How will we play Doom in ten years?

[Teddipetzi]

I recently realized that over the last ten years not much has changed in the Doom source port landscape. On the contrary, the established ports have more or less solidified their position, with the exception of ZDoom, but it still gets continued as part of GZDoom now.

But elsewhere there hasn't been much going on. None of the upstarts gained any notable popularity and none of the more successful ones yielded its position.

But will this go on or are we due for a make shake-up?

[Graf Zahl]

If you ask me: Even in ten years we will still have this schism between the classic-or-nothing mindset that thrives at Doomworld and those who want to expand and experiment.
Which ports will we use in ten years is up for amone to guess. But a lot will depend on how PrBoom continues. If it remains dead in the water as it is now, the inevitable time will come when its crusty and antiquated OpenGL 2.x renderer will break. Will GZDoom still be present? Hard to say, when I started in 2005 I never expected that 14 years later I'd still be working on it, so it may happen that in 10 years it is still active, but 10 years is a long time where a lot can happen.

[Rachael]

The difference between the last ten years and the next ten years is how the Doom community is aging. We were all a lot younger in the past decade than we will be in the next one - and unless some of the younger folks start to take on the roles that have previously been filled by us, I think the next decade is when things will start to slow down and stagnate. There'll still be plenty of us doing the same old thing, though but I don't think things are going to be quite the same.

[Curunir]

That's one of the things that surprise me actually - the amount of younger people entering the community yearly and contributing great things. Even if we're rushing straight into what people call "middle age", I'm fairly confident there will be enough young blood to keep the scene alive and exciting.

[Graf Zahl]

There's surely lots of younger people, but there's one thing missing: new programmers who could take over the source ports. The majority here is somewhat older. What happens if the ports can no longer be maintained because young people cannot cope with the 90's programming style that despite all modernization can still be seen everywhere or simply have no interest working on some ancient game from then 30 or more years back?

[Rachael]

That's exactly what I was getting at. Newer programmers seem to be interested in the newer languages - which is fine and dandy, C++ is by no means the king of the world and it never deserved to be. But Doom was written in C and in the case of some ports translated to C++, and that is the language that will have to be learned by anyone wanting to take the source ports over.

There's MochaDoom which was written in Java, but unfortunately that is effectively a dead language at this point - its maintainers no longer want to work with it, and anyone who takes Java over will inherit all the problems that have been piling up on top of it over the past couple of decades.

There is another port being written in Haxe but I don't know how much I am allowed to say about it - so I'll just not say much at all - but it might show some promise, and from what little I've gathered, Haxe seems to be the kind of language that we really need to make C++ less of a "necessary evil".

[Darkcrafter]

I really wish this happens to doom: https://youtu.be/_gfMeRaj3e8

I wouldn't say I'm shocked by what I seen in this video, but I think this is the future of doom, we lose so much with the current mapping limits and tools. Personally, nothing else except GZDoom, Crispy Doom and old dos doom executables exist for me now. Say if I want to play original doom I fire up old dos executable via dosbox and it's more than enough to have all that old experience, crispy doom goes for vanilla maps that can not be run in old doom due to visplane overflow and better music (old doom dos exes can not physically play more than 8 opl channels that is certainly bad to me). GZDoom for everything else including my beloved Brutal Doom with huge maps, stacked sectors, portals, 3d graphics, 3d floors and other stuff that I suppose every modern non vanilla source port must have nowadays, otherwise they are all out of existence to me.

What I wish even more are better levels, because what people do now and consider "a high quality zdoom experience" is an utter overcomplicated trash with lots of useless rooms.

At last I'd like to wish GZDoom to continue its life becoming an even better thing that in my opinion outcasts everything existed before it maybe with little exception towards Zandronum for its multiplayer capabilities.

What I expect else is that level generators become better.

[Rachael]

Well to be fair - what makes Doom great is entirely subjective.

Some people like the slaughter of hordes of zombies, some people prefer the same for the tougher demons, others prefer the visual aspects of it. Everyone really gets their own thing out of it.

I highly doubt that a Unity port of Doom will be the future of Doom. Sorry - I just don't see that happening. Unity might be a viable engine in its own right, but it comes with strings attached, which makes it particularly unattractive for any sort of long-term use, especially for a game like Doom and its many mods and maps.

What seems more likely and viable to me, is someone remaking the game in one of the Quake engines, and making a map converter that works with that, instead. That at least keeps us on the free software track, and with a map converter it also means that older levels can still be played as well. It's either that, or making a new 3D engine entirely from scratch. If someone did decide to port Doom to a Quake engine though, a lot of the monsters would have to be redone and rebalanced - because 35 tics per second simply don't translate well to 10.

[phantombeta]

Will GZDoom still be present? Hard to say, when I started in 2005 I never expected that 14 years later I'd still be working on it, so it may happen that in 10 years it is still active, but 10 years is a long time where a lot can happen.

Well, GZDoom is basically my entire life at this point, so I'll still be around in 10 years if the community still is. If anything happens and GZDoom is left without a maintainer, I guess I could do as a sorta subpar replacement.

The difference between the last ten years and the next ten years is how the Doom community is aging. We were all a lot younger in the past decade than we will be in the next one - and unless some of the younger folks start to take on the roles that have previously been filled by us, I think the next decade is when things will start to slow down and stagnate.

There's surely lots of younger people, but there's one thing missing: new programmers who could take over the source ports. The majority here is somewhat older. What happens if the ports can no longer be maintained because young people cannot cope with the 90's programming style that despite all modernization can still be seen everywhere or simply have no interest working on some ancient game from then 30 or more years back?

Well, at least on GZDoom's side, there's me, Marisa, Gutawer and maybe Major Cooke, I guess...

I really wish this happens to doom: https://youtu.be/_gfMeRaj3e8

and from what little I've gathered, Haxe seems to be the kind of language that we really need to make C++ less of a "necessary evil".

>tfw D isn't gaining much traction and the experience on Windows is... meh.

[Darkcrafter]

Quake has many problems too, including this tic timer limit, if I ever set host_maxfps to let's say 400 wild things start happening as soon as actor lifts down or goes down a slope it feels so choppy. So I still hope some sort of generic template of doom will be worked on for unity or some other modern engine, maybe someone can come up with something that resembles and feels more doom day by day. By the way, something of this kind is already being worked on: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/9 ... for-unity/

I think licensing is more of the problem, I believe it's super easy to represent doom maps in full 3d if we would talk about conversion of doom sectors into polygons and objects, but you know that sky problem that is very specific in doom, perhaps a lot of additional work must be done in order to some doom maps to charm, it's like adding details that are absent in doom maps, unification and finalization the level like this:

Before: https://imgur.com/ZhPISz0 and https://imgur.com/tXGeQcm
After: https://imgur.com/Rn2armn and https://imgur.com/ch2WfiN

[Rachael]

Well I refuse to play any Doom conversion made in Unity, and I am sure there may be others who feel the same way too. It's just far too limiting - it's as simple as that.

Free software is the way to go. Yes, Quake has its own problems, but licensing isn't one of them. Even the Doom3/Quake4 engine would work for this.

[Graf Zahl]

Doom is more than "displaying stuff in 3D". That's why all hardware rendering ports use custom engines or in case of Vavoom a heavily modified variant of another engine.
You can pretty much forget a commercial closed source engine because you'll never be able to make it handle the kinks of old 2.5D renderers.

[Caligari87]

Porting Doom to Godot would be interesting, as it's a FOSS MIT-licensed engine with great capabilities.

[JPL]

Given the current devs' commitments to deprecating old stuff and maintaining the health of the codebase and "future proofing" as much as is reasonable it seems likely to me I'll still be playing most of my Doom with GZDoom in 10 years. Super robust multiplayer with all the current modding capabilities (ie Zscript) feels like the last major missing puzzle piece, and I think that could have a dramatic community-growing effect as well.

I would love to see more tools for Doom editing - another generation of powerful and approachable level editors (which could just mean SLADE 4 / GZDoomBuilderOmegaMaxx), small tools for doing things like remixing and combining wads, maybe a new random level generator project building on what OBLIGE pulled off.

I'd also like to see id/Zeni step up and be respectful custodians (ie without interfering with any existing community) of classic Doom, pointing all the people who eg buy Doom 2 on Steam/GoG towards the decades of amazing community work. I'm not sure how I feel about them doing so on the basis of the Unity-based port they've released on consoles, as I think Unity is in danger of suffering a Flash-like fate if the company behind it pivots strategically or falls prey to competition. But even if that happened, source ports are alive and well.

Regarding the proliferation of source ports, it might be cool to see some genuinely experimental Doom ports that make really unusual tradeoffs to eg maximize render throughput, or maximize dynamicity of level surfaces (sectors, walls), or cadge it all into a portal rendering scheme somehow, or push some interesting approach to scripting... I dunno, fill in the blanks there.

I think there's also a major unfilled niche for a very modern, no-bloat Doom-like engine with a fully integrated level editor that is as easy to learn 3D space building with as existing Doom, but that doesn't care about legacy compatibility. That's not really Doom though, except in the sense of taking inspiration from it. Ahh, maybe someday.