What's so special about /idgames?

[ARMCoder]

Time and again I see someone saying that he (or she) released the completed WAD to /idgames, implying it was a somewhat special event. Well, maybe it was, and I simply didn't get what's all about (I normally release my WADs to ModDB, that's just one among several good repositories).

 

I'd appreciate any clarifying answer!

 

Cheers!

[LadyMistDragon]

I know that when it involves non GZDoom stuff that DSDA will add your demo to the archives if the wad it's for is on /idgames. With GZDoom's demo playback problems, I have no idea why anyone would upload their stuff there. I think in some cases, people who aren't interested in Doomworld for whatever reason will upload their wads there without saying anything.

[Pseudonaut]

A wad that is uploaded to idgames is more likely to be final and less likely to undergo changes that would cause a demo to desync. So speedrunners often take an idgames upload as a cue that it's safe to record demos for the wad.

[esselfortium]

idgames is the most permanent long-term archive of Doom community content we have. If you want the best chance of people still being able to find your WAD in another 20 years, idgames is the place to put it.

[LadyMistDragon]

What essel said'd technically correct....it's another question if someone will actually find your wad after it's sank into obscurity. It's not like everyone just clicks random file when they get to the archives.

[Nefelibeta]

Yeah it's more like an archive nowadays, especially after /newstuff died lol

[ARMCoder]

 

Thank you all for the answers!

 

20 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

What essel said'd technically correct....it's another question if someone will actually find your wad after it's sank into obscurity. It's not like everyone just clicks random file when they get to the archives.

 

This is the harsh world of WAD making, unless your WAD is really, really top notch to stand out of the crowd, most likely it will be forgotten faster than the time you took to build it... You REALLY have to like what you are doing!

 

Cheers!

 

[7Mahonin]

47 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

What essel said'd technically correct....it's another question if someone will actually find your wad after it's sank into obscurity. It's not like everyone just clicks random file when they get to the archives.

I don’t believe that to be a unique problem with Idgames. That’s the case anywhere where you can host a WAD file isn’t it? 

[LadyMistDragon]

21 minutes ago, 7Mahonin said:

I don’t believe that to be a unique problem with Idgames. That’s the case anywhere where you can host a WAD file isn’t it? 

yes, including Doomworld so there's really not a huge advantage to it, at least if you just made a map only compatible in GZDoom if said map is in UDMF/Hexen format, despite not necessarily using lots of non-vanilla resources.  If it's Boom-compatible though, it's probably speedrunner-friendly so there's little reason not to.

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, ARMCoder said:

This is the harsh world of WAD making, unless your WAD is really, really top notch to stand out of the crowd, most likely it will be forgotten faster than the time you took to build it... You REALLY have to like what you are doing!

WADS are also special when they land a page on the DoomWiki. Usually because they are noticeable, but some offbeat stuff also tends to land there.

2 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

What essel said'd technically correct....it's another question if someone will actually find your wad after it's sank into obscurity. It's not like everyone just clicks random file when they get to the archives.

Id argue its more difficult to find on Moddb than its on /idgames. Moddb is all just separate pages for separate games... whereas idgames is easier to search for.

[Solmyr]

3 hours ago, ARMCoder said:

This is the harsh world of WAD making, unless your WAD is really, really top notch to stand out of the crowd, most likely it will be forgotten faster than the time you took to build it... You REALLY have to like what you are doing!

It's only harsh if you're aiming to stand out and get recognition, however if you're making wads just for fun, obscurity and indifference are a given from the get go, but so is love for what you make and share.

Edited July 25, 2022 by Solmyr

[Somniac]

I got (and continue to get) all my favourite WADs from idgames, or from threads on this forum that link to idgames. For me, to have my map on the same archive is what makes it "official" in a sense. There are a few other places that host WADs but idgames is the largest and most well known.

 

That's also the reason there's an insane amount of files on there, so I get what people mean about standing out, but that's where the community comes in. Development threads here can build a lot of interest in projects before they're properly released there. We still talk about great (and not so great) WADs from the same year that Doom came out, so there's a collective memory for quality maps.

Edited July 25, 2022 by VisionThing

[Hitboi]

11 hours ago, ARMCoder said:

I simply didn't get what's all about (I normally release my WADs to ModDB, that's just one among several good repositories).

I think what's so special about /idgames is its simplicity of downloading and uploading Doom content, you also have reviews but the support for them has been ended since 2018(?), there was a section for demos too but also support for it has been ended since a long time ago. Because you mentioned ModDB it's also great but not as simple as /idgames.
 

11 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

I know that when it involves non GZDoom stuff that DSDA will add your demo to the archives if the wad it's for is on /idgames. With GZDoom's demo playback problems, I have no idea why anyone would upload their stuff there.

Your post kinda confuses me, your point about "recording demos with GZDoom and then waiting for them to be put in DSDA is pointless" is right, but I don't know why you linked DSDA with /idgames, both of them support GZDoom stuff (not really on DSDA's side), so the only good purpose (I can think of) of using GZDoom in demos is for the wads that are designed for GZDoom (which means no demo desyncing! depending on the GZDoom version)

[LadyMistDragon]

Probably b

6 minutes ago, Hitboi said:

I think what's so special about /idgames is its simplicity of downloading and uploading Doom content, you also have reviews but the support for them has been ended since 2018(?), there was a section for demos too but also support for it has been ended since a long time ago. Because you mentioned ModDB it's also great but not as simple as /idgames.
 

Your post kinda confuses me, your point about "recording demos with GZDoom and then waiting for them to be put in DSDA is pointless" is right, but I don't know why you linked DSDA with /idgames, both of them support GZDoom stuff (not really on DSDA's side), so the only good purpose (I can think of) of using GZDoom in demos is for the wads that are designed for GZDoom (which means no demo desyncing! depending on the GZDoom version)

Probably because that's what speedrunners use as a vector for demo recording(the DSDA Archives. Having recorded or attempted to record demos before, I know you'll probably be asked for an /idgames link

Edited July 26, 2022 by LadyMistDragon

[Hitboi]

Just now, LadyMistDragon said:

Probably because that's what speedrunners use as a vector for demo recording.

Are you talking about DSDA-Doom or the DSDA archive? I was talking about the purpose of recording demos with GZDoom, not about that nobody records and uploads demos with GZDoom for non-GZDoom content. Still, I don't know why you mentioned DSDA because /idgames currently doesn't affiliate itself with demos.

[Shepardus]

Part of the prestige of /idgames comes from its legacy as the oldest continually maintained archive dedicated to Doom content, but I think it's also that it strikes a good balance between being open and accessible to a wide variety of content and content creators (especially after the introduction of the web uploader) while also remaining clean and trustworthy to those consuming the content. You may not like every wad on there, but when you download something from /idgames you at least have some idea of what it is, who made it, and what you can do with it, from looking at the text file. Much credit goes to the maintainers all the work they've put into the archive.

 

8 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

What essel said'd technically correct....it's another question if someone will actually find your wad after it's sank into obscurity. It's not like everyone just clicks random file when they get to the archives.

Well there are a handful of people who enjoy clicking that random button and seeing what comes up. And at least there is a random button that you can click on with confidence that what you get is related to Doom.

 

11 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

I know that when it involves non GZDoom stuff that DSDA will add your demo to the archives if the wad it's for is on /idgames. With GZDoom's demo playback problems, I have no idea why anyone would upload their stuff there. I think in some cases, people who aren't interested in Doomworld for whatever reason will upload their wads there without saying anything.

What the DSDA maintainers look for when adding demos for new wads is that the wad has been finalized, so that demos don't get desynced by a future update to the wad. A wad being uploaded to /idgames usually serves as a good proxy for that, but there are still cases of wads being updated on /idgames, as well as wads that aren't on /idgames but are trusted to be "finalized" (for example, Ribbiks' wads from the past few years).

 

Technically GZDoom demos are accepted on DSDA, though it's true that the lack of demo compatibility hampers players' interest in running GZDoom wads. Even if you have no interest in speedrunning, though, there are good reasons to upload to /idgames rather than just leaving your wad on the Doomworld forums. Of course there's the file size limit for Doomworld file uploads (/idgames also has limits, but it's per file and not a grand total per user), but at least as important is that the /idgames archive is, well, an archive. By uploading a file to /idgames, you're entrusting that file to maintainers who have an interest in cataloguing and preserving Doom-related content. In contrast to a Google Drive, Mediafire, or even ModDB link, which could go down for any number of reasons such as the uploader moving on from Doom and deciding to free some space, or the host making policy changes detrimental to Doom content (because preserving Doom content isn't their raison d'être), you can be fairly confident that as long as there is interest in Doom, there will be an /idgames archive to serve that interest.

[Endless]

10 hours ago, ARMCoder said:

This is the harsh world of WAD making, unless your WAD is really, really top notch to stand out of the crowd, most likely it will be forgotten faster than the time you took to build it... You REALLY have to like what you are doing!

I've started, along several others, various projects to try and find all those lost gems in the ocean of WADs. Thousands and thousands of WADs that have probably never been played by more than 5-10 people out there, with no ratings or reviews of any kind. It's one of those realities that come when a market becomes quite saturated. There's WADs released daily, and, on average, 50-80 WADs are released each month on Doomworld alone, and there's been super active months when more than a hundred are released, including various megawads. Even those that manage to get uploaded to /idgames, sometimes may pass quietly into oblivion.

 

It is quite the competitive field!

[ARMCoder]

6 hours ago, Solmyr said:

It's only harsh if you're aiming to stand out and get recognition, however if you're making wads just for fun, obscurity and indifference are a given from the get go, but so is love for what you make and share.

 

I enjoy designing and tinkering maps a lot, but I'm less and less motivated to share. Not because of sheer recognition (my maps are simple and not really ambitious), but because of the overabundance of new maps released every week.

 

There's no one to blame here, it's just a natural thing, even *I* cannot find the time to play many (let alone all) of the new maps that see the light of day (but I try to find some time to review the maps I afford to play).

 

The WADverse is an oversaturated space, where sharing or not is virtually indifferent, unless you have a really *hot* project.

 

My 2 cents.

[ARMCoder]

20 minutes ago, Endless said:

I've started, along several others, various projects to try and find all those lost gems in the ocean of WADs. Thousands and thousands of WADs that have probably never been played by more than 5-10 people out there, with no ratings or reviews of any kind. It's one of those realities that come when a market becomes quite saturated. There's WADs released daily, and, on average, 50-80 WADs are released each month on Doomworld alone, and there's been super active months when more than a hundred are released, including various megawads. Even those that manage to get uploaded to /idgames, sometimes may pass quietly into oblivion.

 

It is quite the competitive field!

 

This is sad, and most likely is still getting worse. In a way, this resembles the Open Source / Free Software community, where there are tons of projects sitting on Github without being downloaded by anyone... this happened to me also. Lots of wasted effort. I no longer share software because of the extra work needed to do it decently... About Doom maps, maybe I will share a few in the future, but having in mind that sharing is not the objective but just a side product.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

10 hours ago, ARMCoder said:

This is the harsh world of WAD making, unless your WAD is really, really top notch to stand out of the crowd, most likely it will be forgotten faster than the time you took to build it... You REALLY have to like what you are doing!

I see people say this a lot as if it's unique to the DOOM modding scene, but it's not. It's not even unique to user-created content in general. Go look on Steam, the eShop, PSN, Xbox, Google Play, Apple's app store, etc. Those are actual commercial products that someone is going to use on their career portfolio. Many of them took years of development, and the people making those games spent money that they probably won't get back. 99% of the games there, even the free ones, are so obscure that virtually nobody has heard of them. The same thing applies to music, books, film, artwork, and every other form of art or entertainment. Most people working in those fields generally do really like what they are doing, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. That applies even more to a modding scene, as there is no incentive to make a DOOM wad other than the fact that you enjoy it.

Edited July 26, 2022 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[Doomkid]

To anyone seeking the answer to the question asked by the OP, esselfortium and Pseudonaut are correct. Many hundreds of Doom wad archives have existed over the years, and the only one that has stood and continues to stand the test of time is /idgames. That's not to say Doomshack, Wad-archive and ModDB aren't worth uploading to (they definitely are), but if you want your wad to still be around in a decade or two, you need to put it on /idgames.

 

On the topic of obscurity and such: I can safely say that any wad which was a staple of shovelware CDs of the 90s - you know, the wads you can find on basically any disc, no matter how shitty - were played/booted by a minimum of hundreds of people over the years, and it's probably more like thousands considering how common these CDs were and in how many different countries they existed. Sure, in the last 15 years, most of the files have probably not been played, or very rarely, but you have to remember just how many of these Doom wad CDs were printed. Probably nearly a million if you added each specific CD's ~10,000 press run all together.

 

It's worth noting that, while the Downloads section tracks number of visits/downloads, that has only been the case since 2017. If all the times an /idgames wad was viewed or downloaded was tracked since, oh say, 1995, each file from pre-2000 would have at least dozens of downloads, and that's just the obscure stuff. Things like Memento Mori have probably been downloaded tens of thousands of times from idgames alone, not counting the times it was downloaded from more obscure wad sharing sites. (source: some of my shitty wads from the mid 2000s that I hosted on goddamn MediaFire still managed to crack 1,000 downloads in fairly short time, and these wads were pretty much not very well known at all.) I have to assume more competently made stuff, posted about on various Doom forums and uploaded to /idgames, was performing at least similarly.

 

EDIT: Also, as MagicMushroomMan says, literally every artform is "oversaturated", our whole species is oversaturated in general lol. You don't have to make something great or even good to catch attention, but it should be about more than that. Well, imo anyway. It's different for everyone of course.

 

EDIT 2: Re-reading the thread, I'm not sure how port-specific chat came up, but idgames is great for any variety of mod for any port. It's really just a URL to your wad that will never die. The type of wad you make and where you share that URL, on forums or YT videos or wherever, is all up to you.

[Misty]

I imagine there are several reasons why people upload their levels in idgames archive:

1. Preserve their work of course - there so many levels lost in time and space we might never see the light, by uploading those levels in idgames archive you're at least sure they will survive and be reachable for wider audience or get documented on doomwiki or any other space related to doom levels.
2. Sense of accomplishment.
3. Indicate that all changes are final and only critical bugs are fixed. 
4. Can be good archive to study community mapping trends and style changes through years. 
5. It's also first place you would search obscure/ less known levels before searching other hosting pages - there's wide chance to find what you need due how many years idgames archive stayed online. 

[Biodegradable]

I hope you realise how special The /idgames Archive is now, @ARMCoder hehe ;^P

[Clippy]

I mean what's the first place the majority go to when they want to find an archive of wads

 

It's really the only place I bother uploading anything to

[IcarusOfDaggers]

5 minutes ago, Clippy said:

I mean what's the first place the majority go to when they want to find an archive of wads

 

It's really the only place I bother uploading anything to

majority : idgames

me: doomshack :D

Edited July 26, 2022 by IcarusOfDaggers

[Graf Zahl]

So...

 

majority: map will still be available in 20 years.

you: WTF have my maps gone??? >D

 

The big advantage of /idgames is that the entire community has a vested interest in not letting it die, so even if the current maintainers go, someone will continue their work, ensuring that all hosted work won't get lost - not to mention the search engine that's also available.

Any other place will just disappear if its maintainers lose interest - especially commercial sites like moddb that make a living off the content they host.

 

[Solmyr]

9 hours ago, ARMCoder said:

 

I enjoy designing and tinkering maps a lot, but I'm less and less motivated to share. Not because of sheer recognition (my maps are simple and not really ambitious), but because of the overabundance of new maps released every week.

 

There's no one to blame here, it's just a natural thing, even *I* cannot find the time to play many (let alone all) of the new maps that see the light of day (but I try to find some time to review the maps I afford to play).

 

The WADverse is an oversaturated space, where sharing or not is virtually indifferent, unless you have a really *hot* project.

 

My 2 cents.

I see, and i agree with what you and other members said about the oversaturarated PWAD market issue, and that it's a bit frustrating when you see your PWAD thread quickly sinking down the pages of Wads and Mods without any confirmation that someone actually played it, thus no feedback, but only that some people liked it. As you said there's no one to blame, it's just how things are.  

Edited July 26, 2022 by Solmyr

[DuckReconMajor]

23 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

What essel said'd technically correct....it's another question if someone will actually find your wad after it's sank into obscurity. It's not like everyone just clicks random file when they get to the archives.

 

I think you're missing the point here. Imagine the opposite scenario. You stumble across a wad on the archive or a DW thread and over the years you forget the name of it (and you've swapped computers and lost track of your old hard drive)

 

We have a whole thread dedicated to this. And if you got that wad from /idgames it is still in /idgames. And in the multiple mirrors and among the many backups individual people have made over the years.

 

Ideally the work someone puts into even the most obscure wad would be preserved for as long as possible. That's why the archive is so special

[ARMCoder]

5 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

I hope you realise how special The /idgames Archive is now, @ARMCoder hehe ;^P

 

I have a couple maps that I think are polished enough to make it to /idgames, so it will do no harm to upload them there.

[DuckReconMajor]

5 hours ago, ARMCoder said:

I have a couple maps that I think are polished enough to make it to /idgames, so it will do no harm to upload them there.

 

As long as you aren't still updating it, didn't stuff the WAD with megabytes of copyrighted music, and didn't include items from Doom2.wad or other IWADs, there's little reason not to submit to /idgames.

 

I guess as a more direct answer to your original question, it's not that the /idgames upload is a super special honor for only the best maps, it's just when you see a big project they want to make sure it gets plenty of playtesting before submitting that final product to the archive. It's kind of the final "We're done" stamp of a project