How Long do Mappers Last?

[EPICALLL]

Question for those who have either been lurking on the forums for a long time, or those who just know a lot about it;

How long do new mappers last? I.E. From the day they publish their first map, to the last time they log out (as long as it's more than a year), how long are they active for before they pack their things and embark upon a new journey?

[esselfortium]

We have a lot of examples of people leaving Doom mapping and coming back a decade or several later. I've been here since 2002, myself. There are also lots of examples of people who make a few maps and then drift away. But when the mapping bug really bites someone, it seems to frequently be for life.

[EPICALLL]

Ah, in that case I should probably elaborate; How long does the AVERAGE mapper last?

[MoreMending]

I honestly think that the average mapper for Doom maps on and off for around 2 or so years before they completely switch to another game to map for. I mean yeah you do have a lot of people mapping once, getting hooked, and then mapping for over a decade, but the average mapper probably makes a few maps, gets bored, finds inspiration again, makes more maps, then moves on from doom or just stops making maps.

 

I gotta say tho when I first read the title I thought you meant something else

[Murdoch]

You're asking a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" kind of question. @MoreMending is correct, but no one has enough information to give specific lengths of time. 

 

15 minutes ago, MoreMending said:

I gotta say tho when I first read the title I thought you meant something else

 

I can honestly say I have no idea what you possibly could have thought instead of the obvious. No sir. Not a clue.

Edited May 23, 2023 by Murdoch

[Lucius Wooding]

I guess Romero is probably the longest tenured mapper, since he's the only one of the OG Doom mappers that's still active as far as I'm aware. Around a full 30 years in his case, and fan made maps began not too much later.

 

My answer to OP is that they last as long as they have malice for the player in their heart. That's what truly sustains all mappers. But their work will last until the end of time; I truly believe if there's one last byte of data preserved in the universe it'll be a fragment of some obscure archive of WADs that was carved into limestone by a community member. Even after Voyager's golden record decays into dust, that stuff will still be maintained.

[msx2plus]

i died just last week, so give or take a couple years

[EPICALLL]

10 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Even after Voyager's golden record decays into dust, that stuff will still be maintained.

now's not the time for instigating a near-anxiety attack in me. But yes, your statement summed it up pretty well.

[Endless]

There are a lot of old-school 90s mappers in /idgames archive that have released one or two maps, and then disappeared. Most of their maps nearly forgotten, hardly mentioned, and sometimes would wind up in some shovelware disk. From the top of my head, I remember Street.WAD which is a single-level with some early examples of realistic design from 1994. It seems the author, just named Jail, never released anything else after that.

 

While your question is hard to properly answer, I'd say that the average mapper in the 90s probably only contributed 1 map, then dipped. Today, with modern tools, it is more common to find newcomers that release 2-5 maps, and it's also way easier to get addicted once you start getting the hang of it and seeing other people play your stuff.

[Capellan]

50 minutes ago, EPICALLL said:

How long does the AVERAGE mapper last?

 

Median, mode or mean?

 

There's no real way to know.  Membership of Doomworld and making Doom maps are not a 1:1 correlation, and there's a whole lot of mapping activity that has nothing to do with visibility on the forums, or even with releasing maps.  Is someone who spends six months tinkering with various map ideas but never shares them with anyone else a mapper?  I think so, but we'd never know about them.

 

And of course, almost everyone takes breaks from mapping.  Romero made maps right at the start, but then he didn't publish anything until 2016.  It seems likely that for much of that twenty year break, he was not actively mapping.  However "actively mapping" might be defined.

 

[xScavengerWolfx]

I've been here since August of 2020 and didn't release my first (shitty) map until march of 2021. I guess it really depends on how long you want to go for. For me i want to keep mapping until the day i die or i finally give up on reaching the top and moving on to other things. 

 

Only time can tell when a mapper(s) come and go from here, i look at it that some mappers like Eric Alm the mad lad that made Scythe 1 and 2. That man left a legacy in the mapping community and i was re watching one of the Dean of dooms videos mt pain dose and i got to the Sycthe X one he covered, made me sad to think a person would just release only 10 maps and ride off to the sunset and never return.

 

I mean sure he will come back someday but until then Eric Alm made and left a legacy with in the community. Of course i am going off my Mt. Pain's thoughts as well but someday us mappers and modders and midi composers will leave a mark on doomworld and move on to other stuff but as mt. pain once said "you may leave doom behind, but doom never leaves you".

 

Thanks for listing to my ted talk

[Immorpher]

I joined Doomworld in 2018, but my first map didnt come out until 2022 (4 years later). I was modding in other ways though. Now I got a handful of other maps and collaborations in making maps. I tend to float around just helping where I can. I know some people get burned out after a while, but for me since can contribute small things here and there in different ways, I havent felt that yet. Thus I imagine a distribution of the lifetime of a mapper to be quite wide.

[Lizardcommando]

I joined Doomworld in late 2001, but I think I tried making my own Doom wads and mods about a year before that. Since then, I've been making random Doom maps and mods on and off. My Lizard Squad ZDoom mod had about a 10 year development period: It was initially started in 2006 when it was first called "The Exterminator" and then I started expanding that mod in 2010, renamed it to Lizard Squad and worked on it on and off until 2017 when I released the final version of it and got bored of working on it. Between the final release of Lizard Squad and my Omega Zero mod in 2020, I would make some random test mods, usually simple custom monsters or weapons to use for my own personal use. ...And here I am still. Now I've been plugging away on Doom Builder 1 making a few maps here and there for some random community map packs while making my own map set on the side.

 

The point I'm making here is that people come and go as they please. Sometimes they can keep plugging away and release something on a frequent basis or release something every once in a blue moon or they release 1 or 2 things, take a 10 year hiatus and then come back and release something then disappear until the next decade.

[EPICALLL]

I guess I should probably add a bit of self insert, in the form of a timeline;

1990s-2000s - My parents have constant doom deathmatch sessions during the weekends (this will be kinda important later).

2012 - I first experience doom on a really random, on the whim occasion.

2014 - I start to grow a fascination for older titles such as doom, however...

2019 - It would be five years until I lock onto doom, albeit following a suggestion from none other than my dad (thanks, dad).

2020 - I start experimenting with mapping tools, however it wouldn't be until the following year until I actually figure out how to use them properly.

April 2021 - I finally manage to actually get the hang of mapping tools, however still un-familiar with many shortcuts such as Ctrl + A

May-October 2021 - Gradually, I get the hang of mapping tools, and end this phase with the map that ended up being unexpectedly a miserably weak hinge point for the majority of 2022.

 

November 2021 - decino opens up his fourth round of Viewer-Submitted levels, I submit Cleansing of Hell's MAP05, titled "Darkness"

December 2021-March 2022 - I gradually begin to doubt my mapping abilities (as literally everyone I sent my maps to told me that they were really bad, which in their defense, they were.)

April 2022 - decino's video of him playing my level goes up, and it was pretty much the only thing people knew me for until just before the end of 2022, putting an image on me as this really, really bad mapper, one worse than the map I sent proved to be, far worse.

May 2022 - I make a new map as a part of my new-ish WAD in spite of these claims, and to my surprise, people actually liked it, a lot. Whaat?

June-September 2022 - I continue to work on my WAD, determined to prove that I wasn't all that bad of a mapper, nuff said.

October 2022 - I pledge a map to the community project; Doomed Urbex, a CP formed around city maps, of which I had literally only ever made one attempt of prior (Cleansing of Hell MAP14)

November-December 2022 - Finalization of my solo WAD, case and point.

January-May 2023 - Continued work on projects such as; Doomed Urbex, Doom II Minus Doom, Scythe: Resharpened (dead project), Rusty Drill & Plutonia: The Way We Remember It


So yeah... After doing that, I can kinda see where you guys are coming from now, especially in the case that I can't really determine where my DOOM journey began.
Did it begin before I was even born with the DM sessions?
Did it begin in 2012 with my first ACTUAL experience with the game?
Or did it begin in 2019 when I actually got attached to the game?

[Doomkid]

I hope I last a little while longer

[DJVCardMaster]

As an example, Capellan himself has made maps since Demonfear in 1995 and his Memento Mori II/Requiem maps, he is still active in the community with casual releases here and there, mappers will last as long as they want and can. Some mappers did maps until their last day on earth, and their legacy keep going on. Back in 2011 said "I will keep making maps until I hit 18" without even publishing something in Doomworld and making maps for ZDaemon friends to play. And here I am, 25 years and losing my long hair making maps, I may finish my megawad when I hit 50, who knows.

[pcorf]

I have lasted for 27 years.

[Capellan]

40 minutes ago, DJVCardMaster said:

As an example, Capellan himself has made maps since Demonfear in 1995

 

I actually released maps in 1994, but they have not survived the transition from the old ftp.cdrom.com archive to archive.gamers.org, while others have been misfiled (e.g. talons.zip, a compilation of some levels I made and released individually well before before dfear1, ended up filed under deathmatch for some reason).

 

Overall, this is probably fortunate, as there was little to recommend the wholly 'lost' levels.

 

After darken2, I didn't map at all for the best part of a decade (the part map in AV was recycled material from the 90s).

 

[Kristian Nebula]

Been mapping since june 1996! :)

[prfunky]

Mappin' since 2003.

First release; December 2011 on ZDaemon.org.

To everybody's detriment, I will probably continue mapping until my fingers fall off...

 

[Christian Ck.]

Like someone else above said, prolly 2-5 maps until they find a new toy. However I think it really depends on why each individual is mapping in the first place.

 

I started around 2017 ,I think, because I wanted to learn how to make levels to later make my own doom TC based on the countless stories and ideas I have. As life went on it became clear that won't happen so I just make maps whenever time allows in order to make something cool. Like an art form you know someone out there will get to expirience.

 

Will I stop some day? Idk, I tried other mapping tools for quake, build games and unity but doom is the most convinient to directly test and change as I go which is important to my style of mapping. For now I have 3 stand alone maps and I think 4 or so which are a part of CPs. All of em are ok-ish so perhaps once I make my "magnum opus", something so good I will not be able to top I'll just stop and try something new :)

Edited May 23, 2023 by Endy McGufin

[DJVCardMaster]

11 minutes ago, Capellan said:

 

I actually released maps in 1994, but they have not survived the transition from the old ftp.cdrom.com archive to archive.gamers.org, while others have been misfiled (e.g. talons.zip, a compilation of some levels I made and released individually well before before dfear1, ended up filed under deathmatch for some reason).

 

Overall, this is probably fortunate, as there was little to recommend the wholly 'lost' levels.

 

After darken2, I didn't map at all for the best part of a decade (the part map in AV was recycled material from the 90s).

 

Well, it is though, quite an example of someone that has been mapping since Doom started being a thing, although nowadays new maps are just a chance.

[kwc]

Thinking about baseball helps

 

I figure I have a few more years in me

[TheMightyWhoosh]

I’m still a newbie compared to most, but hope to stick around for as long as possible. Perhaps will ditch the solo-projects after “KINDa 2” for submitting maps to community projects instead. 

[erkyp3rky]

i wonder if any other mappers get stuck in the "making my first map but i keep redoing sections, removing sections and adding sections" phase. thats where i am right now. ill look at an old section, dislike it, revamp it entirely, then see another section, repeat. oh, and then i spend like 10 hours on visual areas out of bounds 🤣🤣🤣

 

at this rate, ill last as long as this development hell does

[smeghammer]

You could probably do something with stats and readme file parsing - assuming the dates are correct...

 

 - get all readmes from IDGames releases

 - extract some metadata (map name, map DATE, creator)

 - sort by creator and then by date

 - get the date range for each creator

 - calculate mean or whatever other stats you want

 

Should be fairly straightforward to do overall, especially given there is already a structured data view onto the ID Games database.

 

>>> EDIT <<<

Actually, it's probably better to use the existing API, 'cos the structured data for each entry already contains the date and author. e.g.:

 

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/api/api.php?action=getcontents&amp;out=json&amp;id=8

 

{
  "content": {
    "file": [{
      "id": 1009,
      "title": "Cyber Death",
      "dir": "levels/doom2/a-c/",
      "filename": "cybrdth2.zip",
      "size": 97636,
      "age": 782809200,
      "date": "1994-10-22",
      "author": "Scott A. Smith",
      "description": null,
      "rating": 1.8,
      "votes": 5,
      "url": "https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/cybrdth2",
      "idgamesurl": "idgames://levels/doom2/a-c/cybrdth2.zip"
    },
    {
      "id": 1159,
      "title": "CD3.WAD",
      "dir": "levels/doom2/a-c/",
      ...

And I already built the framework to crawl this (and others):

 

https://github.com/smeghammer/wad_downloader

 

So all I'd need to do is create another crawler that grabs the required data from each entry and generate a database table in SQLite or similar. 

 

I feel a project coming on...

Edited May 23, 2023 by smeghammer
typo

[impClaw]

Looking at my profile I joined 2004, released my first finished map in 2007, so 3 years for me. I still do mapping though (latest finished map 2022), but no longer release anything on here. Still lurk around the forums, and rejoice in the fact that new mappers show up all the time. And I'm also happy to see names I remember from my time in this community.

[houston]

It's important that your beloved mappers get checkups regularly, especially when they present signs of bad health such as:

- Bad breath

- Unusual appetite (loss of, or esp. trying to consume grass)

- Underlying illness

- Missing hair or feathers

Remember to feed your mapper regularly and well (+ avoid overloading their bowl day in and day out). Keep them locked inside in the middle of extreme weather conditions such as cyclones and lightning where they might be frightened and tempted to escape over, through, or underneath your fence.

Some sizes and breeds of mapper are said to be long-lived, but I think that as long as you keep a watchful eye and take good care of them, you should have plenty of warning in advance to deal with the fact that all mappers just don't last forever. It may help both you and them to find them a playmate before the time comes.

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

honestly prob for atleast another year til i find something better to do with my life or til i get burnt out

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

id  say minimum 30 mins depends tho