The Intolerance and Rejection of New Mappers for Base Doom

[Whizzy the Elephant]

I’ve been playing DOOM 2 for twenty years, and was tinkering around with amazing classics in doom builder like demonfear, mini level madness, d2reloaded, scythe and many classic megawads, playing around with the editor and making it easier or harder with placements or terrain – I felt inspired by downloading the maps from doomworld and learning how to edit.

 

Seven years ago I felt confident that I could map build, and I learned how to make props, trees, boats, houses, construction cranes, and even cars using only doom builder 2. I was making things I didn’t know was possible in doom editor, things not seen before in any other megawad.

 

Then for the next seven years I made highly detailed linear maps, which I then translated to arena maps. They are full of immersive sector made objects and gameplay changing location work.

 

After completing 32 maps I then went further and fully realised six locations from real life memories, accurately recreating every area. The maps looked amazing in different visual packs and it was great to see doom in new 4K graphics along with all the creature mods and player mods.

 

However when you upload to doomworld with a megawad designed for these great packs in mind – you now get “Contains unmodified id Software resource(s)”.

 

I’ve been going onto the idgames uploads form and it says this over and over. Hundreds of wads rejected for "unmodified id Software resource".

 

There is youtube channel devoted to uploads of wads from all sources – there are hundred of new maps each week!

 

They are almost all done in base doom and they are all done by mappers who deserve to have their maps on this site to be played, critiqued, and all have the fair chance to possibly achieve a cacowad or go onto the official wiki list.

 

You are rejecting many hundreds of detailed base game wads and megawads, why?

 

All megawads on your site contain a degree of unmodified id Software resource(s).

 

All of them.

 

It’s maddening to mappers who work hard making these wads for you to enjoy, and you to reject them regardless of level of detail or quality because of your rule that is simply impossible to implement.

 

You have to understand, we are in 2024, and there are a large number of high quality texture upscaling packs, bringing the game to higher resolutions with detail never seen before - it’s truly incredible to play doom with such incredible visuals, and I thank the creators of these replacement packs. In addition there are light mods, shadow mods, reflection mods, all many kinds of wonderful ways to make the original doom look incredible – but they require base/TNT textures readable as base/TNT doom.

 

There are no excuses not to allow them, you've always allowed them, why are you banning them now? They are required for these amazing add on visual packs to work. These visual ad ons packs are a great achievement for the doom community and base megawads should be encouraged for this reason. You even have skins and combos on your site that require base doom or TNT to work.

 

You’ve supported and hosted many great megawads that inspired many new mappers to build in base doom, but now we simply can’t give you our maps back in tribute and as thanks.

 

We’ve been downloading maps made completely from base doom for years! Now it’s even better than ever due to the amazing contribution of graphic modders.

 

Please stop rejecting perfectly valid wads that we can play with these packs. You didn’t reject the base doom mappers from fifteen years ago, why are you rejecting them now?

 

[Death Bear]

14 minutes ago, Whizzy the Elephant said:

However when you upload to doomworld with a megawad designed for these great packs in mind – you now get “Contains unmodified id Software resource(s)”.

 

I’ve been going onto the idgames uploads form and it says this over and over. Hundreds of wads rejected for "unmodified id Software resource".

 

I don't think you actually realize what this means? They're not rejecting wads that are stock asset in nature. Check this out. Don't copy the base iwad assets directly into your pwad.

 

[Gothic]

16 minutes ago, Whizzy the Elephant said:

You are rejecting many hundreds of detailed base game wads and megawads, why?

Simple

16 minutes ago, Whizzy the Elephant said:

“Contains unmodified id Software resource(s)”

If you're making a Doom/Doom2/Final Doom wad with duplicate contents from the IWAD it's supposed to run with, without editing them (see BTSX, it had to include Doom 2 sprites to fit a new palette), then it's not gonna be accepted.

 

Unless the archive is prohibiting IWAD rescource interchange, then I understand being pissed off.

[LadyMistDragon]

Maybe it's an issue of people just uploading wads and being poorly educated on what exactly that means? Although I will say that many people don't read the guidelines on such things very carefully, but more explicitness would not be such a bad thing.

[Misty]

Those rules were included, because archive maintainers don't want get takedown requests from copyright owners and get archives scrutinized or spammed with low tier troll levels. You don't need include entire doom2 textures and sprites within your megawad(texture1/texture2 and pnames already contains loading data for the game), since you will be loading doom 2 iwad anyway. Exceptions are for heavily customised palettes, since those render default textures and sprites badly without conversion. 

 

Slade has option to check for duplicated iwad resources, it's really helpful before uploading your project to archives. 

[oneselfSelf]

40 minutes ago, Misty said:

Those rules were included, because archive maintainers don't want get takedown requests from copyright owners and get archives scrutinized or spammed with low tier troll levels. You don't need include entire doom2 textures and sprites within your megawad(texture1/texture2 and pnames already contains loading data for the game), since you will be loading doom 2 iwad anyway. Exceptions are for heavily customised palettes, since those render default textures and sprites badly without conversion. 

 

Slade has option to check for duplicated iwad resources, it's really helpful before uploading your project to archives. 

This helped a lot, thank you. My map got rejected like a lot of others today but it was because I had accidentally duplicated just one texture already in the DOOM2 IWAD. It's been fixed now though and I'm gonna try to be a bit more careful in the future.

[DNSKILL5]

It’s not that deep lmao don’t duplicate iwad materials into your pwad and nobody would have this problem. 

[roadworx]

...op, i feel so bad for you lol

 

wads with doom textured are fine - what isn't fine is copying those textures directly into your wad. you need to take them out; the wad will still work perfectly fine without them as it'll grab them from whatever iwad you're using and use them ingame.

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

I kind of see what you mean, but at the same time, "DOOM Remake 4".

[Astar]

To be honest, I expected to see arguments here that the Doomworld community is supposedly gatekeeping the work of newcomers, lol

[Edward850]

This reminds me of a time someone made an alternate language version of Strife and posted it on the Steam forums. Cool project, but they had unfortunately duplicated the entire IWAD so I had to ask them to redo it to clear out the extra resources. Somehow, despite explaining the problem to them multiple times and even demonstrating it to them, they refused to understand the problem and insisted I was trying to ban them from modding. So the whole project remains deleted off the forums and has vanished into obscurity, entirely through their own actions.

 

I almost wonder if they just decided right from the start that someone was going to stop them, and thus this became the problem even if they were told how to solve it. They wanted to be the victim no matter the reason.

 

They can come back and try again any time, I never even banned them. They just need to figure out the most basic puzzle of delete duplicate resources.

Edited May 6, 2024 by Edward850

[Obsidian]

Okay, I got a little curious and looked at the recent movements of our OP.

 

From what I can tell his previous posts on Doomworld have been to do with a project called "Arena Survival Doom": some interesting screenshots, maybe a little visually busy but nothing much beyond that. I then went to our handy dandy IdGames Uploader (shout-out to Xymph) to look at the most recent rejects and, sure enough...

 

 

So I decided to download the aforementioned Arena Survival Doom and what did I find?

 

 

Surprising few, I found all of the resources from TNT: Evilution bundled into the wad. I am not remotely surprised that this was rejected from the archives.

 

@Whizzy the Elephant, you do not need to include IWAD materials in order for your projects to work: if the end user has their own IWAD copy (which they usually do, it's not like the old Doom games are expensive these days), then their source port of choice will load it alongside the custom wad file and all the resources will be present during gameplay. It is ultimately unnecessary for anyone to include IWAD materials in their wad (barring rare exceptions like BtSX) and the folks that do are usually newbies who haven't yet gotten to grips with Doom modding as a whole. The archive maintainers aren't quelling the sprouting talent of prospective mappers, I promise you.