From DoomWiki.org Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be recorded in this page's edit history. Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! == LMP uploads == I notice that all the demos so far have been contributed by you, so I'm asking <i>you</i> this question first. :> Do you suppose we ought to have a policy about how demos are recorded (e.g. what executable is used)? [[User:Ryan W|Ryan W]] 03:15, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) : I think that to be agnostic, vanilla Doom should be used. [[User:Fraggle|Fraggle]] 08:05, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) ::Indeed. [[User:Fredrik|Fredrik]] 17:37, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) : Nothing in computing is agnostic if it becomes a headache for most of the users involved. : COMPET-N and sites like it, whose main purpose is to evaluate and compare demos (some of which may be 8 or 10 years old!), have good reasons for insisting on complete uniformity. Our purposes are different, so it's not obvious to me that all those reasons are valid for us. : Any Doom player who watches other people's demos has to deal with the compatibility issue sooner or later, no matter what executable is on his machine. Writing good walkthroughs is IMHO one of the best possible uses for a site like this (along with the editing tutorials/whitepages and the connections to the wider Doom community), but if we want to standardize the associated demos, we need to ask ourselves how many of the people downloading them will be: :# still using vanilla and a DOS-compatible OS :# using an emulator like DOSBox for vanilla compatibility :# using the path-of-least-resistance implementation (i.e. Doom95 and Windows 98/ME/2000/XP) :# using something else (a source port, or a completely different OS such as Linux) : In the absence of any survey statistics (not [[sales|sales figures]], but how many copies actually survive and are being played), I propose that the vast, vast majority of new/casual players are in category 3, and of the remaining tiny group (hard-core gamers making a serious investment in Doom for the first time), few prefer category 1 or 2 because category 4 is easier to set up and allows them to play/design much cooler PWADs. This will become even more true as time goes on, since category 1 is currently hard to enter and easy to abandon. In that case, if we had to pick one format to standardize on, vanilla would be the worst. : I mean, it might make more sense not to even have a strict policy — just to insist that all demos be labeled with their sources, [[:Image:E1m4secr.lmp|as Fredrik has done]]. Then, the individual player can decide, '''as he already must when browsing COMPET-N or any other existing database''', whether it's worth the extra effort to be able to view all the demos. (Posting something that only works with a specific obscure source port, obviously, would be frowned upon.) : Writing scientific software in FORTRAN was the only game in town in 1974, and agnostic in 1981, but nobody was doing it by 2003 because it created more problems than it solved. If we were starting this site in 1998, I would be completely on your side, but now that it's 2005, I have serious doubts that we can be that rigid without hurting the site's usefulness as an educational resource. [[User:Ryan W|Ryan W]] 23:43, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) ::This is a recommendation, not a rule. And the recommendation is that demos are compatible, not that they were recorded with doom.exe. In most cases, Doom95 plays back and records doom.exe compatible demos, as do PrBoom and Eternity. If someone posts ZDoom or Legacy demos (or whatever) in addition, so as to make things more convenient for the visitor, that's even better. [[User:Fredrik|Fredrik]] 09:07, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC) :::Well, I hope I didn't sound like I was crying blue murder. :> I have no problem in principle with MS-DOS programs; I just don't think very many people who want <i>our</i> demos will have them. (In fact, I would be surprised if COMPET-N is still around in five or ten years, unless they change their policy.) :::In my experience, Doom II/Final Doom demos recorded with vanilla go out of sync about 40% of the time on Doom95 (as soon as I hear DSPESIT, I go to get a drink), but I have <i>yet</i> to see one fail with PrBoom 2.2.6 <tt>-complevel 1</tt>. Considering that I often watch looong demos (starting with George Bell's original Tyson collection, way back when), I think that's pretty impressive. :::Um, and I'll go back and label my demos now. [[User:Ryan W|Ryan W]] 15:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC) Summary: All contributions to DoomWiki.org are considered to be released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 International (see Doom Wiki:Copyrights for details). By contributing, you agree to be bound by the Terms of Use. Your changes will be visible immediately. Please enter a summary of your changes above. Do not submit copyrighted images or text without permission! 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