"(File)Size Matters" 64K Compo (Judging not underway)

[Gez]

UDMF Compressor erases all(most?) unnecessary line breaks, spaces and comments from your TEXTMAP file.

That probably makes DB2/GZDB unable to load them.

[Dancso]

Actually for GZDB the one catch was that there has to be a line break before each closing curly bracket and that's it. I used GZDB to test my compression theory so i have abided by that one rule, probably could save thousands of characters if gzdoom itself didnt have this limitation but I was too lazy to check
At best it's probably just ~5% extra compression (5% compared to rest of the cut characters) which in the grand scale of things (after 7zip) is pretty negligible anyway.

[Gez]

SLADE 3 used to skip a linebreak between two UDMF properties (I think it was floor and ceiling textures IIRC) and I was asked to fix this because it prevented GZDB from loading the maps. The parser in DB makes some not-necessarily-true assumptions in order to speed up reading a bit, so it can choke on perfectly compliant files.

[Crudux Cruo]

Sidestepping the drama for a bit, I have a mutator idea of sorts and figured I'd check out a quick reference to see if it's doable, and lo and behold: Parkour's pk3 is a mere 22kb. Something similar may have to be done.

OMG PLEASE REMAKE PARKOUR! its my favorite doom mod of all time! too bad its broken now

[LilWhiteMouse]

Version 1.1

Assorted tweaks, but the biggest addition is side rooms in the interior map. When in front of a door, use FORWARD to enter. Hostages, keycards (security rooms), and guns (armoury) have been moved to side rooms. Enemies no longer drop health kits in the interior map. Instead they'll occasionally drop a pass card that will let you use the healing platform in a medical room.

Drag 'n drop on ZDoom to play (7z because forum doesn't accept PK7). Requires Strife.

[lizardcommando]

Here's my submission. You may have seen my video preview on the WIP thread. It's a simple gameplay mod. Unzipped, it's about 48 KB. What started off as a simple mod where I just changed the Pain Elemental and Lost Souls because I absolutely hated them, it became more than that since just changing those two monsters is boring. Now all the enemies have changed. Have at it:

I HATE PAIN ELEMENTALS (AND EVERYTHING ELSE)!

[disposable_username2]

FINAL VERSION OF GLITCH LAND
It was a pain development version, I was like 800Bytes more than 64K D:, I used every trick I could find to reduce the map, and tadah, it's now 64.487 bytes D:

Y U NO ZPAQ???

[Marisa the Magician]

Ah to hell with it, I'm coming back. Here it is again, Spooktime 64K Edition. I've fixed some glaring bugs in the visibility checks, so it should be fine now.
Requires a recent ZDoom dev build since it uses anonymous functions a lot.

Since I'm working on restricted sizes here, it lacks many features of the "Ultimate" edition such as multiplayer support, widescreen overlays, many visual effects, special compatibility addition to vanilla maps and other tweaks. Still, it's good enough for single player, I've tested two episodes of Doom 1 with it.

I must give credits to Major Cooke for teaching me the magic of A_Warp, and to Nash for the software flashlight idea. The vast majority of assets in the mod were all handcrafted by me.

[Inchworm]

Seriously cool, man. The death animation was a nice touch. After the contest, it would be pretty cool to see it developed even further.

[Combine_Kegan]

A 64kb mod?

You're on.

I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this one, I still got a bit of work to do, but I think this'll be a fun mod.

[wildweasel]

So, given recent events (and a very long apology PM to Nash), I've decided it's time I start seriously thinking about how this competition is going to be scored. I've come up with a few scoring categories, but I'm not sure how many of them should really be used, so I've put up a multiple-choice poll at the top of the thread to see what you guys think.

I should note, I've shied away from more obvious categories like Graphics, Sound, or Gameplay; since not everything that's being submitted so far has technically been a playable game or has featured anything new in terms of audio or visuals, those categories wouldn't really be fair to everything, so I merged them into a broader "Execution" category. Where I'm a bit stuck, though, is whether I should award points for the actual size of the project, and if so, in which direction (should users get bonus points for going smaller, or bonus points for "closest without going over"?).

And I really ought to clarify, too, that I have yet to even download any of the entrants, but I've been hugely impressed with the output I'm seeing so far, especially the two submissions I've seen so far that elected to use Strife as their IWADs. Which reminds me: bonus categories! I don't really want to just define a bunch of categories ahead of time; I think it'd be more fun to come up with them on the fly as I play the individual entries. So stuff like "Used Strife1.wad", "Ultra-compression", or whatever. Feel free to suggest some, though.

[Dancso]

I think given that we're compressing to fit a certain size, we shouldn't really judge how much space is left or how close to the limit it got, the first one will favor mods that happened to have very lightweight ideas whereas the latter just incentivizes filling your entry with redundant data to come close.

In my personal opinion the execution should only matter from an end-user standpoint because some of us might have to resort to either doing ugly behind-the-walls stuff or sacrifice features we would've liked to add.

I did pick a bonus category vote, it kinda overlaps with what you originally said WW, to judge based on how well the space taken up is utilized. The one catch I see here is that it's tedious to get a thorough, fair idea of what efforts each entry had gone through to cut down on its size, but I think we should reward ingenuity / creativeness behind the scene aswell, because there are definitely multiple ways to do things, and if something stands out for being particularly smart utilization of a feature, it earns brownie points in my book.

[Xaser]

OMG PLEASE REMAKE PARKOUR! its my favorite doom mod of all time! too bad its broken now

Uh? How is it broken?

Also, for clarification, I'm not talking about a remake, but rather something in the vein of "gameplay mutator that doesn't change resources" -- though I might 'cheat' and include a few small things given that there's likely to be a few kb to spare.


[EDIT] Regarding categories, if we're talking general public voting I'm personally not a fan of voting categories in general because they tend to muddy the waters since interpretations are all over the place. If it's a judge or a panel or somesuch, though, then that might work I suppose.

[kodi]

What about "ingenuity" as an alternative or complement to "originality"? It would cover for things that have been done before in Doom or elsewhere, but that are implemented in a particularly creative or outside-the-box fashion.
Oh and, will the final score of an entry be the sum of all the categories combined will a winner be chosen for each category?

[wildweasel]

[EDIT] Regarding categories, if we're talking general public voting I'm personally not a fan of voting categories in general because they tend to muddy the waters since interpretations are all over the place. If it's a judge or a panel or somesuch, though, then that might work I suppose.

Well, I planned on judging the entries myself, actually, though I suppose a public "choose three favorites" vote would be cool as well. Given how many entries we've got so far (I'm overwhelmed by how many awesome things I've seen on here!), I might have to set up a Google Forms survey, since there are more entries than can fit on a phpBB poll. But hey, that's a good thing, because that means I can visualize the results in a bunch of different ways!

What about "ingenuity" as an alternative or complement to "originality"? It would cover for things that have been done before in Doom or elsewhere, but that are implemented in a particularly creative or outside-the-box fashion.
Oh and, will the final score of an entry be the sum of all the categories combined will a winner be chosen for each category?

Hmm! I should add that to the poll, though it means everyone will have to re-vote. [edit] Done, everyone will need to re-vote, though.

Yes, the final score will be a total of all the categories combined.