What’s Happening With UZDoom?

[Boondorl]

So, you’ve no doubt picked up on a lot of the buzz that swept the internet for the past week. In case you haven’t, after a scuffle between Graf Zahl, the project lead of GZDoom, and its maintainers, the ZDoom organization has decided to step away from him spearheading its leading port. While there are many reports on the nature of what caused it, we’d like to outline the issues that led to this decision to clear the air of any speculation.

Graf has been an incredibly consistent developer, and has helped craft some of ZDoom’s most defining features including the OpenGL renderer, DECORATE, and ZScript. His contributions cannot be overstated and his work is a core part of ZDoom’s modern appeal. The extensions he helped add to the engine have evolved and helped shape an entire new world of content, from incredibly impressive mods to even full-blown games. Genuinely, we could not be where we are without his passion for this project.

But Graf has also not been a stranger to getting into conflicts with the community and other developers. He has often acted antagonistically towards those wishing to be involved and has said some reprehensible things of the works of others, even going as far as to call for outright harassment. His leadership has pushed many prospective coders away as he often shuts down discussions, refuses to cooperate with his peers, and has generally created an unproductive work environment. This has always been unacceptable, but it is even less so as ZDoom’s leading port creator. ZDoom is built around its community and those wanting to create for it, so the lead of its direction cannot be someone so hostile towards them.

The latest incident was not just caused by Graf pushing code to GZDoom generated by an LLM (Large Language Model), but also highlighted his treatment of others. While ZDoom takes a strong stance against LLM code for multiple reasons (ethical and legal alike), the attitude he showed towards our newest maintainer was completely out of line, especially after all he asked was for Graf to respect his peers more. In response, we were informed that we should create our own port if we do not like this treatment, so we will be doing so.

Going forward, Graf will no longer be leading ZDoom’s main port, with a new team of maintainers taking over this role. This port will be UZDoom (Ultimate ZDoom), a continuation of GZDoom as it is at the time of posting this. Unlike before, UZDoom will not have a singular person as its project lead but instead the organization itself will determine its direction, with a new collaborative approach that seeks to level the playing field among all maintainers and give everyone a chance to speak, the community included. Graf will continue to run GZDoom and is still free to contribute directly and collaborate with ZDoom, but his port will no longer be considered our main one.

UZDoom’s versioning will pick up where GZDoom left off in order to make transitioning as smooth as possible. Currently a release version, 4.14.3, is being worked on so it can be made available for download in the coming weeks. This version will contain some security fixes, so it’s highly recommended to upgrade to it. Plans for UZDoom 5.0 are unchanged and it will still have the reworked launcher, networking, bone manipulations, etc. For those worried, we will not be removing any major features and all current GZDoom projects should work the same, with configuration and save files being transferable. Our vision of maintaining backwards compatibility will still be upheld into the foreseeable future. And yes, texture filtering is now off by default.

Alongside this restructuring, we’ve decided to clean up the forum and download page for ease of use. Projects and modding help will now be at the top of the ZDoom forums as we feel this is what most users are likely in search of, with the technical help being moved down as this is often more niche. Those who wish to report issues and submit feature requests to UZDoom should do so on the GitHub repo as this is where most activity will be occurring, but proper forums for it may be added if there’s enough demand. For the download page, with now four ports to display (UZDoom, LZDoom, GZDoom, and ZDoom), we’ve decided to create two sections to help lessen confusion: Current and Historical. Current ports are ports that are considered actively sponsored by ZDoom and will be at the top for better readability. Historical ports are ports that are significant to ZDoom’s history but are either retired or are superseded.

We find it regretful that this parting went down the way it did, but we felt we had no other choice. We wish Graf the best on wherever he decides to take GZDoom, and we look forward to starting this new chapter in ZDoom’s history.

-Boondorl, Nash, Marcus, Jay, Gutawer (UZDoom Maintainers), Rachael (Webmaster), Barry (Forum Administrator), Agent_Ash (Discord Administrator)

[Enjay]

Congratulations to the UZDoom team on getting your fork off the ground and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours. A new fork is always a welcome thing, and always brings interesting ideas to the table. The team has several people in it who I have known for years, who have done good work for GZDoom and I'm sure will continue to do good work with UZDoom. So, I genuinely wish UZDoom and all of its contributors the best and look forward to seeing what the port brings.

Thank you for the account of what has gone down recently. It may not be a short post, but it is probably as clear and concise as possible. It's also a definitve statement of the current position and one that can be pointed to if anyone is asking about anything related to the changes to ZDoom and ZDoom.org. Thank you.

While I'm on, it also seems appropriate for me to thank Graf personally for everything that he has done over the many years that he has been working on ZDoom and then GZDoom. His contributions are immense. Without him, there would be no GZDoom. He brought 3D accelerated rendering to ZDoom, without him DECORATE and then ZScript would have not been as fully featured as they became and, before GZDoom became the main port on ZDoom.org, he was doing increasing amounts of work and coordinating things as Marisa was less able to do so. Personally, my experience with Graf is largely positive. He has implemented features that I wanted, I found that he listened to well argued points and he helped me out on many occasions. Yes, he has also said "no", sometimes very abruptly, but I also appreciate that meant I had a clear answer - usually with reasons. His style may not be to everyone's taste, but I always felt that he ran GZDoom with a clear vision and very, very high standards of acceptability for robustness of code etc. My feeling was always that if Graf had committed to doing something, then it was going to be done, and done well.

dpjudas' contributions are also significant and I don't think we'd (nearly) all have switched over to Vulkan without him.

And, I'd also like to pause to remember the early days of ZDoom being the only more-or-less stable true native Windows port (the first (very, very early) version I tried always crashed as soon as you hit the exit switch in a map to complete the level), and when all discussions were held on the old notgod phorum (before ZDoom.org). Marisa Heit should still absolutely get a shout out for her pioneering work with ZDoom and revolutionary things like the ZDoomHexen format (and everything that it allowed: ACS, independent line actions and activations, polyobjects and more), slopes, support for large textures and "any graphic anywhere", support for other games that most weren't supporting and an endless list of features. Marisa, with a totally different style to Graf, very much had her way forward for ZDoom and was one of the most calm, considered and genuinely nice people I have interacted with on the Internet. I still miss her gentle presence on the forum. Marisa's input may not be entirely relevant to the events of the last week or so, but at a time of significant change, I thought it was worth acknowledging ZDoom's roots, and the contribution Marisa made, not just to ZDoom but how her influence has shaped the the activities of the Doom community as a whole.

Each and every person I have mentioned, and many more who have also contributed to ZDoom and ZDoom.org that I haven't, has had a positive impact on my life. You have enabled and enriched a hobby that has been an obsession of mine for over 30 years. Thank you.

Onward and upward!

I have moved the discussion that I probably shouldn't have started here to its own thread to avoid the more important stuff getting derailed: viewtopic.php?t=80997

[SanyaWaffles]

Sometimes change happens when you least expect it.

The UZDoom devs have my full support and I wish you all the best, and look forward to working with you.

[Caligari87]

Didn't sign the announcement because I've mainly just been watching from the sidelines, but I do want to say that UZDoom has my full support and encouragement. Looking forward to what the future may bring.

[Zhs2]

Finally, a scheduled fix for the broken automap textures! But what did it cost...?

[SirAuron]

Best of luck for the UZDoom devs, and I'm looking foward for this new chapter in ZDoom history. o/

[Nems]

I've been following the thread on the matter on Doomworld and I just want to wish the team the best of luck. I'm excited to see where UZDoom will go now. I always felt like, as a player, that GZDoom was capable of so much more than it currently is (was? idk). I've heard from other developers in the community express their issues in the past and while I'm not a programmer, I feel their frustration as a creator (writer here). It sucks that it had to happen this way but something I've learned in my life - including recently - is that sometimes it takes a big event in order to move things forward and change for the better. It's painful, yes, but we learn from that pain how to do better, how to be better.

I've been an avid ZDoom user since the old notgod days of the forums and even though I don't really interact all that much with the community, I've always felt at home here and anywhere else related to ZDoom regardless of what happens. I'll be cheering y'all on as y'all start down this new path. I think the future of UZDoom is gonna be a bright one. :3

[Boondorl]

Fixed a small typo that was pointed out, thanks Enjay

[Ihavequestions]

Good luck and all the best to the UZDoom team but also Graf. I was actually short of asking what happened to him after his mysterious Covfefe moment, but he's been further active on Github, pushing commits to the project that is now exclusively his.

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.

[Boondorl]

To clarify, we're actually defaulting the filtering to None (Trilinear) since in our experience we feel this is the best balance. Crisp pixels up close and on the HUD/weapons, filtered pixels at a distance so it doesn't turn into unreadable mush. We're gonna be tweaking a few other defaults, but all of them are aimed at making GZDoom feel more vanilla out of the box instead of needing to tweak a bunch of obscure parameters (which can also hopefully be fixed in 5.0 with the addition of tooltips). It'll be a mix of modern hardware advancements with that distinct software aesthetic.

[Boondorl]

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.

[Enjay]

I've started a new thread about the texture filtering because I don't want this thread to get derailed, and I moved Bauul's post there (in fact, because the forum sorts by post date, it became the first post when it was moved).

viewtopic.php?t=80997

However, I'm leaving Boondorl's post where it is because it covers more then just the texture filtering and has comments about the general default philosophy of UZDoom. However, I will quote it there too.

[Enjay]

On the general preference philosophy, has any thought been given to the possibility of preference profiles? i.e. being able to save more than one preference setup?

At present, I think we have "save current preferences" and "restore the last saved preferences" (or something like that). Perhaps somewhere down the line having several different personal profiles to choose from might be an idea.

At present, I think the restoring saved preferences is a bit broken anyway. Whenever I use it, I get dumped to the console with "Attempted to write past end of stream".

[Boondorl]

Well that can't be good lmao. Profiles are an interesting idea. We had some thoughts for a few presets (Vanilla, Modern, etc.) but it'd be cool if you could make your own. The menu is in desperate need of cleaning up so I think that'd be around the time I could look into adding something like that.

[Deybar_TECH]

I have no resentment towards Graf Zahl,
but now that his "unproductive work environment" has ended,
I'll pray to see the new UZDoom will have improvements never seen before!



Good luck and my best wishes
to the new UZD Development Team.

" The future looks so... promising "