Bio Hazard wrote:If it were my descion, I would go for a whole new map and class definition format. Not putting any thought twoards compatabillity with old WADs. Then I would expect the community to make patches for broken wads or converters to the new (well duccumented) format. Then ZDoom would be much less hack-filled.
(Is ZDoom hacky? It sure does a lot of things that there are better ways to do now. Why add special checks for the old hacks?)
No class format? Why? I think DECORATE is fine as it is but only needs some programmability. But that is being addressed by Randy's plans.
New map format: Have you read that discussion over at Doomworld? After going nowhere for far too long I have decided to go ahead and design something better - including a port independent DLL to load it.
For example: If I made a really nice map way back when and I used some crappy boom hack that will cause ZDoom to need special checks for in the future, when it finally breaks due to being old and hacky, fans of the wad would update it to use the new system and upload a patch to a wad patch archive somewhere. This would discourage trying to get around limitations by constructing dirty hacks. Sure innovative ideas will be pinched a bit, but imagine how much easier it would be to implement new features without needing to support every bleeding flat platform, voodoo-doll script and DEH nightmare (batman.deh).
The dirty hacks will continue because the mappers using them don't specifically target ZDoom. In ZDoom maps I haven't seen any crude hacks for a long time. The things you list are all required to be supported in the future. Bleeding flats are a side effect of the renderer and I even managed to get them to work quite well with my hardware renderer, VoodooScript is trivial to support and why drop DEH? Granted, Batman is indeed a nightmare but I think that WAD is beyond repair anyway
Some of us programmers need to show up on the IRC or something and discuss a new map format. ZDoom needs an update very badly.
Yes, it does. But so far any discussion has gone nowhere because people like Deep are constantly torpedoing any discussion that doesn't go into the direction they prefer. The only thing that works is to actually do something. I think I have worked this out to a degree that can handle everything ZDoom needs. But I have no desire to discuss this further. I want to implement it and when that is done it can be fine tuned.
My view might sound self-destructive to the future of ZDoom, but it worked for a lot of the other projects I have worked on.
Only the part of abandoning old features. That would indeed be self-destructive. ZDoom doesn't live in a world of its own. It is still part of the Doom community and large parts of that need compatibility.