Talk:Maximum Doom

The maximum doom levels are all taken from old ftp depositories like the idgames archive. I know most of these wads are on the archive mirror already but some are not. All of the WAD accompaning text files say its ok to distrubte. The sound clips and images in Monty Python and Simpsons DOOM are fairuse, and are mirrored on idgames already in anycase.
 * The above was clearly written by someone who hasn't seen the compilation. All of the text files certainly do not say that (the majority of the WADs don't even have text files, and therefore must be assumed not to permit redistribution).  "Fair use" has a fairly limited definition, and tossing samples around to decorate your project is not included, as The Verve discovered way back when.  And no, they are not mirrored in the archive, which has a strict anti-bootleg policy.    Ryan W 01:13, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Levels vs files
Eris had a good point so I wish he'd left his comment in place. There may be 1800ish files but how many levels do they include? I'm not about to go through them manually to find out; maybe there's an easier way? --Quasar 21:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I deleted my comment because after writing it, I saw the following: "Although the package advertised over 3,000 levels, the actual figure is somewhat lower."


 * Heh, I guess I reacted a bit too quickly there, that may also have been under the assumption that files = levels. --Eris Falling 21:55, 10 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Someone really good with regexps could probably add it up by parsing this. I once tried to write an MS Access macro to turn it into a table with one row per WAD, based on a suggestion of Fraggle's, but without success.    Ryan W 23:05, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I just remembered that when I started a log of my progress, I made blank entries for every file ahead of time. According to them, the Doom1 part has 365 maps in 156 files (leaving 45 WADs with no maps), and the Doom2 part has 3060 maps in 1616 files (leaving 13 WADs with no maps).  Of course, there's no reason for anyone to believe that either, since it's my usual manual computation with no source control.  :>     Ryan W 23:22, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * If you have the CDs themselves, you could extract all zips, and then grep count all wad files for a map-only string such as SSECTORS. The number of instances found will be equal to the number of maps, provided none of the wads are corrupt. (There are cases of junk map lumps unconnected to an actual map that would affect such counting methods.)


 * Another possibility would be to hack something in Odamex and load everything in it. It has the necessary logic to keep track of all the maps from all the loaded files (EE also has something to that effect, but it's limited to certain specific "managed" files rather than absolutely everything it loads), so it shouldn't be too hard to write a console command that iterates through available maps and count them. --Gez 10:20, 12 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Those are much better ideas. :>   For the first, THINGS is preferable to SSECTORS because of pre-nodebuilder mods (e.g. 29.WAD from D!Zone 150).    Ryan W 23:25, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Official listing
On the Master Levels CD, under the MAXIMUM\WADS\DOOM2 folder there is a MAPS.ZIP file. Extracting this renders the following files which list per line every map in every wad on the disc (including the DOOM directory). Wads without any maps in them are listed on one line with the text "The file does not have any missions". So determining the number of levels was a matter of taking the line count of each file and adding them together, and subtracting the number of lines that say no missions. The total comes out to 3201 levels, and an additional 43 WAD files that do not contain any levels. --Quasar 18:37, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Here is the table of levels and non-level containing wad files for each file from MAPS.ZIP --Quasar 18:42, 13 July 2013 (UTC)


 * We can dismiss MAPS.ZIP: not only the /DOOM dir is not included, the contents don't match the /DOOM2 dir listing either.
 * The file does point toward the solution, however. It was generated with MOVELEV, a CMD-line util from '94. Its output is easy to parse, as you point out; one just has to keep in mind that it appends a blank line to the end of the list. Oh, and a major caveat: it only scans files for ExMy/MAPxy markers without verifying that any of the associated entries like THINGS, LINEDEFS, SECTORS etc. are present.


 * List of levels under /DOOM1: https://controlc.com/b73bf360
 * List of levels under /DOOM2: https://controlc.com/2ea8837a


 * /DOOM1: 426 entries total; 1 with no levels, 18 Heretic levels in 10 files (RAM4 has 9 levels)
 * /DOOM2: 3080 entries total; 13 with no levels, 5 bogus ExMy entries, 1 duplicate D1 entry (KILEMALL), 1 misplaced unique D1 entry (ANDER)


 * Thus we have:
 * D1:    408 levels
 * D2:   3060 levels
 * HT:     18 levels
 * total: 3486 levels


 * These results are very close to the count I did in 2015:
 * https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/72805-maximum-doom-number-of-levels/


 * Now if we want to count the number of unique levels things get a little more complicated. There are 15 pairs and 1 triplet of identical files under /DOOM2:
 * https://www.mediafire.com/file/guele5vzjq0ttol/Maximum-DOOM-dupes.html/file
 * All are single-level WADs except for the EP5A2/FLESHLZ2 pair (9 levels each). That gives us 25 duplicate levels. Quite likely, there are more - slight edits of the same map that don't produce a CRC match. Barring individual examination of each and every file we are left with either 3486 or 3461 - take your pick. --Tpoppins (talk) 04:32, 30 October 2022 (CDT)

Respectively
''These included D!ZONE, D!ZONE 150, D!ZONE 2, D!ZONE 3 and D!ZONE Gold. These discs include approximately 900, 150, 1000, and 3000 levels respectively,''

Okay. What's the count for DZG? --Gez 08:59, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Just going to point out you're on the wrong article's talk page to discuss D!ZONE. The numbers for D!ZONE are what was stated on the box. D!ZONE Gold is the one that claims 3000, AFAIK. I believe it's D!ZONE 3 that is being left out, as, I don't own that one. I can verify the first 3 are correct. --Quasar 15:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I was able to obtain D!ZONE 3 and count exactly 1069 .wad files on the disk. --Quasar 16:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Levels by Master Levels authors
It'd be awfully nice if the article listed the actual files instead of just hinting at their presence. --Quasar 18:35, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

NB: I have tagged this with which nine years later. --Quasar (talk) 13:23, 18 November 2022 (CST)