How many Doom WADs are there now?

[Endless]

It's been ages since the last relevant thread like this one was created. The last proper answer seems to be from this post all the way back in 2015:

Quote

Roughly 13,206 - if you exclude docs/, historic/, idstuff/, the non-Doom wads from levels/, lmps/, newstuff/, roguestuff/, source/, a bit of stuff from themes/, all but the dehacked patches from utils/ and of course the .txt files.

 

So 13k WADs around 2015, but it's been 8 years (oof) already, and in the last years since Doom Eternal release, the productivity of this community has skyrocketed, with almost daily releases. So, I was wondering, does anyone have any idea of how many current WADs are being hosted on /idgames? Going into a bit more less precise questions, it does make me wonder how many total WADs, including those not on /idgames, exist. It is quite an outstanding achievement for such an old game.

[smeghammer]

Soooo....

 

My scraping database has:

WAD Archive: 93643

 

Doom Wad Downloader (various sites)

42314

 

It's all a bit developmental, but I think it is indicative.

There's probably dupes so at a conservative estimate, I'd say 100K WADs is probably fair.

 

FUCKING HELL! :-)

[Murdoch]

A lot. One might say, endless....

[tatsu91]

41 minutes ago, smeghammer said:

Soooo....

 

My scraping database has:

WAD Archive: 93643

 

Doom Wad Downloader (various sites)

42314

 

It's all a bit developmental, but I think it is indicative.

There's probably dupes so at a conservative estimate, I'd say 100K WADs is probably fair.

 

FUCKING HELL! :-)

Including Wads not on the database on Here Zdoom forums and doomer boards plus the Region specific boards i would add quite a bit more as their are alot of good wads you can find not any archive. i would say 150k is possible.

[Endless]

1 hour ago, smeghammer said:

Soooo....

 

My scraping database has:

WAD Archive: 93643

 

Doom Wad Downloader (various sites)

42314

 

It's all a bit developmental, but I think it is indicative.

There's probably dupes so at a conservative estimate, I'd say 100K WADs is probably fair.

 

FUCKING HELL! :-)

Interesting numbers! Do you have something similar for /idgames archives database? At 93k for WAD Archive, that's a toooon, but I imagine a lot of them are duplicates and/or early versions of the same WAD.

[Burgish]

7 minutes ago, Endless said:

but I imagine a lot of them are duplicates and/or early versions of the same WAD.

 

This caught my interest so I decided to do a quick pass and clean up and consolidate duplicate versions.

 

There are actually 8 WADs.

[Maximum Matt]

...and a secret level.

[smeghammer]

15 hours ago, Endless said:

Do you have something similar for /idgames archives database?

 

I do, but I'd need to find the relevant VM and fire it up. Been a bit distracted with looking for a new job recently, so my Doomy code projects have not had much love :-(

Edited June 20, 2023 by smeghammer

[Andromeda]

Not sure about wads, but there's currently 16.898 zip files on /idgames (excluding docs/, historic/, idstuff/, lmps/, newstuff/, roguestuff/ and source/).

 

[Roofi]

Not enough to fulfill my unsatiable wad appetite.

[DogsRNice]

59 minutes ago, Andromeda said:

Not sure about wads, but there's currently 16.898 zip files on /idgames (excluding docs/, historic/, idstuff/, lmps/, newstuff/, roguestuff/ and source/).

 

Here's how many pwads are documented per year on the doom wiki for comparison 

[LadyMistDragon]

Then count the ones just posted on Doomworld/moddb/ZDoom etc....although that's mainly the last decade when much less stuff is released through /idgames.....feels like that could be 10k to 12k more at least!

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

id say 150k and theres prob like a million un released/never completed wads

[Decay]

5 hours ago, DogsRNice said:

Here's how many pwads are documented per year on the doom wiki for comparison 

Realistically out of those thousands of wads only a handful are worth playing, most of them are trash. Any extended /idgames dive would tell you that. I'd hazard a guess that the doomwiki covers most major/notable/cacoward/larger public releases because they are more publicized/played/noteworthy rather than simply just documenting wads.

[Endless]

5 hours ago, Decay said:

Realistically out of those thousands of wads only a handful are worth playing, most of them are trash. Any extended /idgames dive would tell you that. I'd hazard a guess that the doomwiki covers most major/notable/cacoward/larger public releases because they are more publicized/played/noteworthy rather than simply just documenting wads.

Surprisingly, the Doom Wiki doesn't have set criteria when it comes to what WADs are worthy for being documented on the wiki, as such, it is quite flexible as to what it includes, and I like it that way. It is, however, frowned upon to make an article for some shitty and totally unremarkable WAD from some old shovelware disk. Because of this generally flexible but also supervised system, a lot of the WADs on the Doom Wiki are quite noteworthy for a variety of reasons. Some are just pretty fun, and others are historically important for innovating design or being pioneers in some now common feature.

 

I actually use the Doom Wiki to find stuff to play since there's no real modern WAD archive now, so the Doom Wiki does a pretty good in the meantime.

[INfront95]

Its interesting that judging by his picture  the most productive years were release one and covid one. For obvious reasons.

Edited June 21, 2023 by INfront95

[Mystic 256]

I'm confident that there are over a million wads by this point

[Captain POLAND]

I currently have 1593 covered on my monster count thread but there are many more.

 

 

[Jakub Majewski]

Protip: https://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/ in this directory, the fullsort.gz is a zip file(or at least functions like one), that contains a text file. That text file contains a list of all the files in the whole FTP folder, and it's sorted by upload date, listing file size and file names. The new files are added to the top. And naturally, it's about 40k lines long. The reason it's put in a zipfile is presumably to compress it, as it's so big. Will the above in mind, you can analyse the contents of the archive without needing to actually download the whole thing, more or less.

 

23 hours ago, Andromeda said:

Graph

That's a cool graph! Did you make use of the file I described above to create it? Nonetheless, good work!

[Andromeda]

4 minutes ago, Jakub Majewski said:

That's a cool graph! Did you make use of the file I described above to create it? Nonetheless, good work!

No, I wasn't aware that file existed so I had to scrape every directory for the file listing - will come in handy next time, thanks for the info!