by Rachael » Mon Mar 21, 2022 8:08 am
It's actually really difficult to "fully refute" things because at some points (this one in particular) you are asking to change a paradigm that has existed for decades. It's a lot of history to go through to try and iterate why X or Y would be a bad idea and sometimes the standard as it exists is taken for granted. (All the more reason not to change things too suddenly)
In this particular instance while it might not outright break mods - it would definitely cause problems. Overwriting sprites with the same name has been a core part of the Doom experience since 1993 (although back then it was done via external tools). To suddenly get a warning (most people would think it's an error) for something as fundamental as that would cause a lot of unnecessary alarm, causing many people to think their mod is broken - and then, in order to fix it, they will do things that actually break their mods, when they actually did nothing wrong in the first place.
This is why I agree with Marisa that an external tool would be more helpful here.
The trick with GZDoom is, namespaces only exist for the short 8-character texture names. Otherwise, when using long names, they can be any arbitrary name you want in pretty much any arbitrary path as long as it is reachable. Including the sprites folder.
Now I will grant it makes absolutely no sense to store patches in the sprites folder that later get overridden by name with other same-named sprites, but it is nevertheless a supported mechanism, odd and as senseless as it may be.
It's actually really difficult to "fully refute" things because at some points (this one in particular) you are asking to change a paradigm that has existed for decades. It's a lot of history to go through to try and iterate why X or Y would be a bad idea and sometimes the standard as it exists is taken for granted. (All the more reason not to change things too suddenly)
In this particular instance while it might not outright break mods - it would definitely cause problems. Overwriting sprites with the same name has been a core part of the Doom experience since 1993 (although back then it was done via external tools). To suddenly get a warning (most people would think it's an error) for something as fundamental as that would cause a lot of unnecessary alarm, causing many people to [i]think[/i] their mod is broken - and then, in order to fix it, they will do things that [i]actually[/i] break their mods, when they actually did nothing wrong in the first place.
This is why I agree with Marisa that an external tool would be more helpful here.
The trick with GZDoom is, namespaces only exist for the short 8-character texture names. Otherwise, when using long names, they can be any arbitrary name you want in pretty much any arbitrary path as long as it is reachable. Including the sprites folder.
Now I will grant it makes absolutely no sense to store patches in the sprites folder that later get overridden by name with other same-named sprites, but it is nevertheless a supported mechanism, odd and as senseless as it may be.