnant for nearly a decade

Also reeks of ignorance. It's almost as if the people who weren't around or didn't consistently play for the past decade have no idea what they are talking about.

 

There are literal player number stat trackers for zandro and odamex that factually tell you this is wrong. 

 

There has been stagnation for a while long time but nothing was really in decline until about 2017. Zan 3.0's shitty netcode compared to 2.1.2 and lack of updates have contributed to it's decline. Odamex has probably received more players than ever, regardless of whether or not you have to get on a communication platform to find them, and zdaemon  has been chugging along. Sure zdctf isn't played 24/7 anymore but it's worth considering people get older, find more accessible games with more people, etc.

 

PvP is only dead in people's minds because they want it to be. If you define it as "it's dead because what I want to play isn't always readily available" that's a personal problem that doesn't accurately reflect the state of things