[Ninety-Six]

RIP Id software 1991-2020

[Aristotle Gumball]

John Carmack: "I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles."

[ck3D]

jkas789, on 21 September 2020 - 08:06 AM, said:

I don't like it. More and more we are starting to see console companies acquiring high profile studios, and that can't end well. I think it could lead to the scummy practices that Disney uses to "protect" their IP and the way they release their games (the famous Disney Vault). Also I can see Microsoft cannibalizing devs from Bethesda/iD/whoever to help develop their own first party games like Halo, Fable, etc.

Most often, in other creative fields than gaming, when that type of behavior manifests itself (a handful of entities enforcing a monopoly of sorts on a market by purchasing every recognizable, established productive outlet), the direct consequence is the independent scene blowing up to the point of becoming a legit parallel industry (while on their end, the old timers fossilize), eventually resulting in a renewal of the scene, as though such situations allow some leeway for the passing of the torch. Hopefully, I guess in the relatively long term, that means more shine for indie developers with new games good enough for their quality to do all the talking.

[Ninety-Six]

I'm just waiting for the AAA market crash at this point. Call me a pessimist but I don't see id or Bethesda remaining successful under Microsoft. Bethesda already has a lot of baggage and, quite honestly, that Zenimax or Bethesda let id get this far without meddling in their affairs is a miracle. I don't know where Carmack's been sleeping but Microsoft has been extremely consumer-hostile for the past decade and a half, to the point of trying to kill their own OS as a gaming platform in favor of Xbox. The very same platform that id themselves proved were an untapped and lucrative market back in the 90s (granted it was DOS but still: id proved PCs were able to not only match consoles of the time, but later to also completely outperform them).

I don't see good things in this future, and probably after the two Eternal DLCs come out I expect id, its super pro-consumer attitude and lack of fear to experiment with their games to be stamped out in favor of the usual focus group bullshit and live service crap, so I hope everyone liked Doom 4's multiplayer because that's probably going to be Doom's future from now on.


hip hip hooray

[NightFright]

Well, I certainly dislike how id decided to handle the Quake franchise. Turning it into a multiplayer only series was the worst decision ever. Such a waste, especially when looking at Quake Champions. Didn't turn into a big hit and isn't even finished yet, after all these years.

Hard to tell if Doom will thrive under MS supervision, but things for Quake can only improve. Even if they just kill it off and put it out of its misery.

[Ninety-Six]

I think part of the problem is that the Quake "series" is not a series at all, but a name given to essentially three different games and their sequels. Champions is just the sequel to Arena.

I can't comment on Champions itself, but as far as the brand being a confused mess, that was a mistake id made long before Bethesda bought them.

[Morpheus Kitami]

Funny thing is, I can't really think of a good reason for Microsoft to buy Bethesda. Sure, TES6 is going to be hyped up and Skyrim is probably the biggest selling RPG of all time, but that's probably not going to increase their sales by more than a couple of million for the Xbox whatever. I feel like they're just getting a bit of redundancy in their line-up. Most of Bethesda's bread and butter isn't terribly different than the usual dudebro stuff Microsoft has...or had, I haven't touched an Xbox that wasn't the original. They already have Halo, they already have Obsidian (and Inxile!), and any other games from Bethesda aren't really going to matter, unless I'm forgetting something.
I legitimately don't see this working out in anyone's favor, except for the people who'll get a nice paycheck out of this.

[NightFright]

It's gonna sell XBox's once future Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein/etc titles won't appear on any other console any more. PC users might profit from the death of the Bethesda launcher, but other than that, it should be business as usual. More interesting is whether Bethesda will be allowed to continue existing as a "brand"/studio or they will put the MS logo everywhere from now on.

[Danukem]

NightFright, on 21 September 2020 - 10:00 PM, said:

It's gonna sell XBox's once future Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein/etc titles won't appear on any other console any more.

It's more likely that there will be a console exclusivity window, which will still help XBox sales a lot but not deprive ID of all other console revenue.

[Malgon]

I have to admit that I am genuinely suprised by this announcement. I really have no idea how this will pan out and whether it will be a benefit or a detriment to the franchises and players across consoles and PC. Just wow.

[Balls of Steel Forever]

Danukem, on 21 September 2020 - 10:13 PM, said:

It's more likely that there will be a console exclusivity window, which will still help XBox sales a lot but not deprive ID of all other console revenue.

Square Enix typically does this because console sales usually yield alot more profit for them then pc due to playerbase (jrpg gamers are mainly console gamers)
and also pc sells decrease naturally due to pirating.

Square has proven itself more then capable of releasing pc games on time if they choose to but for their main titles almost never.

I could very well see microhard-on doing the very same with timed exclusivity deals and not give the time and release it two years later for money
as that somehow works for square enix.

[Ninety-Six]

Apparently REKKR was added as an official add-on. That's neat.


I don't know how I feel about REKKR quality-wise as I haven't played it yet, but in my experience the TCs of the Doom community have a slightly better track record when it comes to being fair.

[NightFright]

I played REKKER twice and it is truly magnificient. A must-play.

[jkas789]

ck3D, on 21 September 2020 - 12:35 PM, said:

Most often, in other creative fields than gaming, when that type of behavior manifests itself (a handful of entities enforcing a monopoly of sorts on a market by purchasing every recognizable, established productive outlet), the direct consequence is the independent scene blowing up to the point of becoming a legit parallel industry (while on their end, the old timers fossilize), eventually resulting in a renewal of the scene, as though such situations allow some leeway for the passing of the torch. Hopefully, I guess in the relatively long term, that means more shine for indie developers with new games good enough for their quality to do all the talking.

Counter argument: The only industry that has happened successfully is the comics industry.

[ck3D]

jkas789, on 23 September 2020 - 02:59 AM, said:

Counter argument: The only industry that has happened successfully is the comics industry.

I don't think that's true, I can think of several examples in music, cinematography and several more niche art forms I dabble in, some professionally (just to say it's something I've actually studied). It just takes different forms, but the process is the same, I think it's a general pattern. Shop windows are only so attractive to people looking for something sincere, they'll make do with it for the lack of anything else under their radar but as soon as something actually substantial comes up that resonates with their needs, most often they will go that way. Regardless of context, the key is getting their attention, something damn near impossible in a world clouded with commercial bullshit but that tends to be made easier in times of deep cultural crisis.

[Jimmy]

jkas789, on 23 September 2020 - 02:59 AM, said:

Counter argument: The only industry that has happened successfully is the comics industry.

>comics
>successful

I mean maybe 30 years ago. The movies have all but killed comics.

[jkas789]

NightFright, on 18 September 2020 - 01:18 AM, said:

Small update for the pack. I had used graphics taken from the ZDoom forums for TNT and Plutonia before since I was unable to find the downloaded wads from the Steam release. Now the proper widescreen images are included (which are slightly better).

I have been using the mod in vanilla doom on LZDoom and there seems to be a weird graphical glitch in the level end slides. Got no ideea whats going on there but the widescreen pictures looks so good compared to the ones in vanilla Doom.

Quote

I mean maybe 30 years ago. The movies have all but killed comics.

The movies didn't killed comics. I don't want to get political but woke comic writers killed comics. The amount of thrash they have produced over the years has being incredible to watch. EG: Gotham High.

It's come to the point thata all my favourite comic book heroes have been neutered, and the art is something that you only saw on tumblr some 10 years ago.

Truly manga is the spiritual successor to the comic industry. Now if only twitter could keep their dirty hands off it that would be nice.

[Jimmy]

I didn't say they outright killed it, I said "all but."

Movies made comics mainstream. Mainstream means marketing, advertising, and the "big bucks." That means sanitization. In the past, sanitization has been varying amounts of tolerable. Today it means SJW politics.

[jkas789]

Oh, sorry then.

And yeah I agree with that.

[FistMarine]

Civvie's Heretic video is out!

[NY00123]

So, about a week ago, it was shown in a Doomworld thread that by taking advantage of an exploit, a saved game made for Vanilla Doom can lead to arbitrary code execution.
Just for one example, such a saved game can now be used in order to start a game of Snake:


https://www.doomworl...code-execution/
https://github.com/kgsws/doom_ace (There's currently a separate branch with a saved game compatible with Doom 2 v1.9.)

In case of doubts: It's better to not expect such exploits to ever work in the same manner in Chocolate Doom.

[Sanek]

Speaking of Doom mods..

When Doom textures is being used in Duke3D, it looks nice and like it belongs there. So why when textures from Duke is being used in Doom, it's almost always looks jarringly out of place? Borderline cheap I'd say.
I dunno why but it always looks like kinda noobish to me.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Sanek, on 05 October 2020 - 08:40 AM, said:

Speaking of Doom mods..

When Doom textures is being used in Duke3D, it looks nice and like it belongs there. So why when textures from Duke is being used in Doom, it's almost always looks jarringly out of place? Borderline cheap I'd say.
I dunno why but it always looks like kinda noobish to me.

Lack of proper shading maybe? Doom is a bit limited in its lighting system compared to Build.

[Ninety-Six]

Doesn't it have a more limited palette too compared to Build games? (well, the trinity, anyway. I don't know how pre-D3D Build compares to D3D and beyond).

[Ninety-Six]

I needed to test some stuff in the DOS version, and while I still had the wad files from previous installations, the actual DOS executables were lost in the harddrive crashes. So, I needed to get them back off steam. This meant installing the unity port as well.

By accident, I started the unity version instead of the dos version, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that it ran just fine without making this computer cry. Now I know Unity can be either optimized well or crappily depending on the game, but this laptop is still a bit old so I was figuring even if it was optimized it would still cause trouble. But it didn't.

I don't know if that's credit to the hardware or the coding but kudos to someone all the same. Or maybe I just have a poor understanding of exactly how shells work. Equally possible, if not moreso.


I played around with it, and it turns out I might have been a bit optimistic about the crosshair. I was assuming it would actually move to the height of the enemy being targeted. So not as useful as I was hoping, but the feature is still appreciated. I'm still testing to see if it's useful at all for working within the hitscan bug (at least in terms of melee, anyway). So far I haven't even encountered the bug, but that could very easily be explained by the finer precision offered by a mouse vs. an analog stick. In fact I'm all but certain that's the case.

[NightFright]

Feast your eyes upon the latest screenshots of the upcoming "Elementalism" megawad. It's hard to believe this was made for Doom.

[NNC]

NightFright, on 08 October 2020 - 09:50 PM, said:

Feast your eyes upon the latest screenshots of the upcoming "Elementalism" megawad. It's hard to believe this was made for Doom.

These look very impressive indeed, but often playing the actual maps doesn't match the expectations because of shallow, more often than not slaughterish or unfair gameplay with hordes of monsters. Also player's view is different ingame and in the builder the shots are taken. You won't see most of these sexy areas when you play the wad and your actual view can be very limited to some repetitive rooms. Also I don't like that again too many mappers are working on one thing, I prefer tighter releases with fewer (less than 3) mappers. OTOH I like Bauul's work, Foursite was a very interesting level even with its bugs.

[Player Lin]

Not really a fan of large amount maps-megawad...good gameplay or not...when I still have a lot of WADs needed to play but lack of time to do so...


===edit: added my long post that failed by database error for some reasons===

Ninety-Six, on 08 October 2020 - 12:40 PM, said:

I needed to test some stuff in the DOS version, and while I still had the wad files from previous installations, the actual DOS executables were lost in the harddrive crashes. So, I needed to get them back off steam. This meant installing the unity port as well.

By accident, I started the unity version instead of the dos version, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that it ran just fine without making this computer cry. Now I know Unity can be either optimized well or crappily depending on the game, but this laptop is still a bit old so I was figuring even if it was optimized it would still cause trouble. But it didn't.

The underlying engine still the good'ol original DooM engine with some limit-removing and patches, the idtech4/Unity part just a shell.

https://doomwiki.org...ssic_Unity_port

Quote

The port is based on the Doom Classic codebase, but replaces the id Tech 4 shell with one based on the Unity game engine.


Although utilizing the Unity engine, this is a true Doom engine port, not a Unity recreation. Unity is merely used as a shell—more formally referred to as an abstraction layer—for handling input and output, while rendering is still performed by the original Doom engine.[1] The actual Doom game code is contained in a DLL which is loaded by the Unity framework to run the game; this allows simplified portability.

Static limits are raised and engine bugs are fixed on a case-by-case basis, as required to support the additional features introduced in the port without breaking demo compatibility.[3] This also means that certain new features such as freelook are not planned,[4] and that certain limitations of the original engine, such as the issues when attempting to load sprites, flats, and textures from different archives, are left in place.

So it ultimately just a DooM classic port, running on Unity engine of shell (for cross-platform supports), it won't be surprised your old notebook still working fine with it.

[NightFright]

I am actually currently playing through Doom 1, Sigil, Doom 2 and NRFTL maps with Heretic textures and sprites thanks to a rather ingenious mod published here:

https://forum.zdoom....hp?f=19&t=69829

You need to isolate the maps from the iwads since it will look bad otherwise, but it's fantastic. Feels like hand-made Heretic remakes.

[MusicallyInspired]

I really want to try this but the extranneous instructions to get it to work scared me off. Why aren't these in a simple downloadable form you can just play?