My Critcisms of Freedoom

9 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

BTW, are you playing the latest official release, or a nightly build? 'Cause the latter has a lot of graphical and level design updates, including more polished sprites for some weapons. 

I think it's the latest official release, FreeDoom 0.12.1.. I'll check out the nightly build though, thanks, that looks badass. 

FreeDoom could definitely use a more clear vision and setting. As it is presently, it feels kinda like Strife-but-the-sprites-are-worse. Because it is made by volunteers and its scope is to replace id assets, the aesthetic it chooses should be something simple, something you can explain in 3 words or less. For example, robots/cyborgs or space squids or lizards or eldritch horror monsters. Bonus points if your theme can maintain a mix of sci-fi and occult so that the new assets don't look out of place in existing PWADs.

6 hours ago, the_kovic said:

FreeDoom could definitely use a more clear vision and setting. As it is presently, it feels kinda like Strife-but-the-sprites-are-worse. Because it is made by volunteers and its scope is to replace id assets, the aesthetic it chooses should be something simple, something you can explain in 3 words or less. For example, robots/cyborgs or space squids or lizards or eldritch horror monsters. Bonus points if your theme can maintain a mix of sci-fi and occult so that the new assets don't look out of place in existing PWADs.

You should check out the link MrFlibble posted:

http://freedoom.soulsphere.org/

It features improved graphics for monsters with more polish and more thematic consistency. Eldritch horror monsters I'd say. Alien eldritch horror monsters. 

Freedoom should also pick a theme to choose from, like some of the enemies are aliens of the planet horizon and some are hellish demon roster, seeing the latest autobuild it seems like our marine was captured by a evil organization, the AGM and it's experimentations failed and now are attacking AGM bases and our hero escapes the bases only to find out that our home, earth is also attacked by these aliens. If freedoom's enemies have a alien theme im fully on it

the idea of aliens attacking earth instead of demons is good and unique from doom and how the levels, music and graphics look and sound Lovecraftian specialy phase 1 and I like it

Freedoom's levels,enemies and graphics look Lovecraftian and alien like with a touch of hell in it, but I think they should completely remove the hellish theme of the wad and follow a alien and Lovecraftian theme of levels where the enemies are either aliens or experiments of the AGM, Phase 2 is great and trying to be a replacement for doom 2 and they should make replace the hell levels at least in phase 2

In my opinion, if someone makes a free software based on a paid one, they should also have different themes 

No longer relevant, see bellow.
Problem is that the project is trying to do too many things at once.
People have said that the project goals are:

• Pwad compatible. 
• Full vanilla limits compatible
• Completely distinct from doom

To be distinct from doom it needs to include textures that suit it's own themes. To maintain PWAD compat it needs to include equivalents of all doom textures, and Vanilla compatibility puts a limit on the number of textures.

So instead of making a TC that is really good at one thing, we have this mismatch of different goals that ends up bringing the entire project down.
Personally I think we should have ditched vanilla limits a long time ago, but I have been overruled. 

31 minutes ago, GrnKnght said:

Personally I think we should have ditched vanilla limits a long time ago, but I have been overruled.

LOL the project started as limit-removing BOOM compatilbility way back when; vanilla limits were decided later on basically so that it can be used with *any* sourceport, even Chocolate DOOM and the like.

3 hours ago, GrnKnght said:

To maintain PWAD compat it needs to include equivalents of all doom textures, and Vanilla compatibility puts a limit on the number of textures.

Vanilla compatibility has nothing to do with the number of textures. FYI, Freed∞m IWADs already include extra textures, among them the Aquatex set, which are actively used in the maps -- just start Phase 1 and you'll be immediately greeted by Aquatex stuff (in fact, E1M1 started as a submission for an Aquatext mapping contest).

On 10/8/2023 at 9:31 AM, MrFlibble said:

Vanilla compatibility has nothing to do with the number of textures. FYI, Freed∞m IWADs already include extra textures, among them the Aquatex set, which are actively used in the maps -- just start Phase 1 and you'll be immediately greeted by Aquatex stuff (in fact, E1M1 started as a submission for an Aquatext mapping contest).

I know it includes extra textures, the issue is that https://doomwiki.org/wiki/PWAD_size_limit, also applies to IWADS, and the Iwad is already stuffed with misc doom engine assets.

Aquatex is great for techbases but not so much for alien planets.

If you visit the discord you'll see that they are discarding perfectly good "bonus" graphics because they are worried about reaching the limit. Vanilla compatibility has everything to do with the lack of resources.

Disregard, I've changed my mind since then.

On 10/9/2023 at 12:56 PM, GrnKnght said:

If you visit the discord you'll see that they are discarding perfectly good "bonus" graphics because they are worried about reaching the limit. Vanilla compatibility has everything to do with the lack of resources.

As far as I understand (I could be wrong), there're still textures included that aren't even used in the maps.

But even if they all were, the 4046 lump limit is not unreasonable for the project. I'd argue it helps preventing the WAD from becoming bloated. I don't think hosting an ever growing huge texture dump should be a goal. The limit also helps imposing some consistency, since it encourages maps to reuse the textures and not keep adding variants of the same texture just for flavor. I don't believe that being "distinct from Doom" requires that.

Note that keeping the entire set of Aquatex textures is also not one of the formal "project goals", so if you really think there's any one particular texture that is more deserving to be included than others, I think it would make more sense to propose a texture replacement (removing whichever other "bonus" texture seems to be redundant or least used/useful) instead of asking for the new textures to be added while placing the blame on the Vanilla compatibility for not allowing every single possible "perfectly good" texture that was (or will be) ever proposed to be included.

There's also an "attic" stored as a separate repository. There's no limit to how many textures could be placed there, so there's that as an option for submissions. It's not like the textures would be lost forever if they aren't included / or are removed. If someone wants to use those textures in a PWAD for Freedoom, they can still tap into that resource to have extra textures and it would still be vanilla compatible, since the limit is per-WAD.

On 10/10/2023 at 2:21 PM, Ferk said:

There's also an "attic" stored as a separate repository.

The attic seems to have not been updated in a long while. I'd gladly help out when I have some time (in the past I committed a few replaced graphics there), but its structure requires to know the author of each contribution that is archived, which appears to have become more complicated now -- I guess one needs to shuffle through pull requests on GitHub, whereas all development discussion (that would help establish authorship) is found on Discord, which is not public.

I'm also a bit worried that some art that was added after the latest official release but then replaced with something even newer -- I remember several variations of health and armour bonuses in recent autobuilds, for example, -- might not get archived at all unless someone manually puts it into the attic. Or, at least, one will again need to wade through pull requests to track down these contributions.

20 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

I'm also a bit worried that some art that was added after the latest official release but then replaced with something even newer -- I remember several variations of health and armour bonuses in recent autobuilds, for example, -- might not get archived at all unless someone manually puts it into the attic. Or, at least, one will again need to wade through pull requests to track down these contributions.

On the other hand, this all being tracked in git potentially allows for automating it... I guess it would be technically possible to automatically generate a website, sort of a "Freedoom DB" that chronicles the evolution of each graphic file. I think the idea was kind of hinted before in a github issue, someone mentioned about a script to track changes in levels: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/issues/775

The attic definitely could do with some reorganizing. While authors should definitely be given credit, grouping it like that makes it very hard for people to know where to look for when they are searching for something specific. Although I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it if we are limited to folders. I feel there might be assets that could fit in more than one "category" (and things like levels have often been moved and switched around to different slots over time), so maybe it might be better to just have one big folder for each generic type of asset (eg. sprites, flats, levels, etc.) and a yaml or json file for each of them to keep the metadata about author, submission date, etc. I don't know...

Also, for anyone wanting to check older versions of an asset in the main repo, instead of wading through Pull Requests, you could directly look at the history of the individual file you wanna check.

• Bonus Armor Pickup history: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/commits/master/sprites/bon2a0.png
• Bonus Health Pickup history: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/commits/master/sprites/bon1a0.png

Though that's from after it was converted from GIF to PNG (in 2017). For history of the older GIF versions it would be:

• Bonus Armor Pickup GIF history: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/commits/96ca8bf/sprites/bon2a0.gif
• Bonus Health Pickup GIF history: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/commits/96ca8bf/sprites/bon1a0.gif

In 2015 and earlier, all files were using symlinks (back then the attic was actually part of the main repo and the files from it were linked into the right location, when used), which further complicates things...

6 hours ago, Ferk said:

While authors should definitely be given credit, grouping it like that makes it very hard for people to know where to look for when they are searching for something specific

Yes, that's certainly very true -- but again, this would call for a complete reorganization of the attic, which does not seem to be a priority right now.

6 hours ago, Ferk said:

Also, for anyone wanting to check older versions of an asset in the main repo, instead of wading through Pull Requests, you could directly look at the history of the individual file you wanna check.

That's cool -- I did not know that. I don't suppose there's an easy way to extract all the different versions of an asset as separate files?

Also there are contributions that never actually ended up in any build of the IWADs, yet have good quality. I tried to catalogue those in the past, when development discussion was still mostly here and not on Discord -- which I gather does not even store messages indefinitely? Is there any attempt to archive that work? I think it very much deserves to be in the attic.

20 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

I don't suppose there's an easy way to extract all the different versions of an asset as separate files?

Not within the github website like that, I don't think so. It probably requires some scripting using git commands.

20 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

Also there are contributions that never actually ended up in any build of the IWADs, yet have good quality. I tried to catalogue those in the past, when development discussion was still mostly here and not on Discord -- which I gather does not even store messages indefinitely? Is there any attempt to archive that work? I think it very much deserves to be in the attic.

Yes, that's a pity. The problem with that is also that if that content was never formally included in the repo then it never was really explicitly put into the MIT license. I'm not sure if it would be wise to take those work-in-progress / rejected graphics without the author's consent and assume that the author is actually OK with them being put in the attic under the MIT license. Unless they gave explicit permission, which in some cases it might be hard to get if a long time has past.

On 10/13/2023 at 4:46 PM, Ferk said:

The problem with that is also that if that content was never formally included in the repo then it never was really explicitly put into the MIT license

I'm assuming that those who have posted art as contributions here in the forums automatically consented to that it would be licensed appropriately once it's been included in the project, by the very act of making these posts -- which is what happened to all contributions that made it into the IWADs, no? I only remember a handful of instances when someone decided to revoke their submissions, and in all cases this was done by contacting the project admins or otherwise making it explicitly clear they wanted their stuff to be removed.

On 10/8/2023 at 6:37 AM, GrnKnght said:

To maintain PWAD compat it needs to include equivalents of all doom textures

Wat? That doesn't have anything to do with compatibility. The problem of derivative "Doom-like" textures is related to the period in which these maps were made (which ironically was when the project was Boom). Also the resource limit is extremely high - but you can always use an extra wad for that if needed.

The strength of Dooms adversaries were that they were not as faceless as the insectoids and worms.

The humans are also covered up, at least partially.

The Doom sprites had uncovered mouthes, and could therefore be animated as screaming, which adds to the satisfaction of slaying them.

The Hellknight replacement has these aspects, and is therefore one of the best monsters, but that handpuppet looks a bit goofy...so, points detracted from that.

I guess the Cyberdemon has a face, too, but its so small, and the mancubus , while also qualifying, just makes me think of this old game here, Gruntz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruntz#/media/File:Gruntz_Coverart.png

I am also confused about the vibe, many of the key enemies are insectoid looking, but then there's the hellknight looking like a reptilebird.

Why are birds cooperating with insects?

I did think of the possiblity of a "Cataclysm" roguelike esque situation where there's many different types of aliens and monsters all coming in at the same type, which would also explain monster infighting, and thus has a leg up for believability, and that could be the way to go for the story, without having to change the assets.

Otherwise, they're a bit of a mishmash.

The best thing about Freedoom is the marine, I genuinely love him and I hope he will never get replaced, and instead Freedoom opting to offer pwads to override him.

Also, I am wondering if it could be a good idea to split off the maps into a separate package, and trim down the then to be base to a few easier ones.

I'm 100% fine downloading all the episodes for all the phases, but I'm already getting a bit fatigued, as a Doom newbie in general, of them.

Granted, it's partially my fault for trying to go pistol start, no saves UV like I'm some sort of not noob, but...still.

I think it could  benefit from some trimming, classic Doom even though I did not play it until recently ...is much easier, man.

The music tends to be pretty damn good. I have had earworms from several of them.

All in all, I think Freedoom is good, especially the nightly builds (those huge boots hahaha the impaled marines had...)

The graphics are also good, but I think the designs could be better. They are, for the most part, rendered/implemented quite well, after all.

I do intend to contribute too, though. Perhaps not in the art sector (although I am practising drawing again, don't have a portfolio lol) but the sound design, too.

The sounds are already not bad, but I do get pulled out of the ambient sound of the worms, for example, that loogie hocking moan thing.

Not cause it's gross or anything, but because of the intensity shape KRRRCHHmrrrrr on loop is a bit grating to me.

Pain and death in monsters could also use some bumping up. I have not done research really but this overall feels kind of oldschool German to me...makes me wonder if the people behind it are German too (I am... lol)

In a way, this appeals to me, but I think there is potential for more spectacle and also streamlining (not actually an oxymoron, you can have smooth spectacle) to be had.

I am not learned enough about the vanilla compatibility thing, to really judge it, but a trimmed down mapset could help with that, too.

That said, since I'm a Linuxer myself, and a pretty freedom advocating one, I do very much approve of the wish to be vanilla compatible, but at the same time, I can't help but also agree with the notion of "the original wasn't free, so, sourceports are the way to go, and sourceports aren't the original".

But from a spiritual standpoint, a spiritual free software standpoint, I just have to go with at least the notion that it should be as 'drop in' and 'unmeddled' as possible.

On 10/15/2023 at 7:33 PM, Noiser said:

Wat? That doesn't have anything to do with compatibility. The problem of derivative "Doom-like" textures is related to the period in which these maps were made (which ironically was when the project was Boom). Also the resource limit is extremely high - but you can always use an extra wad for that if needed.

Perhaps. I just know that there is a serious push in the discord to replace the unique looking textures with more doomlike textures, quality be darned. PWAD compat is used as an excuse, and whenever I suggest alternate textures, they get rebuked because "we don't want to reach the limit"

So even if the limit is large, people on the discord are using the limit as the reasoning for not being more creative. Maybe my reasoning is wrong, but there is definitely a push against making Freedoom have it's own unique feel. I want to see the project thrive as something unique, not just a doom rip-off.
No longer relevent

27 minutes ago, GrnKnght said:

Perhaps. I just know that there is a serious push in the discord to replace the unique looking textures with more doomlike textures, quality be darned. PWAD compat is used as an excuse, and whenever I suggest alternate textures, they get rebuked because "we don't want to reach the limit"

So even if the limit is large, people on the discord are using the limit as the reasoning for not being more creative. Maybe my reasoning is wrong, but there is definitely a push against making Freedoom have it's own unique feel. I want to see the project thrive as something unique, not just a doom rip-off.

Yeah, that's a bit weird. Afaik there's no problem in adding new stuff like textures or flats into the game. Personally I would first edit the older maps using the newer textures, including the ones that are on the pwad already (like the aqua-tex pack). As it is, only the first map uses them in a way that looks unique - the other maps are filled with the older, more derivative textures. I would either change all the other maps to be like map01 or change map01 to be like the older ones, because as it is there's a major inconsistency between them.

Disregard, fixed in latest version.
Part of it is that the lump limit is 4k and they are at around 3.6k right now.

Still plenty of space for new textures, but they are refusing anyway because they might reach it at some point. (how that would be possible, given the refusal to add textures without replacing old ones, I have no clue)

Besides, they should replace some of the aquatex textures. They were contributed freely, and I see why people don't want to replace them (especially since some are in use right now), but they need replacement.

AQPANL 01 is inexcusable.

• There is a green gradient that doesn't tile
• the metal is pillowshaded.
• the wear pattern is shared between surfaces that should be separate.
• the grill/grating thing is impossible to parse at low resolution or at an angle.

On 9/25/2023 at 1:05 PM, Nihlith said:

 

I'd agree with that.

 

Is it just me or is FreeDoom harder than Doom? I just started playing Phase 2 which is a hell of a game. I'm enjoying the hell out of it but a couple levels in, I think it's the gamma lab, where you start down an elevator shaft and emerge into a room surrounded by techno spiders, I couldn't get past the blob monsters that come out after the spiders are all dead without god mode. Even before then I kept thinking, these are not just equivocal replacements, these enemies and weapons work differently.

 

I think it looks great, at first I thought the zombies looked jankey but I think they're supposed to look messed up being zombies and all. 

 

I think it is a hair harder than Doom as well.......but: I've also developed a new found love for it.....  I think over half the levels are just brilliant (although secrets can be quite hard to find on your own....QUITE hard!)  I think the true jackpot of Freedoom is that it largely stands on its own to feet as a game that is truly fun to play!

Freedoom's mapset is great; the only maps I dislike from a gameplay viewpoint are @Z0k's maps - they're quite labyrinthine.

It's a mixed bag. Episode 1 is perfect, except for E1M5 hitscan hell and an underwhelming E1M8.

On a positive note, the team might be more open to including high quality textures and replacing aquatex textures, so Disregard anything I said about that.