Engine preference

[Phml]

Not sure if Vermil's post is some brilliant deadpan comedy or actually serious.

[DaniJ]

I can't really comment on that as most other ports lack empirical data to prove otherwise. However I do know that Doomsday has had over half a million downloads in the past year*.

* Not including those which get our port via some other means, for example our APT repository.

[printz]

Dragonsbrethren said:

Every non-Doomworld place I visit with Doom discussion seems to be about GZDoom now. A few years back Doomsday seemed to be the most popular port at those places, but that's definitely changed now.

What about the Communaute francaise de Doom? That site seems to be administered by a French Doomworlder, who likes stuff like Boom.

[Gez]

Dragonsbrethren said:

Every non-Doomworld place I visit with Doom discussion seems to be about GZDoom now. A few years back Doomsday seemed to be the most popular port at those places, but that's definitely changed now.

Heh, maybe. I have seen Brutal Doom discussed a lot, for example on SA, and it needs GZDoom or Skulltag.

Still, that remains of the anecdotal variety.

DaniJ said:

I can't really comment on that as most other ports lack empirical data to prove otherwise.

For [G]ZDoom and Eternity, it'd be hard to have since I think a large part of the downloads are from the DRD Team svn build site.

printz said:

What about the Communaute francaise de Doom? That site seems to be administered by a French Doomworlder, who likes stuff like Boom.

That? If I look here and its subforums, I see mostly Skulltag or ZDoom/GZDoom mods, with a strong minority of Boom.

[Graf Zahl]

DaniJ said:

I can't really comment on that as most other ports lack empirical data to prove otherwise. However I do know that Doomsday has had over half a million downloads in the past year*.

Sure. You get a lot of downloads. But how does that translate into active users. As you said yourself:

DaniJ said:

A large segment of Doomsday's user community have zero interest in DOOM mods. All they want to do is to relive their childhood playing the IWADS with a more up to date audio visual experience.

... and many of those will play the game once or twice and then move on.

Such numbers remind me of a project I am currently working on. The ones responsible for it have set up some statistics to see how many users they get each month. However:

- no information is available how often a particular user visits
- one time users that just want to try it out count as much as regular users.
- no stats for how long users have been using the product.

Not that I want to talk your numbers down, but absolute number of downloads is only half the story. The abovementioned product also has numbers that look great upon first glance, but if you add up the number of daily users you barely reach 3x the number of monthly users, in other words, each one uses the product 3 days a month on average - which is utterly dismal.


Sure, half a million is a lot but the more interesting number - which unfortunately is and will forever be unavailable - is, how often certain ports are being used by how many users.

[DaniJ]

I only bring it up because I have no other means to comment on the claim that Doomsday's popularity is declining - i.e., our download stats would suggest otherwise.

Furthermore, if you consider that Doomsday now releases new builds each and every week and popularity was indeed in decline or that users downloaded the port once and then didn't upgrade - then one would expect to see a trend of newer builds receiving fewer and fewer downloads.

[entryway]

(almost) nobody (should) use prboom, but it is still downloaded more than prboom-plus: 262 vs 156 for the latest week

[printz]

entryway said:

(almost) nobody (should) use prboom, but it is still downloaded more than prboom-plus: 262 vs 156 for the latest week

I was using PrBoom a lot on my Mac until I remembered PrBoom+ existed. That "plus" is important but it's very easy to miss, especially by vanilla Doomers who know that Doom+ is just a hacked Doom, unlike PrBoom+ vs PrBoom.

[chexwarrior]

Glboom+ for most dooming and GZDoom for those interesting zdoom only projects.

[entryway]

printz said:

I was using PrBoom a lot on my Mac until I remembered PrBoom+ existed. That "plus" is important but it's very easy to miss, especially by vanilla Doomers who know that Doom+ is just a hacked Doom, unlike PrBoom+ vs PrBoom.

Florian Schulze suggested me to replace prboom with prboom-plus completely, but I was too proud not ready to lose that «-plus» ™, heh

[Vermil]

Alot of people refer to PrBoom+ as just 'PrBoom'.

I suppose it's like alot of people refer to Doomsday as 'JDoom/Heretic/HeXen'.

[Graf Zahl]

DaniJ said:

I only bring it up because I have no other means to comment on the claim that Doomsday's popularity is declining - i.e., our download stats would suggest otherwise.

All I was saying is that the numbers I'd really like to see can't be derived from download stats alone

Nobody will ever be able to tell what the downloader did with the downloaded product.

Just as with the example I listed. There someone is proud we have x00000 users (sorry, can't disclose the actual value) but they were completely ignoring the conclusion from a closer inspection of the numbers that more than 70% were just trying stuff out, never using it again. (If you ask, how I got that number without anything tracking it: By comparing the increase of monthly users with daily users each day.)
To get meaningful numbers those would have to be removed somehow.

entryway said:

Florian Schulze suggested me to replace prboom with prboom-plus completely, but I was too proud not ready to lose that «-plus» ™, heh

Frankly, I have been wondering for years why you haven't done yet. That's the kind of pride that actually can hurt a product. In this case to the uninitiated it doesn't imply 'something better', but merely 'a side project with some added features'. The impression is completely different and may make many choose the 'original'.

[entryway]

Vermil said:

Alot of people refer to PrBoom+ as just 'PrBoom'.

I suppose it's like alot of people refer to Doomsday as 'JDoom/Heretic/HeXen'.

Alot of iddqd.ru users refer to PrBoom+ as just 'Boom'. I was confused many times, before I got used.

[entryway]

Graf Zahl said:

Frankly, I have been wondering for years why you haven't done yet. That's the kind of pride that actually can hurt a product. In this case to the uninitiated it doesn't imply 'something better', but merely 'a side project with some added features'. The impression is completely different and may make many choose the 'original'.

Why gzdoom is still not merged with zdoom?

http://zdoom.org is better place than http://www.osnanet.de/c.oelckers/gzdoom for gzdoom renamed to zdoom

[Graf Zahl]

That answer is simple:

I want to keep control. Unlike PrBoom, ZDoom is still actively being developed and you perfectly know Randy's opinion regarding new releases. I do not want to depend on someone who can't be made to release it more frequently. Ultimately SVN builds won't be used by the same people I just mentioned for similar reasons (i.e. it's not an official build of the project's mainline.) so they do not count here.

[Ralphis]

I actually agree with the + creating issues. Even having been around for many years, there was a time where I thought + was just a few minor fixes over the original prboom. It isn't a problem for someone already knee deep in the single player community, but even people who play Doom regularly often don't know the difference.

[printz]

Dragonsbrethren said:

Every non-Doomworld place I visit with Doom discussion seems to be about GZDoom now.

If Doomworld shuts down and the purist community breaks in pieces, I'll move directly to Doom 3, Doom 4, Rage etc... Either old-school or new-school for me, no need to mix or emulate them.

[Kira]

Gez said:

That? If I look here and its subforums, I see mostly Skulltag or ZDoom/GZDoom mods, with a strong minority of Boom.

We are a rainbow nation! There are purists, Boomers and G/ZDoomers. It is host of a Boom megawad project BTW: Necromantic Thirst.

[chungy]

GZDoom to Linux users at least sounds like it's an abbreviation for "OpenGL ZDoom"... I honestly don't know myself if GZDoom has anything else over regular old ZDoom.

"prboom-plus" similarly sounds just like "prboom plus a few extras" rather than being the current line of development.

[Gez]

chungy said:

I honestly don't know myself if GZDoom has anything else over regular old ZDoom.

If you compare the latest official versions, yes.
If you compare the latest SVN builds, no.

[Coraline]

Anyone, aside from Kronos, still use 3/EDGE? As in, would/do/did you use it for mods created specifically for EDGE or for general DOOM gameplay?

[ReFracture]

chungy said:

"prboom-plus" similarly sounds just like "prboom plus a few extras" rather than being the current line of development.

It's true, you've always got to point out to people that PrBoom-Plus may as well just be called PrBoom at this point.

[printz]

++PrBoom.

Gez said:

If you compare the latest official versions, yes.
If you compare the latest SVN builds, no.

Yes what, no what? What question are you answering with yes/no?

[Gez]

I quoted the post I was replying to; I don't see what so confusing about it.

[chungy]

Indeed; it's quite clear.

[printz]

Gez said:

I quoted the post I was replying to; I don't see what so confusing about it.

He wasn't asking a question, though. Did you mean that the latest official GZDoom versions had something special over ZDoom 2.5.0, but nothing GZDoom-specific has been added since then, in the SVN GZDoom builds?

I wonder what are Graf Zahl's plans with his port, GZDoom, now.

[Gez]

Oh for eff's sake, just because something isn't framed as a question with the interrogation mark at the end doesn't mean it can't be replied with yes or no.

"I don't know if there's anything interesting in this thread." "Yes [there is something interesting]." "No [there isn't anything interesting]".

And what happened is that all formerly GZDoom-exclusive features (at least as far as ZDoom was concerned) have since been backported. FraggleScript is the most significant thing; but there are also obscure little tweaks like this. As of r3329 there's no difference between them.

[NightFright]

I think it's good ZDoom and GZDoom are still kept apart. Personally, I use ZDoom on my netbook since it's not sufficiently capable of running OpenGL graphics. In 1024x600, it actually also looks better without any filtering, and since it's running in 8bit, it doesn't stress the CPU that much.
My desktop PC is running GZDoom in 1920x1200 with all details (even with "anti-quality" setting HQ3x which most of you folks hate so much - it's just too blurry otherwise without highres textures).

IMHO, (G)ZDoom is the best port out there since it's a compact all-in-one solution for all the important Doom engine games. Also, many popular mods rely on it, so you can often hardly avoid using it, anyway.

[printz]

Gez said:

And what happened is that all formerly GZDoom-exclusive features (at least as far as ZDoom was concerned) have since been backported. FraggleScript is the most significant thing; but there are also obscure little tweaks like this. As of r3329 there's no difference between them.

Even sloped 3d floors?

[Gez]

That's a renderer thing. Renderer things are implicitly disclaimed away. See also: dynamic lights, cubemapped skybox, glowing flats, etc.

Technically, they are supported and they work perfectly for the game simulation; they're just invisible to the player.