what if the doom source code never was released

[dyshoria]

Considering the ddom source code was relesed a while ago we have a ton of source ports like crispy doom,prboom plus and gzdoom for example. But what if dooms source code never was released. Whould we need to use MSDOS for everything? Whould doom mapping even be a thing?

[MFG38]

Doom mapping would certainly still be a thing even if the source code was never released. The first wads were made back in 1994 while the source code wasn't released until 1997. But I suppose had id kept the source code to themselves all this time, source ports wouldn't necessarily exist. Or there'd at least be a lot less of them. We certainly wouldn't have GZDoom and its set of fancy features that allow projects like Age of Hell and Elementalism to look as gorgeous as they do.

[Gez]

It would certainly be a lot more limited. There wouldn't have been Boom, DOSDoom/EDGE, Legacy, ZDoom in the late 90s/early 00sto bolser continued community involvement as the Doom engine became obsoleted by newer games that were themselves quickly obsoleted. Obviously there would be nearly no gameplay modding scene, either, since this was something pioneered by EDGE and then revived by ZDoom/GZDoom.

 

On the multiplayer front, no csDoom/ZDaemon/Skulltag/Odamex/Zandonum. That means no Capture the Flag scene, or any other team-based gamemode. No such thing as the IDL, as a consequence.

 

Map-wise, you can take a look at the Top 100 WADs of All Time and strike out anything that requires more than a limit-removing port (one can assume the Doom+ hack would have happened anyway).

 

You can also say goodbye to youtube channels like IcarusLives or those regular Kotaku article about some crazy Doom mod doing things impossible in the Doom engine. All in all I figure the Doom scene today would be perhaps as developed as the Dark Forces scene today.

[Maximum Matt]

5 minutes ago, Gez said:

Kotaku

is cool.

[Redneckerz]

Obviously mapping would still exist. Eventually something like DEU would be ported to Windows (And it did already as WinDEU) and likely something like Doom Builder would also exist, just fixed on the Vanilla spec.

 

DeHacked would be more prominent, ported to Windows. I can imagine that you would also see more hexedited patches to muck around the executable.

 

But you would lose a lot. Multiplayer would be mostly Deathmatch and or Dethtag and goofball things like DoomBall. Anything fitting in Vanilla and using DeHacked.

[Apprentice]

1 hour ago, Dyshoria software said:

Considering the ddom source code was relesed a while ago we have a ton of source ports like crispy doom,prboom plus and gzdoom for example. But what if dooms source code never was released. Whould we need to use MSDOS for everything? Whould doom mapping even be a thing?

- Maps and mods: yes

- Source ports: no

- MS-DOS: yes

 

We probably would've had an official release of WinDoom and a more advanced version of Doom95 . . .

[Jewellds]

I think we would still have modern engines to play Doom on, just of a different sort. Reverse engineering efforts were already beginning on Doom in the 1990s before the source code release.

If a community is determined enough, and the Doom community *is* determined enough, quite complex games can be recreated by reverse engineering. Daggerfall Unity, for instance. Not having the code would have slowed the community down, but I'd be surprised if we hadn't got some modern form of Doom by now.

[jval]

We could reverse engineer Doom exe so source ports could exist.

[Graf Zahl]

Let's not delude ourselves: What makes Doom still go as strongly as it does is that over the years there always have been ports that allowed to play the game on modern systems at native screen resolutions. This particular thing is crucial to attract new users.

 

Without it the user base would have steadily shrunk to the hard core of fans who may have been able to keep the game alive at a far lower level for several more years. But even among those eventually the time will come to move on, resulting in gradually thinning out the community.

 

So we'd have a game, playable at 320x200 (ignoring Doom95 which was bad even as it was new) in DOS emulators. There'd be no Brutal Doom to lure in younger people - all you'd had is a comparatively simple game, both technically and visually, that'd be existing in some tiny niche somewhere on the internet where the common public does not even look.

 

Of course one big factor here is whether it would still have had the momentum to spawn Doom 3. If yes, things may have been different, but if not, it'd probably be dead by now.

 

[Wavy]

People would of just reverse engineered the original DOOM.EXE file so we can modify the source to allow enhancements. This happened with Mario 64, GTA 3/VC, and even Space Cadet Pinball. So even if we never had the source release, we know that certain talented individuals would decompile and reverse engineer the EXE.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Wavy

[Pechudin]

Truly a cursed timeline. Thankfully, not one we live in.

[continuum.mid]

I think to projects like OpenMW and EasyRPG when reading this thread actually. Bethesda never released any of the source for Morrowind's engine or the engines that succeeded it. But the game developed a dedicated modding community, and they made an open-source reimplementation.

Now, is Doom the type of game that would receive such a project? It did have a dedicated community, and reverse engineering efforts, prior to the code release, but it is also a much older game, and the idea of reimplementing a game engine didn't really exist, as far as I know. So, I'm not sure.

[Maes]

1 hour ago, northivanastan said:

the idea of reimplementing a game engine didn't really exist, as far as I know. So, I'm not sure.

 

Actually, that's how video games were ported to different systems until that point: the game "engine" and often the audio/video assets were recreated from scratch, within the limitations of the target system and the budget/talent of the team/company/individual doing the porting. So in practice, each port of a popular arcade game was just a completely different game engine made to look as close as possible (with the caveats mentioned above) to the original. Besides, with many games written in assembly-language and targeting some custom arcade board, there wasn't much choice there.

 

Doom was pretty innovative in that it (also) had a highly portable, mostly C codebase AND a sensible asset management system. If the engine was easy to figure out but the assets were in some sort of hermetic compressed/encrypted format, like some particularly "clever" games did at the time, good luck getting anything reused, short of doing raw video captures.

 

Without the Doom source code probably we'd get the Doom equivalent of "Street Figher II IBM"

 

 

 

N.B. this version is quite more refined than the one I got my hands on ages ago. Mine was a barely playable proto-MUGEN.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Maes

[borogk]

Doom engine could certainly be reverse-engineered and huge chunks of it even written from scratch. It would be more of a re-creation than a direct fork. But, even so, the popularity of Classic Doom and the variety of quality custom content would not be nearly as great as it is today.

 

Proprietary console ports would still happen periodically, not dissimilar to how Nintendo keeps milking 35 year old NES games :)

 

Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal could still happen and not even be different from our timeline at all. The franchise recognition for the general public would be still the same ("oh yeah, I remember that thing from the 90s"). Doom community being several times smaller wouldn't make much difference in that regard.

 

Wild speculation mode off

[Marisa the Magician]

I feel like if that had been the case, I'd still be modding Unreal Tournament to this day, and I'd be even deeper into clinical depression than I already am, because jesus rollerblading christ is that engine bad.

 

The existence of GZDoom and its more robust modding capabilities are what pulled me away from the vile clutches of Tim Sweeney. Seriously, source ports are a BIG deal here. I don't think Doom would have gotten to where it is without them. The community would surely wither away as other games with more options for content creation come out.

[Zulk RS]

Honestly I don't the community would have been as strong as it is now. In fact, I'd say there'd be a good chance that it would die out. Look at all the games that had modability but not the source code released. I may be wrong but I believe Morrowind is a game that has modding tools but no source codes. Although even now there's a good chunk of people that are fans of Morrowind and even mods for it, it's nowhere near what the Doom community is. I think if the Doom source codes were never released, that's what the Doom community would have been if not in an even worse state.

[maxmanium]

On a very technical level, it wasn't -- we still don't have the DOS source code thanks to use of the DMX library.

[Maes]

Or maybe one day there would be that hypothetical, officially-sanctioned, made-by-the-Gods-at-id equivalent of Boom or ZDoom (yes, that was a thing that appeared in one too many "How would/should the next Doom be?" polls over the years).

 

Good luck asking for more features on a daily basis though ;-)

Edited October 5, 2021 by Maes

[Sokoro]

Wait, there was something about arbitary code execution on cacowards, someone managed to force vanilla engine to do crazy things, maybe that would save that hypothetical timeline?

 

Also, short answer: We would be doomed!

[DannyMan]

HacX: Twitch n' Kill was created before the source code was even released or something.

[Graf Zahl]

14 minutes ago, Sokoro said:

Wait, there was something about arbitary code execution on cacowards, someone managed to force vanilla engine to do crazy things, maybe that would save that hypothetical timeline?

 

Also, short answer: We would be doomed!

 

No, not really. With all these things you must never forget that a lot of the analysis to do this stuff required the source to be available. It also took over 20 years to get there and the game not falling into relative obscurity.

 

12 minutes ago, DannyMan said:

HacX: Twitch n' Kill was created before the source code was even released or something.

 

So? It wasn't the first mod to use Dehacked to alter the monsters' and weapons' behavior.

 

[Teo Slayer]

I can't imagine a world without the ZDoom Family Source Ports

[Kinsie]

What if hamburgers ate people? I will not elaborate and will leave you all to do all the speculation for me.

[Noiser]

We would still have wonderful megawads and even a few mods. And the community would still be relatively popular, at least on the mapping front.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Noiser

[Nikku4211]

Maybe the level editors would still exist, but the community would be much smaller and everyone would have to rely on either DOSBox or Doom95, unless Bethesda still would've eventually made a Unity port of Doom in such a timeline.

 

I probably would not have gotten into Doom past the SNES version if it weren't for ZDoom introducing me to the idea of a source port that is compatible on a modern OS without emulation(even if it behaves very differently from the OG Doom).

 

At least there'd be more of a reason and more motivation to push the limits Doom's DOS engine, though, and make DeHackEd versions that can modify much more than what our timeline's versions are capable of.

 

Maybe Doom modding would be more like SMW hacking if the source code wasn't released, relying on constant reverse engineering.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Nikku4211

[MrFlibble]

I think it's a bit of a stretch to put the community size in direct correlation with Doom being open source.

 

Abuse was open sourced on very liberal terms, and there existed a mapmaking & modding community which even made a completely free / libre game called fRaBs based on that code, alongside source ports, but after some time, the community just faded away. Even though Abuse's LUA scripting allowed to code almost anything into it (like the included sample Arkanoid style game).

 

Counter-example: Supaplex. It's been immensely popular from the start, and fans found ways to bugfix and improve the DOS binary without access to the code (it was never open sourced). The copyright holders and original authors declared the game freeware. People created extra levels and stuff, made clones and improved versions. Since there is no code available, there's an accurate open source recreation based on disassembled code from the binary. The Supaplex community may not be large, but it exists and the game continues to be popular and attract new players because of its appeal and gameplay.

 

I think that the major pillars of the Doom community are a) Doom's gameplay and replay value and b) modding and mapping. That John Carmack open sourced Doom speaks a lot about his visionary qualities, but he did what was right from the programmer's standpoint (a programme is its code, not its binary executable), rather than out of concerns for community preservation.

 

Let's not forget that Doom is Doom (heh). Very few other titles have had this level of impact on the gaming scene on the whole. The source code release simply amplified the effect to an extent, and yes, it opened up a lot of opportunities long before playing the original DOS version natively on Windows-based systems became impossible. But it's still just one of the contributing factors to Doom's longevity -- very vital but not the only one to motivate people to play it.

[Shepardus]

Looking at OpenTTD and OpenRCT2 as examples, I imagine people would have reverse engineered the engine and created decent ports anyway, and there'd still be a community around it. Let us not forget that even Strife and Doom 64 never had source code releases, and their ports are based on reverse engineering (though I'm sure having the source code and knowledge of other Doom engine games helped).

[CBM]

10 hours ago, Kinsie said:

What if hamburgers ate people? I will not elaborate and will leave you all to do all the speculation for me.

the living hamburgers would then have a chain called McHumans, that sold human-burgers

[Blzut3]

For everyone saying "it would just be reverse engineered" I do have to wonder how much of an influence Doom's source code being released had on many of the cited examples being reverse engineered.  Obviously Strife and Doom 64 would have a lot less interest if it wasn't for source ports, but what I'm getting at is how much of the concept of taking an old game and improving upon the engine/making it run anywhere traces to Doom?  Would we instead just be happy to be running filters on DOSBox or running the assets in a new engine with dubious at best accuracy?  I'm sure it would happen eventually, and maybe it's just my biases but it might have taken a lot longer for the demand that resulted in all those other projects to exist.

 

On a more personal note, it's almost certain I'd be a lot less well off if Doom's source code was never released.

[CBM]

Id say that the old dos tools and dehacked would be all we had