What’s Happening With UZDoom?

[Enjay]

Why not name the version as 1.0 instead of 4.13.2, this is a more logical decision than 4.13.2, otherwise they will think that the previous versions were skipped? (Yep this question is for UZDoom)

Boondorl explained the numberling logic in answer to a similar question:

Okay, I have one question. Why is the new UZDoom version planned to be 4.14.3 and not a 4.15 or 4.16? After all, 4.15 is the current development version, and there are many changes coming, so it would only make sense to continue at a higher version number, IMO.

Main reason is that this release actually won't be too different from 4.14.2, just with some fixes and security updates. Almost every feature from 5.0 will be absent and a lot of the versioning is already based on the previous work flow so it's easier to continue it.

I don't know if its relevant or not, but ZScript files often contain information to "version" the files to whatever version of ZScript was current when they were made. This is usually the same as the GZDoom release version. So, if UZDoom reverted to version 1.0, but was loading ZScript files versioned to 4.14 (for example) it would get confusing. Sure, the code could be adapted, but continuing certainly makes sense from that point of view at least.

[Redneckerz]

I know that the branding is temporary but, particularly given how much attention UZDoom is getting, that strikes me as being close enough to get someone at Epic Games' attention, and not in a good way. Claims have been fought over less.

Its literally a placeholder. The quality of that placeholder is significantly lower than the Unreal logo, which is far more stylized. Its just the letter U in white against a black background.

I understand the concern, and at the same time, Enjay, i am surprised you are the one making it. Is it something that bothers you, or (Devil's advocate here) is how you viewed the initial coverage of UZDoom and its messaging playing more of a influence than you are letting us on?

[Enjay]

Oh no, it doesn't bother me at all. I know it's a placeholder (I mean, I said as much - "I know that the branding is temporary"), I know there's been a discussion about how the actual logo should look and I know that it won't bear much (if any) resemblance to the Unreal logo eventually.

You're reading too much into it. Like waaaay too much. It's not a dig, or some bizarre attempt to undermine... I don't even know what. It's just an observation that, mostly, I just found amusing. In turn, I'm surprised that you would think I might be doing... something else. I'm not even sure what really. I think you know me better than that.

The only thing I have taken issue with relating to UZDoom is the lack of notification here when there was a lively discussion going on over at Doomworld. That situation has been explained and (in no small part by the presence of this thread) quickly become history and a non-issue. As I'm sure you will have noticed, I've been contributing to the UZDoom GitHub pages by raising several issues (both bug reports and feature requests). So... yeah, I don't really know.

When I saw it - particularly when I saw it at icon size in Windows explorer, I had a moment (and it was just a moment) of "that's the unreal logo". I have several amateur unreal engine games and they just use the default black circle with the stylised U in it. So, I'm used to opening up a folder and seeing it sitting there looking at me. At 16x16, well, like I said, it was just a moment.


(Remember, I didn't see them side-by-side (or on top of each other) like the pic. I saw them at separate times in separate windows.)

I certainly don't expect anyone to take any action based on it, especially as the logo will be changing before long anyway.

However, my point that "claims have been fought over less" stands. For example, Citroën took Polestar to several courts over the appearance of their logo. Citroën claimed that they were the car manufacturer with the right to use two chevrons as their logo, and Polestar - by doing the same - were infringing on that right, causing customer confusion and all the usual legal nonsense. Most courts threw it out but (perhaps not too surprisingly) they won in the French courts and had to come to an out-of-court agreement before Polestar were allowed to use their logo across Europe.

And, just as a reminder, this is what their logos looked like at the time:

---

Yep, that implied star formed by the two chevrons was close enough to the two stacked (and, at the time, curved) chevrons (representing a herringbone gear that André Citroën found in Poland in 1900 and patented) for at least one court to say "they're too similar."
I'd suggest that the Unreal logo, and the UZDoom temporary logo are more similar than those.
But, again, I know it's a temporary situation, and will be long resolved before any (highly unlikely) action on behalf of Epic Games occurs.
Again, mostly, I just found it amusing - specifically, my momentary confusion.

[Doomguy 2000]

I've managed to transfer my configurations over to UZDoom, but when I tried to import my saves as well, they don't show up when I go to load my game. When I tried loading one of my saves in the console, it said "save40.zds (the save I used) is from another ZDoom-based engine: GZDOOM". Are there ways to fix this, or do we have to create new saves over again since this is a different source port?

[drfrag]

You could edit the saves and change the engine name (gamename) in the json. Y wenas.

[Jay0]

I've managed to transfer my configurations over to UZDoom, but when I tried to import my saves as well, they don't show up when I go to load my game. When I tried loading one of my saves in the console, it said "save40.zds (the save I used) is from another ZDoom-based engine: GZDOOM". Are there ways to fix this, or do we have to create new saves over again since this is a different source port?

this will be fixed for the 4.14.3 release, but isn't yet in devbuilds, i wouldn't recommend switching away from gzdoom 4.14.2 for regular play until that release

[Enjay]

this will be fixed for the 4.14.3 release

Not trying to pressurise anyone - I understand the difficulties - but is there any kind of ball-park expectation for how long it might be until a release?
At the moment, there is a lot going on but, in some ways, it doesn't feel "real" because there isn't actually a generally available release of UZDoom.

Like I said, absolutely no pressure and if the answer is "we simply don't want to commit to anything at the moment" (or similar) that's fine. However, if there is something that is shareable, it would be nice to know.

[Redneckerz]

Oh no, it doesn't bother me at all. I know it's a placeholder (I mean, I said as much - "I know that the branding is temporary"), I know there's been a discussion about how the actual logo should look and I know that it won't bear much (if any) resemblance to the Unreal logo eventually.

You're reading too much into it. Like waaaay too much. It's not a dig, or some bizarre attempt to undermine... I don't even know what. It's just an observation that, mostly, I just found amusing. In turn, I'm surprised that you would think I might be doing... something else. I'm not even sure what really. I think you know me better than that.

Why do you think i am merely opening up the question as if i am playing Devil's Advocate? I had to ask because i couldn't really believe my assumption either. So i am glad you didn't.
(I haven't noticed you were contributing to the UZDoom Github. Had i known, i likely wouldn't have made the suggestion in the first place.) My apologies!

[Enjay]

That's why I said "I think you know me better than that" rather than "I thought you knew me better than that".

Anyway, no problem. Misunderstandings are easy online and sometimes clarification is needed. All good.

[drfrag]

Wenas. Until LZDoom had its own logo i used the ZDoom logo as a generic one.

[Nash]

- Hi, I was the one who (hastily) shat out that U logo (in Microsoft Paint, lol). As has been mentioned, it's a placeholder - people were already starting to self-compile the project so something quick needed to be put in place temporarily
- I've actually commissioned an artist to do the actual logo and artwork - our very own Cardboard Marty - he's been cookin', and I trust he'll nail it
- The plan is to have something officially available for download from us within the next few weeks

[Enjay]

Thanks for the update Nash.

There is nothing wrong with the logo as a placeholder per se. It's just that its similarity to the Unreal Engine one struck me as soon as I saw it. I look forward to seeing what Cardboard Marty comes up with.

"The next few weeks" is certainly a good enough estimate given how volatile things are at the moment. It lets people know there will be something soonish and it will be weeks, but (probably) not months.

[Firebrand]

It's sad to hear the break that happened between developers, but sometimes such things are inevitable and probably are the best course of action.

On the other hand, GZDoom source current state isn't the best; I consider it a bit unstable as of the latest versions, with many hands working on it without any order, making new features appear more buggy and affecting things that were working before. I hope that now that the project is becoming more collaborative, things will get better organized from a development perspective. My suggestion for you new team, is that you start planning better what features you want to add to the engine in the next version and develop them with order and proper testing, the problem of becoming collaborative and getting many hands on the source code, is that you can sometimes loose track of the features that need to be worked on, as new things get added without proper testing, you can use more time in perfecting them, having to return to things that were already implemented in past versions, which weren't properly tested, loosing time to get new features into the engine. If you do proper planning and mapping of the features that you want to see in the new version, limiting people to work on new features before the important ones are finished and tested, you could manage different types of releases, some of them being important features that bring the project to include the newer flashier features and "maintenance builds" where new features arent' the important part of the release, but bug fixing and testing of new things, it might give you enough time to plan ahead what new things you want to add, making sure everything else is working as expected and giving users a more polished quality of code in the released executables. Of course, these are just suggestions, I just giving my opinion and hoping that this new team brings better quality of features in the enigne, which really requires a pass of bug fixes all around.

Good luck with the development!

[Jay0]

It's sad to hear the break that happened between developers, but sometimes such things are inevitable and probably are the best course of action.

On the other hand, GZDoom source current state isn't the best; I consider it a bit unstable as of the latest versions, with many hands working on it without any order, making new features appear more buggy and affecting things that were working before. I hope that now that the project is becoming more collaborative, things will get better organized from a development perspective. My suggestion for you new team, is that you start planning better what features you want to add to the engine in the next version and develop them with order and proper testing, the problem of becoming collaborative and getting many hands on the source code, is that you can sometimes loose track of the features that need to be worked on, as new things get added without proper testing, you can use more time in perfecting them, having to return to things that were already implemented in past versions, which weren't properly tested, loosing time to get new features into the engine. If you do proper planning and mapping of the features that you want to see in the new version, limiting people to work on new features before the important ones are finished and tested, you could manage different types of releases, some of them being important features that bring the project to include the newer flashier features and "maintenance builds" where new features arent' the important part of the release, but bug fixing and testing of new things, it might give you enough time to plan ahead what new things you want to add, making sure everything else is working as expected and giving users a more polished quality of code in the released executables. Of course, these are just suggestions, I just giving my opinion and hoping that this new team brings better quality of features in the enigne, which really requires a pass of bug fixes all around.

Good luck with the development!

yeah, 5.0 was in the very middle of development before this all came down, and still needs a lot of time in the oven, the uzdoom 4.14.3 release won't include any of the currently-in-progress features, just a few minor ones and bugfixes on top of the 4.14.2 branch

[Doomguy 2000]

this will be fixed for the 4.14.3 release, but isn't yet in devbuilds, i wouldn't recommend switching away from gzdoom 4.14.2 for regular play until that release

I'd figure since I already have a dev build downloaded from GitHub that I might as well use it. I will download a dev build when it becomes available and replace it with that build. I do have a couple of questions when it comes to the menu and one of the feature suggestions. I've noticed from the GitHub build I've downloaded that you can turn the simple menu on and off. From the latest dev build of GZDoom, the menu is more simplified and doesn't have the simple and full menu versions of the options. Is being able to switch between a simplified and full version of the menu going to exist in the first public version of UZDoom, or will we have just the simplified version that I've seen from one of the GZDoom dev builds?

---

Code: Select all

OptionMenu "OptionsMenu" protected
{
	Title "$OPTMNU_TITLE"
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_INPUT",			"InputMenu"
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_GAMEPLAY",			"GameplayMenu"
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_DISPLAY",			"VideoOptions"
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_SOUND",			"SoundOptions"
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_MULTIPLAYER",		"MultiplayerMenu"
	//Submenu "$OPTMNU_ACCESSIBILITY",	"AccessibilityOptions" // not really usable yet.
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_MISCELLANEOUS",	"MiscOptions"
	Submenu "$OPTMNU_SYSTEM",			"SystemMenu"
	StaticText " "
	Submenu "$OS_TITLE", "os_Menu"
}

The last question I have is in regards to Skulltag features. Will we see spreadfire being added to the source port or does that idea come with more complicated issues, as Graf has pointed out in the past?