Pure, Vanilla Doom vs. Modern, Z-Powered Doom

[K_Doom]

20 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Man, I had no idea Vanilla wads and mods just like Ray Mohawk 2, D4V and Boiled Doom and such had already been done decades ago and offered nothing new. I could have sworn they were all providing experiences totally unlike what 99% of other vanilla wads offer!

 

By that same logic, since 3D floors, deep water, slopes, transparent lines, and a bunch of other “new” mapping features are also over 20 years old, does that mean pretty much every map, regardless of format, has basically already been done before unless it uses a feature added within the last 10 years? 🤔

 

I’m sorry to zero in on this point so much, it’s just that even though I’ll play anything in any format, when it comes to mapping and modding I keep things vanilla. The idea that everything vanilla can do was already done decades ago is false objectively - even with just my own wads I can confirm that there’s nothing else quite like them that can just be easily replaced with any other wad, the better ones have their own distinct twists not done before or since.

 

I wonder if the idea that vanilla “did all it could do 20+ years ago” is a common stigma I didn’t realise before, even despite numerous vanilla wads made in the last 5-10 years proving otherwise?

Nah, regardless of what I say, the strictly vanilla game is very limited, I mean, to what is limited to running something extra vanilla. Not even dynamic lights are allowed in this. From this it's obvious that mods these days are light years ahead of what Doom originally was. I don't know if you know what "coping" means but that's exactly what you're doing hehe

[Shepardus]

15 minutes ago, K_Doom said:

Nah, regardless of what I say, the strictly vanilla game is very limited, I mean, to what is limited to running something extra vanilla.

"Vanilla is limited to what is possible in vanilla" - well, yes?

[K_Doom]

23 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

"Vanilla is limited to what is possible in vanilla" - well, yes?

Exactly, and for not having so many resources, everything that had to be done in it, has already been done. I'm not saying he's boring, but he's just a lot more limited.

Edited July 22, 2022 by K_Doom
edit

[Shepardus]

Well, even if we ignore the assertion that we've exhausted all possible artistic creativity within vanilla bounds and focus solely on the technical aspects, it's still hard to say that we've really done everything there is. After all, mikoportals were only discovered a couple years ago, despite having technically been possible for decades.

[Doomkid]

1 hour ago, K_Doom said:

I don't know if you know what "coping" means but that's exactly what you're doing hehe

I don’t know if you know what “nonsense” means, but it perfectly describes the claim that all vanilla possibilities were already exhausted decades ago. I even proved you wrong directly by citing 3 vanilla wads that are very different to play compared to other older vanilla maps. How is stating a simple fact “coping” lol

[K_Doom]

32 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Não sei se você sabe o que significa “absurdo”, mas descreve perfeitamente a afirmação de que todas as possibilidades de baunilha já estavam esgotadas décadas atrás. Eu até provei que você estava errado citando 3 wads de baunilha que são muito diferentes de tocar em comparação com outros mapas de baunilha mais antigos. Como é afirmar um simples fato “enfrentando” lol

??? If we are talking about strictly vanilla Doom here, then it means that anything different from the original Doom (and by that I mean the first version) is no longer vanilla, that is, it is beyond Doom vanilla and therefore has more possibilities. If, for example, I use freelook in my gameplay, it will no longer be a vanilla gameplay, but a "semi-vanilla" gameplay, perhaps, and this will bring more possibilities, for example; see everything from top to bottom. I don't understand what you're getting at, my point is obvious.

[Gez]

Point is that community consensus sees DEHACKED modifications of the game's behavior to still be vanilla.

 

Sure that won't add proper camera pitch changes but you can still make the game quite different from what it originally was. E.g. the REKKR TC is vanilla.

[Graf Zahl]

The selection is indeed rather poor.

 

My personal preference is not to use gameplay mods and play maps with the assets that were intended by the mapper, but the two things I absolutely cannot do without is

1) proper mouselook

2) the ability to reduce aliasing as much as possible

 

and there's not much choice of ports that handle both of these well. Which was the main reason why in the early 2000's I created my own port that did what I wanted. :)

 

[Azure_Horror]

I voted semi-purist, but I am not sure where exactly do I seat. I play prboom-compatible mapsets, and I am yet to install GZ-Doom properly, but I am not exactly opposed to more advanced features. For now, limit-removing, Boom-compatible and MBF-based maps provide enough variety. But I don't know, what I will be playing in a year or two.

But for now, having an ability to properly watch all kinds of demos is very convinient.

 

By the way, there are some pretty extensive gameplay reworks for purist Source-ports. Roudy Rudy 2, Struggle, Antaresian Reliquary, Valiant, Doom 4 Vanilla Mod, Uprising, Judgement, Jumpwad...

Where do all those thing should go, according to this poll?

 

2 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

My personal preference is not to use gameplay mods and play maps with the assets that were intended by the mapper, but the two things I absolutely cannot do without is

1) proper mouselook

2) the ability to reduce aliasing as much as possible 

 

and there's not much choice of ports that handle both of these well. Which was the main reason why in the early 2000's I created my own port that did what I wanted. :)

I am now curious. What is your opinion on infitely high monsters? Are they horrible, acceptable or mostly fine?

 

Personally, I learned to stop worrying an to love the infinite height. It can be very grating, but modern mappers know how to design maps around it. I feel like that in modern WADs infinite height often adds to the fun.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Azure_Horror

[Graf Zahl]

35 minutes ago, Azure_Horror said:

I am now curious. What is your opinion on infitely high monsters? Are they horrible, acceptable or mostly fine?

 

 

 

 

They are horrible, but on many maps it is not an issue. Having an option to disable them is definitely appreciated.

 

[Murdoch]

1 minute ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

They are horrible, but on many maps it is not an issue. Having an option to disable them is definitely appreciated.

 

 

Indeed. This was such a pain in the ass bug.

[Azure_Horror]

On 7/22/2022 at 2:27 PM, Murdoch said:

Indeed. This was such a pain in the ass bug.

 

If I am not mistaken, the infinitely high monters are technically a pain the ass feature.

They are an intetional design choice, if I remeber correctly.

Edited July 24, 2022 by Azure_Horror
grammar

[Graf Zahl]

Nah, they are just a lazy-ass workaround for something that did not work right in the engine. Heretic and Hexen had to add quite a bit of fudging, including a new flag, to make it work somewhat reliably.

 

[Gregor]

19 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Nah, they are just a lazy-ass workaround for something that did not work right in the engine. Heretic and Hexen had to add quite a bit of fudging, including a new flag, to make it work somewhat reliably.

 

You'd have to admit though that a huge amount of wads, past and present, use this "bug" as a gameplay feature, intentionally limiting the players movement around certain paths in the map that way.

[ChopBlock223]

tl;dr : Neutral

 

I mostly play with GzDoom, and I love its features and options, as well as its moddability. It's FUN to tinker with all kinds of shit.

 

However, I like the classic gameplay a lot as well, it holds up and is really easy to just drop into, the only thing I just don't like at all is the back and forth mouse movement, thankfully a feature you can disable in basically every sourceport, even the official ones.

In spite of all the mods and options with GzDoom, I'll still occasionally sit down and play some levels in Unity Doom on my PS4, or try emulating one of the old console ports, and even with the many flaws of those, I find myself really having fun anyway.

 

No vertical looking? Oh well, I've got the vertical auto-aim, it rarely fails me.

'Infinitely Tall' Monsters? Slightly awkward, and it sure is nice to turn it off in GzDoom, but it disadvantages the monsters just as well as it advantages you, turning it off lets you sprint over a horde of Pinkies to escape being cornered, but it also allows flying bastards like Tomatoes and Meatballs to traverse above ground monsters or above and below each other unhindered, which can make some encounters much harder than they were designed to be.

Blockmap precision? Not excellent in Vanilla, but mostly functional, and the monsters you can't easily melee are still often a desperation maneuver to try to melee in GzDoom anyway, where you can reliably strike them, and because of that issue mappers typically do not expect and require you to either.

 

Demo compat is also a REALLY cool feature to me, and I'm so glad that it's being maintained after all these years. GzDoom may be my favorite port, but it means a lot that ports like PrBoom+, DSDA and Woof aims to retain it while also developing new features for mapping. Boom and MBF21 are my favorite formats to map in because they have so many useful features, they're easy to use, and also people can plain record a demo and then submit it to the Doomed Speed Demos Archive, where that tiny file gives you a perfect recording of MY map potentially  forever, just get the .wad and demo, then load it up, and you'll see!

Not even FIREBLU can crust up a demo recording!

 

The only mod I actually kind of just always find myself 'needing' is the SpriteFixes one, which I've got on autoload for GzDoom and load with DSDA or Crispy when needed (good old DoomLauncher). I love this mod because it drops into basically any sourceport for Doom, and cleans up the original aesthetics so you can better see how lovingly crafted they are, just fixing the offsets alone makes dudes like the Archie look so very smooth in how he moves.

 

Freelook, brightmaps, jumping? Very sexy baby, and I love them, but Doom 64 had none of that and I was still floored by how great it was when I first gave it a roll a couple of years back. Easily one of the cornerstones of Classic Doom and one I come back to again and again.

[Gregor]

I personally prefer my Doom somewhat vanilla, but, in the end, my main focus is to play any wad as intended by the map makers; so if it is a GZDoom project, I have no problem with modern features like jumping and mouselook. The only thing i can not endure is smeared sprites aka texture filtering; that just looks god-awful to me.

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, Azure_Horror said:

 

If I am not mistaken, the infinitely high monters are techically a pain the ass feature.

They are an inteional design choice, if I remeber correctly.

 

As Graf said not intentional just lazy. So yes arguably not a bug. Still a pain in the ass. 

[Domestic-Weirdo]

Like several others in this thread, I chose Semi-Purist. I prefer to keep things vanilla compatible while enjoying the modern visual enhancements from source ports like Crispy Doom which offer high resolution, widescreen support, and an uncapped framerate. I'm also pretty fond of limit-removing Doom mods since it's essentially vanilla Doom+, making mod development much easier by having access to more resources while retaining the classic gameplay.

 

One of my absolute favorite aspects about Doom is the DeHackEd utility. There's just something so fun and impressive about the things you can accomplish with it. While its limitations can be pretty frustrating at times, somewhat paradoxically, that's what makes it so appealing to me. It's these limits that pushes people creatively to see how far they can go with the original engine's capabilities. The mods made for Boom and ZDoom source ports are still pretty cool and plenty of fantastic projects have been developed around them, like Eviternity, Impossible: A New Reality, and Elementalism. However, DeHacked mods like Rekkr and D4V, in some respects, amaze me the most.

 

 

[magicsofa]

On 7/21/2022 at 5:55 AM, Thelokk said:

If we mean 'vanilla' as in 'a run and gun map style that focuses on simple layouts, 90s style texturing and largely incidental encounters', well, even I have to admit the well is pretty damn close to running dry.

 

If anyone calls that vanilla, they are just uninformed or using the wrong word. They meant oldschool, IWAD-style, or 90's-style. This style can be accomplished in any engine, with stock resources or not, and even with (some) modified game behavior.

EDIT: People do sometimes say "vanilla-style" which really annoys me. There are PWADs from '94 that don't look or play anything like the IWADs, using only stock resources.

Edited July 22, 2022 by magicsofa

[Hitboi]

I'm close to neutral, I enjoy vanilla-compatible content but also at the same time I enjoy stuff like wads that use boom features, and I also enjoy zdoom stuff but not that often.
 

4 hours ago, magicsofa said:

EDIT: People do sometimes say "vanilla-style" which really annoys me. There are PWADs from '94 that don't look or play anything like the IWADs, using only stock resources.

Agreed, it annoys me too, it's like some people (probably not a lot) have forgot what "vanilla" actually means in Doom or any game. It's a technical term, not a slang.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Hitboi

[GarrettChan]

I will never turn off infinite height monsters.

[BoxY]

I'd be open to playing zdoom wads crammed with modern features and fancy graphics if any of the guys doing that stuff were using them to produce the kind of maps I find creative and interesting, but as far as I can tell they aren't, so I'm probably stuck in Boom world until current mapping tastes evolve into something else.

[out_of_service]

I voted for the Neutral option. Doom is Doom. If I didn't like it I wouldn't have been playing the game for the past twenty-nine years lol.

[Mystic 256]

6th option, Variety / What ever I feel like that day

[Bauul]

On 7/22/2022 at 7:14 AM, Domestic-Weirdo said:

The mods made for Boom and ZDoom source ports are still pretty cool and plenty of fantastic projects have been developed around them, like Eviternity, Impossible: A New Reality, and Elementalism. However, DeHacked mods like Rekkr and D4V, in some respects, amaze me the most.

 

Just FYI Eviternity is a Dehacked project: Boom maps don't support any of the more advanced programming language like Decorate or ZScript, so while the Dehacked has access to a few more Things to use by targeting Boom, it's still classic Dehacked underneath.

 

Where modern Dehextra and Decohack fall alongside MBF21 features is probably some kind of middle ground.

 

16 hours ago, BoxY said:

I'd be open to playing zdoom wads crammed with modern features and fancy graphics if any of the guys doing that stuff were using them to produce the kind of maps I find creative and interesting, but as far as I can tell they aren't, so I'm probably stuck in Boom world until current mapping tastes evolve into something else.

 

Out of curiosity, what kind of maps would those be? Utilizing modern source port features don't necessarily dictate what type of map a level is, or how it plays. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there were maps to your taste designed for more modern source ports.

Edited July 23, 2022 by Bauul

[BoxY]

1 hour ago, Bauul said:

Out of curiosity, what kind of maps would those be? Utilizing modern source port features don't necessarily dictate what type of map a level is, or how it plays. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there were maps to your taste designed for more modern source ports.

 

I guess the main things I've really been into playing lately are something like a) scrappy, unrefined speedmap type projects and b) eccentric personal art project maps, and I might be wrong but I feel like both of those genres tend to suffer badly when translated into more advanced ports, but I'm open to suggestions.

[jazzmaster9]

On 7/23/2022 at 7:42 AM, BoxY said:

I'd be open to playing zdoom wads crammed with modern features and fancy graphics if any of the guys doing that stuff were using them to produce the kind of maps I find creative and interesting, but as far as I can tell they aren't, so I'm probably stuck in Boom world until current mapping tastes evolve into something else.

Great thing is that there have been such maps created the past 3-5 years. Elementalism, Mapwich 1 and 2 and Technicolor Antichrist box all Came out relatively recently and are a show case of using Modern Features to create great sets of Levels.

As well as amazing Total Conversions like Adventures of Square and Age of Hell.

 

ZDoom mapping has evolved a lot since 2010 and better knowledge and editors allow for such maps to be fully realized.

Edited July 24, 2022 by jazzmaster9

[TenthRingWanderer]

I've played Chocolate Doom and even emulated on DOSBox just to compare, but the Source Port King that is GZDoom just trumps all others in features and gameplay potential. Modernist is my way to go.
 

[Gougaru]

I like my classic doom a bit chonky.. I player around with gz doom.. but something about vanilla doom just feels cozy 

[Muusi]

Does PlayStation Doom count as vanilla? Playstation Doom is the best Doom experience there is. 

 

I guess for me, Doom is Doom as long as it doesn't contain the word "brutal" in its title lol. 

Edited July 25, 2022 by Muusi