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Doom and Doom II get a ‘definitive’ re-release that’s packed with upgrades (www.theverge.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/retrogaming

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If you own either game already, you’ll get it for free.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's a weird take from someone kind of uninformed. The assumption that the company would base the release off of the GPL'd version and not the original source code is odd. Also, the claim that it's Windows only when it's cross platform so....?

[–] ygpa 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

One of her points that resonated with me was that to get modern levels to work they did have to re-implement Boom features, which were GPL.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Looks like it's a different engine, actually. So yeah, makes sense that if they needed to reimplement features, it's new code that wasn't pulled from Boom, so doesn't need to be GPL.

[–] ygpa 7 points 3 months ago

Yeah it's a port to Nightdive's Kex engine. It wasn't a literal accusation of a GPL violation, more just being disappointed about seeing open source work being captured into proprietary software.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

My main takeaway is that the original Dooms owe much of their cultural relevance to work done by the community for free, under the open source ethos.

And then there's the creative work done using those tools: thousands of hours worth of megawads, total conversions, one offs, and weird little experiments - that have been responsible for keeping Doom actually relevant.

For decades, nothing new happened with Doom 1, 2, or 64, that wasn't authored by us, and for free. The retro dooms weren't exactly abandonware, but for all intents and purposes the franchise has been community run. Yeah you buy the official IWADs from their license holders, but that was the extent of it.

Yes they have the legal right to charge for this work, but like, it's not the coolest move given all the history.

EDIT oh wait I read on a bit - it's free? That changes things. Definitely wish it was more open, but at least it's not a cash grab

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's a whole new port of the game given away freely to those who had previously paid for the more recent ports.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I saw that. See my edit. I've had a chance to play it and it is pretty good. Definitely not as good as the previous ports (I spotted some lighting glitches, artefacting, and mobs getting stuck on linedefs; dark rooms also do not look as "textural" as in previous ports -- this is just what I spotted lazily playing through the first episode anyway).

But the audio options are fun, and it's nice to have an excuse to play through the whole series again (actually, I just played through Doom 1 last week and was about halfway through Doom 2, when I got news of this port (thanks to this post!), so that's why the old ports are so fresh in my mind). Also, the achievements look actually attainable rofl, for those who like to get that 100%.