Kotti wrote:A really interesting discussion.
But it makes me wonder about one thing: What would have happened to ZDoom without Graf Zahl's continued work on the engine? Where would ZDoom stand now compared to GZDoom? He did a fantastic job keeping both engines in sync for more than 10 years now.
Honestly, I think ZDoom would be dead and gone by now.
ZDoom already was close to collapsing in 2005. Back then the bug reports were just piling up with nothing happening. It eventually got so bad that a few community members stepped up and started providing unofficial builds with new features and bugs fixed - and this unofficial build became the basis of GZDoom.
Looking back, this seems to have been the most critical point in time for ZDoom, the project was in genuine danger of just disintegrating under the weight of a year's accumulation of bug reports and a major code submission that had been collecting dust for an entire year.
Ultimately Randi made the right decision by merging all this and ask Graf Zahl to help clean up the mess that had developed, but my guess is if that hadn't happened ZDoom would have died in 2006. Nobody would have used it anymore with GZDoom providing all the same with better feature support and less bugs.
Sadly the same pattern seems to have repeated since then several times, just with a second developer who made sure that those long stretches of absence didn't result in the project's destruction.
[quote="Kotti"]A really interesting discussion.
But it makes me wonder about one thing: What would have happened to ZDoom without Graf Zahl's continued work on the engine? Where would ZDoom stand now compared to GZDoom? He did a fantastic job keeping both engines in sync for more than 10 years now.[/quote]
Honestly, I think ZDoom would be dead and gone by now.
ZDoom already was close to collapsing in 2005. Back then the bug reports were just piling up with nothing happening. It eventually got so bad that a few community members stepped up and started providing unofficial builds with new features and bugs fixed - and this unofficial build became the basis of GZDoom.
Looking back, this seems to have been the most critical point in time for ZDoom, the project was in genuine danger of just disintegrating under the weight of a year's accumulation of bug reports and a major code submission that had been collecting dust for an entire year.
Ultimately Randi made the right decision by merging all this and ask Graf Zahl to help clean up the mess that had developed, but my guess is if that hadn't happened ZDoom would have died in 2006. Nobody would have used it anymore with GZDoom providing all the same with better feature support and less bugs.
Sadly the same pattern seems to have repeated since then several times, just with a second developer who made sure that those long stretches of absence didn't result in the project's destruction.