ZDoom

Some of us may remember the Demo wad that came with earlier versions of ZDoom which featured a small hub of maps that would showcase some of the neat mapping features that ZDoom had to offer (fog, polyobjects, water you could swim in, etc.).

What I'm suggesting is this wad be included alongside GZDoom, and perhaps expanded upon to showcase some super cool features that GZDoom has, perhaps even show off what sort of things the Vulkan renderer can do when the time comes.
I loved these kind of wads back when ZDoom was somewhat new and I really like how they welcome new players to the source port. It certainly worked for me back in my pre-teen years.

Can you believe this ancient ZDoom wad still works?

That's something that's going to require a bit of work from the community. And what would we show? There's far more to GZDoom than just mapping features, and ever since ZDoom got DECORATE the demo wad's purpose too has been slightly diminished. At this point it's more for chuckles and a walk down memory lane, rather than a real teaching tool as it was originally meant to be.

Precisely that. This really has no place in the engine distribution.

Would definitely be cool to construct, from scratch, a 2019 demo but yeah it'd take a fuckton of effort because there's just so many features to show.

Aye, to me the main purpose of the original Zdoom WAD was to show off the Zdoom features that were fundamentally different to traditional Doom modding techniques (hubs, scripts etc) at a time when those were unfamiliar to most modders. The present day needs are quite different,. We also have a wiki and a more established online community and knowledge base.

Alright, Why not just make it Vulkan oriented?
I'm sure many of us (including myself) are unfamiliar of it and need some sort of introduction, and mappers would want some ideas on how to use Vulkan to it's fullest potential (if it even applies to mapping)

Vulkan does not have any mapping specific features to highlight yet, and it's unlikely to get any in the near future.

Currently everything that runs on Vulkan runs on OpenGL and they look exactly the same.

It is very unlikely that Vulkan will get any feature that cannot be done in OpenGL 4.5 any time soon. Hardware raytracing is still not viable. The purpose of Vulkan is to move on from an API that is seeing poor support on some platforms and being deprecated on others.

Ah, I see now