10 years of requirements building up

pablogener

As DD engine has progressed over these 10 years, the system requirements to 'move' it have incremented alongside. Why didn't the team include this on their article about how the project evolved?

Boggles me.

Cheers,
pablo.

JonusC

Isn't it kind of a given (obvious)? It's a constantly-evolving game engine, it would be pretty silly if it wasn't improved to match current hardware. Which it doesn't really, it still uses older versions of OpenGL and DirectX. Pretty sure it still runs on a GeForce2....

gary

I don't think much has changed in Doomsday since I started using it at the end of 2006. 1.9.0 beta 4 was the latest release at that time. I remember that beta 4 caused a visual bug on the green eyeball of a dead cacodemon model. Not much has really changed if you compare the amount and the rate of progress of Doomsday to the amount of time that has went by since 2006; the fact that more than 4 years have passed since then and this is now 2011. We are still using betas of 1.9.0. A few improvements to models and some new and improved textures, as well as some bug fixes have been implemented. Some things have been broken too, like the ability to use .ogg and .mp3 music files. There have been some nice changes, but there should have been a lot more changes by now, both graphically and feature/engine-wise.

There is an SCP for a game called Freespace (3D space sim released in 1999 that I play) and their community here: http://www.hard-light.net/forums is very strong and very active compared to here even after all that time. Since the end of 2006, many missions, campaigns (a group of missions set in a story), and graphical and engine enhancements have been achieved there compared to Doomsday. They use normal maps, shaders, HTL models, glow maps and shine maps, high res textures, etc. Maybe the lack of progress on Doomsday is a result of an apparent lack of interest of classic Doom these days? This is unfortunate. I hope Doomsday won't die and progress picks up someday.

skyjake

gary wrote:

I don't think much has changed in Doomsday since I started using it at the end of 2006.

Our changelogs for the past five years show that there have been plenty of changes, but much of it has been internal and not visible to the user, and unfortunately not all of it has been for the better.

For the recent few years one of main issues with the development of Doomsday has been a lack of coordination, mainly because I haven't been providing any. I've been trying to change that now, though, with the introduction of a revised roadmap, the weekly builds, and the end of the beta (which means a stable release is on its way). However, as I and DaniJ are working on this as volunteers for our own enjoyment, it is quite impossible to set any rigid schedules or timelines for the pace of development and releases. If we had more coders on the team, things would be better, but this is the situation we have. It seems to me that people working on Doom ports all have their own vision and agenda of what they want to accomplish, and fragmentation of the efforts is inevitable...

My hope is that I would be able to construct a positive feedback cycle based on the automated builds and a stable master branch, so that we wouldn't be dragged into endless mazes of beta development or overly ambitious refactorings. Since there can't be a well-defined schedule, there must be a well-defined process that keeps itself going.

DaniJ

Considering we are in the process of a rewrite, it is not surprising that the majority of changes have been internal. This is to be expected.

Remember that we aren't in a normal development cycle presently. Once we get back to a stable release you will then begin to see more explorative development (in branches) but until then, our driving motivation is the removal of metaphorical roadblocks, not the construction of new road.