Freedoom needs more attention

[Celestin]

10 minutes ago, dasho said:

 

How are either of those 'feature creep'?

My question exactly. I fought Freedoom is pretty much replacing all textures, sprites, sounds etc. with new ones and making a two new sets of vanilla-compatible maps. Like, I get this is a lot of work, especially for hobbyists, but 20 years?

[banjiepixel]

14 minutes ago, Celestin said:

I fought Freedoom is pretty much replacing all textures, sprites, sounds etc. with new ones and making a two new sets of vanilla-compatible maps. Like, I get this is a lot of work, especially for hobbyists, but 20 years?

 

Remember, there hasn't been really a some kind of "Freedoom team" actively working on it for 20 years. It has been more about people coming and going, either donating something they had previously done or making few custom things for the project to use. Alot of promising assets have been left unfinished because their creators have lost interest and it can be very hard to find someone to finish those assets if there even is a permission to do so from the original creator. It is only natural that project like Freedoom goes to a backburner mode for few years at the time to wait for people with a interest to make new stuff for it.

 

There is very little reason for Freedoom to be a high priority project for anyone involved so progress can be often very slow.

[fraggle]

1 hour ago, banjiepixel said:

Remember, there hasn't been really a some kind of "Freedoom team" actively working on it for 20 years.

There's literally a Discord with people working on it every day.

 

3 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

And version 1.0 of Freedoom Phases 1 & 2 still suffers from feature creep

Version 1.0 of Freedoom has not yet been released. I'm confused?

[dasho]

18 minutes ago, fraggle said:

Version 1.0 of Freedoom has not yet been released. I'm confused?

 

I think he was trying to suggest that Freedoom is stuck in development hell

[SHEYDE X43]

Not really …but I do recommend the soundtrack 

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

its extremely easy to p1r4t3 every doom(or other doom engine) iwads and personally the sprites are kinda bad in my opinion ive never played through the entire wads so i dont know how goo the map design it but yeah it doesnt really do anything new and intresting

[DerBlanca]

Honestly, all this gratuitous trash talk on a free passion project only makes me regret I didn't contribute. 

[Jayextee]

1 hour ago, DerBlanca said:

gratuitous trash talk on a free passion project

A band of people contribute to provide a free-to-use-how-you-will replacement for one of the most-important games in videogame history and iT dOeSn'T rEaLlY dO aNyThInG nEw Or InTeReStInG!!!!1

Despite, y'know, it giving absolutely gratis access to literally thousands of user-made expansions that do.

[Professor Hastig]

2 hours ago, DerBlanca said:

Honestly, all this gratuitous trash talk on a free passion project only makes me regret I didn't contribute. 

 

Not every form of criticism is trash talk. As long as people stay polite while giving feedback it should be fine - even if the project's maintainers may not like it. If a project starts shrugging this off we will have a real problem.

[dasho]

I think people who STILL think Freedoom is about saving $5 USD should do the following thought exercise:

 

What if Bethesda, for whatever reason, was able to successfully Cease&Desist Realm667, /idgames, and the like for redistributing its copyrighted assets? What if all of the mods based on palette swaps, lifting sprites from other non-free games, and frankenspriting were taken down, and people were extremely hesitant to make new mods at all for fear of the consequences?

[Shepardus]

While there is certainly room for improvement and I appreciate the efforts of the people working to make Freedoom better, I think even as it stands Freedoom fulfills its purpose, and whatever "problems" it has don't stop it from doing so. While having talented creators donating their expertise to the project is great, it's not a problem if they'd rather create their own PWAD (as many do), because Freedoom was always meant to support such creators. Freedoom doesn't need to be a masterpiece, because you can use it to play WADs that are masterpieces.

[fraggle]

17 hours ago, DerBlanca said:

Honestly, all this gratuitous trash talk on a free passion project only makes me regret I didn't contribute. 

You can still contribute!

 

I'm reasonably convinced that there are a lot of people who tried Freedoom once 10 years ago, formed a strong opinion about it as a project and haven't tried it again since. For those people, I recommend trying one of the daily builds because the project has changed a LOT.

[inkoalawetrust]

I think Dasho said it best. Basically explaining what Fraggle's talk about free as in freedom actually means.

 

 

The most practical reason for Freedoom to exist is that the only reason any of us are still here and prancing around with Dooms' still VERY MUCH COPYRIGHTED ART ASSETS is because id/Bethesda/ZeniMax/Microsoft doesn't care and is letting us do it.

 

If any of these companies up the corporate pyramid wanted to, we could all be getting cease and desist letters tomorrow. Sure, source port developers would be fine since Carmack made the engine FOSS. But nearly every mod that isn't a total conversion would very much not be, since we are constantly using and redistributing copyrighted assets, including other media IPs like Duke Nukem.

 

And it's not like there's no precedent for this, Doom is about the safest game series to mod. Other game companies like Rockstar and Nintendo are FAR more harsh. Like Nintendo putting people into indentured servitude and Rockstar suing people reverse engineering their old game executables so that they can sell shitty remasters. And they get away with it all the time. Doom's IP holders could very easily decide to do the same thing one day, and with how the video game industry is going, it might even be guaranteed that they will try something like that before the end of the decade. After all, I don't think anybody expected Unity to kill itself last week either.

 

And the moment we all have the letters come in the mail, the point of Freedoom will become a lot more fucking obvious to the ones that still think it's just Doom for people who don't want to pay 5 quid or Google for 5 minutes.

[Shepardus]

6 hours ago, fraggle said:

You can still contribute!

 

I'm reasonably convinced that there are a lot of people who tried Freedoom once 10 years ago, formed a strong opinion about it as a project and haven't tried it again since. For those people, I recommend trying one of the daily builds because the project has changed a LOT.

I'd also point out that there have been significant changes even since the most recent "stable" build, 0.12.1. I put "stable" in quotes because it's not like the development builds are any less stable, they're just IWADs so it's not like they'll break on you the way bleeding-edge software can.

[SecularSteve]

Speaking of changes, what's left on their roadmap criteria?

 

As far as I know, there aren't any missing levels, all of the MIDI musical slots are filled in, and all of the copyrighted assets have been completely replaced.

 

I've heard talks of overhauling the Deathmatch WAD (FreeDM) because at least half of the maps kind of suck, but other than that, it seems like there's nothing left but maybe a few asset improvements.

 

This looks good for example:

https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/pull/1113

[Anarkzie]

I actually use it on my phone simply because it's better than the official Android app both in terms of control and flexibility. The levels themselves are also really good once you get past the first 5 or so maps.

[SHEYDE X43]

Who cares about the point of it.I am simply recommending the music 

 

[Klickach]

3 hours ago, SHEYDE X43 said:

Who cares about the point of it.I am simply recommending the music

Totally agree with you this OST is pretty good (It also sounds pretty awesome in ArachnoSoundfont)

Edited September 19, 2023 by Klickach

[CasualScrub]

I agree with others that the OST is one of the strongest suits of Freedoom, just so good.