Talk:How to play or start wads

I'm convinced that if such an article is needed, it requires renaming (the title is awkward and ambiguous), a cleanup, and can't just be saying you require a source port to play a WAD, which is not true, without any sort of context or justification. It is lacking in objectivity since it focuses on one pair of engines without good reason. This is not a good idea in an article (including a "how to") of a general nature. Who is like God? 20:02, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

You can probably incorporate a general idea of how to use a WAD in it's respective article. --Turbine2k5 14:01, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

99.5 percent of them load the same way though; no sense repeating the same 2 sentences on every page.  Modern ports know how to handle exe patches and merge lumps and all that (for a notable project, any omissions should be caught during beta testing).  Most also have readme files nowadays, contrary to popular belief.

Particulars of a specific port or front end (e.g. supporting drag-and-drop or not) belong in that port's article.  The exceptions are things like old ZDoom or MBF-based mods, because of the absence of backward compatibility, but indeed those cases could be dealt with in the WAD articles.

Now that I've written all that, the present page seems unnecessary to me.    Ryan W 21:22, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Why not nomination it for deletion then? As is, it's lingering as a mess. --Quasar (talk) 05:27, 17 March 2016 (CDT)

A total newbie, seeing tutorials for DM and for solo play in stock maps, might well ask "what about solo play in mods, to complete the set?"  It seems patronizing to omit that and leave them at the mercy of the port developers' desire to write documentation (though some do it well).  Obviously the present article is ill-formatted and a bit rambling, and could use a better title.

On the other hand, I partly agree with my 2011 post that its scope should be bounded.  There is no reason to duplicate readmes (like PrBoom's huge command line reference) or the step-by-step help in port-specific wikis, since those are just as likely as the Doom Wiki to remain publicly available.  We can give the big picture, recommending major ports for each OS, and linking to them and to lists of prominent WADs.  The reader will have to meet us halfway, however, by reading the readmes and experimenting with each package until they learn how the launch process works.    Ryan W (talk) 19:47, 18 March 2016 (CDT)