Zandronum

Usually once a year there are is something huge that comes out which causes people in the mod scene to sink time into it a lot. This happened for me with GvH when it first came out, I just played it probably all day (or at least a lot). It was one of a kind for me back then, and other mods seem to have done this as well -- of which you know by big names like:

• GvH
• ZH
• AoW
• SF
• WDI
• Megaman
• Brutal doom for coop/survival wads

...etc, if I tried listing them all I'd forget one and feel bad, but those are some common names off of the top of my head.

This year is still active so something could come out, though nothing really huge has hit the scene that I have witnessed. The closest that seems to have been DeathRun, which is fun to play but unfortunately for me the replay value is small and ran out of steam relatively quickly. I don't see it up that frequently, it's good for short bursts but that is all.


When suggesting this I do not intend on any ill will towards the current mods, as they are all fun and playable and I do frequent them when I'm not busy with other stuff (under aliases at time!), but it would be really cool to see something huge that pulls tons of people in for chaotic awesomeness. Most (if not all) of the mods I listed above had days where I just played with 32/32 players a lot of the time. I could play for hours on end and the server would still be packed.

I've been trying to think of what exactly drove these people to play these mods, and maybe take the best elements and see if some epic new mod could be created. For fun, since I haven't actually contemplated this super seriously would be things like:
- Do people want easy frags (ex: GvH had ghouls which back then could just tear through a ton of people)
- Do people want simple stuff
- Do people want fancy stuff (graphic overflow)
- Do people want tons, or little content
- Do people want something we haven't seen before (ex: account system saving progress and allowing purchasable items or something in game?)
- Something a bit more eternal (ex: RPG online that continues on and allows people to level up slowly, maybe something like pokemon where you have to train them to compete, and the amount of people to fight in game is quite large; keeping the player amused for a long time)
- Do people want a highly competitive environment

Or possibly, is this the end of the road, and Doom's mod scene will suffer a heat death like the universe is suspected to go through -- whereby the only thing that will happen is the popular big names mods just keep getting more and more content added until people just get bored and leave, and no new blood comes in... slowly resulting in player numbers shrinking to the point where it disintegrates one day. One of the problems with this is mods can become so superfluous that getting newcomers is impossible because the learning curve is too steep; or you have to be an expert at the game to compete (like using 3 different items from the right class at the proper time.

One mod that had potential to become huge but couldn't I think was ZDoomWars (mainly due to the designers and engine limitations). Creating huge armies and battling them is really fun, but eventually when you get 4 players, if it's not a small map the game craps out due to packet loss as the number of monsters get huge. I had a few solutions to make it so you could play with a lot more monsters but it would require a huge re-write of the netcode.

Or possibly innovative designers have left and this is what we've got to play with. Doom is almost 20 years old now.

Lastly it's very difficult to pull people to new mods, unless swarms of people do it. The nice thing I saw is that it's still possible because DeathRun managed to accomplish this, therefore indicating people aren't still permanently locked into playing the above mods only.

I'd love to see the bubble burst and something pull everyone into a new vortex of addiction, despite not having as much time to waste as I did 4+ years ago... I do now strive to re-live the days where I could just play non-stop and enjoy every second. Do you, or would you like to?
What do you think?

Agree, port needs something fresh instead of trying to mimic other wad mechanics.. Just like when WDI came nothing played like it and it sunk people in it so a little risk can be rewarding.

Most of the time its just that people don't give a new mod a chance and after 10 minutes decide to return to other wads or bash the wad with walls of text even though the modder proves they are fixed/intentional, then the player decides to leave again!

I, for one, believe Samsara/Naraka and Cyberrunner are going to be the next big mods of 2013/2014. Go Terminus!

I thought for a while Icon of Party was pretty popular.

I agree with what you have posted watermelon, so I will actually take those points out and actually comment on them, as we are supposed to:
- easy frags is a matter of taste, but hard to get frags just feel so much better, because it is so much harder to get them.
- simple when brain activity is low, very complicated stuff when we just wake up in a good ~10 degree C winter morning (some with a cup of coffee)
- fancy stuff depends, for stuff that is made for the player on player hard combat, no, that will clutter the gameplay up, but for more relaxed things graphical stuff is neat, in controlled manners of course.
- little content is boring, loads of content is good, look at those you have listed, they got a lot of content.
- something we havent seen before would be nice, but seeing a new angle on something already existing would be great too.
- eternal stuff would be kind of neat, just to have something you can go to when you dunno what you want to do, eternal stuff is allways good in those cases.
- highly competition is depending on what you are making, I cant imagine highly competitive coop projects. I do think that there should be a bit more competition in the existing projects, as in where I like the approach goatsex took when he mapped for AoW with the points you hold to get access to enemy base.

I do advice you not to lay too much weight to me opinions, as I am probably one of those around here who is youngest with 15 years, and is also pretty new to this community with only 2 years. I suppose you lay more weight on the opinions on the people who have been in this community longer.

People make new weird mods like every week. Just have fun predicting which one is going to be the next big one.

Watermelon wrote: - Do people want something we haven't seen before (ex: account system saving progress and allowing purchasable items or something in game?)

This is what I hope to achieve with Mercenaries. I've already made an ingame buy menu (that works anywhere, on any map pack), but I have no way to reliably save a player's money and items between sessions until the proposed Zandro account system comes to fruition. :/

I think that invasion gamemode deserves to have its own champion. It could be Samsara if it would be more into competition, for example if it would somehow reward players who get most kills/points with some item which would let them morph into some monster, maybe into boss from the class' original game... Or some mod which would for example chose 1 player to lead the invasion and let the rest try to deal with it...

Creating any modification for Doom that will attract as many people often takes a considerable amount of time, hence making them appealing and easy to experience from for all players. As a result, this is why such large games such as WhoDunIt and Zombie Horde are still played by many people on a regular basis.

Smaller games for Doom are usually played by a large amount of people upon their release, but become vacant overtime, such as Death Run, which people have stopped playing suddenly.

Therefore, creating a new game mode that is determined to have many people playing endlessly should of course, consist of various opportunities and elements that are challenging and enjoying.

I for one think that my work for porting the RoTT TC to Zandronum could be big, considering it's both Coop and MP and with new features being added each version I'm getting closer to finishing it. It's really fun too.

Or the Blood TC... that could be great too if I could fix the countless crashes :/

What I really like on mods
-Original stuff (not rip off other mods)
-Not so long mod (zdoom wars and most of time aow)
-New things on it(effects, dynamic lights, monsters ai,...)
-Some way, leave somethings that make it remember it´s doom (like doom guy skin, weapons,...)
-Dynamic maps (that mean, use of acs to modify and interact with the map/player) not like doom old style gameplay.
-Public mappacks, when the main maps are done, let people make some maps, and the best ones will be included on a mappacks.

Resuming, that´s the map style that I really love and would like to see on a big mod :D
[spoiler]





[/spoiler]


Also something that I would like to see, is the big mod be offline playable too, like a campaign(like on some aow i played and the bots works fine as normal players (but they only protect the base =/)

EDIT:
for an account system, it would be cool if they implent an SQL like on acs, like you could create a table with data like (nameplayer:x playerid, money:,level,health,...)
then all that table data would be stored on the server, when it resets it saves all the data that the game generate with sql, then when you just turn the server on again it just load the informations and bam :D. (I think it would be cool to use sql on the system since it´s an easy language and it´s more like an standard ansi for all data bases...)

CloudFlash wrote: I think that invasion gamemode deserves to have its own champion. It could be Samsara if it would be more into competition

Samsara was a DM mod first and foremost. Coop just happened to work well for it.

for example if it would somehow reward players who get most kills/points with some item which would let them morph into some monster, maybe into boss from the class' original game...

Never gonna happen.

Well I have two wads that are pretty new, one was SuperDemon, but my drive towards working on it is slowly going away... If anyone wants to team up and work on it I'm open.

BUT! I do have another idea, now that a certain bug got fixed.

I think, the next big mod, would be a mega-coop wad called "The Quest of the VG ROOTS." Starring Slovenian beef cake actor Daniel Medovich. It would have spastic dancing MSP imps, BMT cyber demons, DJ lively Mancubs that would kinda shoot but would do it soon than now, rat-like humping skribla zombieman. Oh you're gonna get your mind blanked after each map and you're rollerblading throughout the map and the locations would be all over the place, America, London, Koper and Vienna. At the end of the game, you'll become the greatest rollerblading championship, music producer and sex magnet of all Slovenia.

I've already made the mega story:
[spoiler]Random guy ,cousin of an elementary school friend, randomly asks me 'if I remember anything about vg roots' .. my reply was , 'I have no idea what's that, wtf is VG? and what is roots?', I replied. I left after the question and really didn't care.
Then in Ljubljana around 2002 I met Jaren Grob and Blake Dennis as they were on the Roces tour, at a point when were alone us 3, they ask me if I remember anything about 'vg roots'. At this point I was a little mindblown, I was thinking, again with this vg roots? So this time I reply the same, 'no idea what's that dudes' but since it was a question from them and really weird , I called up my then girlfriend and asked her if she knows anything about 'vg roots', because I've been just asked about it. She says 'no idea duder'
Still had no idea it was actually a movie/tape.

Let's start with the thing then.

So.. where to begin.
Here,
In 2002 I was kind of into skating a lot. So, my then good friend Rok from Isola, tells me he knows some ex 'pro' from Austria and that he will come to Slovenia soon.
That day comes finally then.
This dude is called 'Markus' , we first meet at the local skate park. We have a nice skating session, I remember the first day we met pretty good. After the session we go the parking lot. Where the weirdness starts. We socialize a bit and stuff of course before this, and then at the parking lot, he just asks me this straight in the face : 'Do you remember anything about VG ROOTS?'
My reply : Sorry man , no idea what's 'VG ROOTS'. (I was a bit like WTF at this point but I still didn't really care, I took it as a random question)
Then I start talking to another friend who has there and I remember Markus having a chat on the phone ,right afterwards the question, going on about 'vg roots' with someone.
So, to make things clearer, Markus came to Slovenia with a buddy of his, called Thomas (which I am still friends with and occasionally contact).
They have a ship/yacht in the local marina. They kind of stay here for weeks and weeks and we keep skating, we keep meeting up, we're getting closer and closer.
So many drunk shenanigans on that ship happened.
So time flies pretty fast, we become really close, hanging out all the time, always when they're here. I have slept on that ship quite a lot of times...
Markus one day mentions vg roots on the ship again, and I really didn't have a clue what is it, at this point I didn't even knew it was actually a movie.
Then slowly Markus starts going on about how amazing their city is, Vienna, the capital of Austria. Him and Thomas both say I should come to visit at this point.
I didn't really wanna go first.
Markus keeps going on about a tape that he has and that I should really watch it.
So a few months pass and they keep mentioning going to Vienna with them.
Then ....bang, comes a day when I've decided. I'm visiting the city, I'm going with you two on the next trip to Austria.
Thomas borrowed me money , I quickly say at home that I'm leaving for an undefined time , no one thinks it's shady as the guys met my family and were at my home few times before this. Anyway...
I pack my travelling bag, put stuff in it and we go with Thomas's new car for a 500km trip from the Slo. coast.
Ok this is where it starts getting really weird for me, also very exciting.
Once we're in the car, Markus starts talking alot about this 'vg roots' thing he has and that we will watch it. I sent a lot of messages to my ex gf telling her all about this. Wish I conserved that phone!
Ok! So we're in Vienna, I stay a bit at Markuss place and a bit at Thomass, but mostly at Markuss place.
It's amazing.
The city is amazing, people are amazing, everything's amazing.
We go skate a bit around the city's skateparks, they show me various places.
And Markus one day on the street says again 'Man, we're gonna watch VG ROOTS soon, you will see my friend'
And guess what, 2-3 weeks pass by just enjoying the city and then, the day of the vg roots comes.
I wake up, go a bit on Markuss computer and Markus comes from his room with a videotape in his hands. He says, here man look!, I look and realize that VG ROOTS the thing that's been going on before this day, is in fact, a videotape.
I was like nice man! Still I didn't really care much. Then he says, 'you must think very much about it'. I quickly check the label before the put in the vhs player and it's clearly written 'vg roots' on the white label and some other text which I can't remember underneath it in small fonts.
Ok so, I finally got to see this thing. Before this day I didn't even knew it was a video. I just didn't care.
I still didn't care...
Until we started watching it..
It starts off as an ordinary rollerblading video, but since the very beginning it had short weird scenes that instantly told you 'this is not your average rollerblading video you've expected'
So the more we watch it the more it gets weird.. It's morphing into a weird movie.
It was done a way that keeps you glued to the screen, waiting for more things to happen.
Some unbelievable rollerblading tricks are thrown, my mind was blown , I was thinking, wtf? I never thought this is possible.
Ok at around the 5 min mark, appears the main character of this movie, a kid named Mambo or Mamba , which is my nickname and art name since I was 13.
The kid looked like in his 15's. Tape was around 97/98 I suppose.
Everyone knew me as Mambo in real life, some didn't even know my real name.
Anyway, the name wasn't written in the beginning, just insane tricks and weird scenes. Instantly I was like HOLY SHIT this guy looks just like me. So I start asking Markus about who's this kid !!! Super excited at this point.
Markus quickly shuts me off and tells me the guy's dead and he doesn't know who he is. The movie was so chaotic and so much happening I just kept watching.
More insane tricks are thrown, even today, I've never seen those anywhere..
It starts getting weird inserts.
for example the Mambo kid is at the skate park chillin, and a bunch of black windowed SUVs come there and take him away furiously.. then a flash and the scene is gone. Keeps going on as nothing happened.
Then at around the 15 min mark, after being completely mind blown as what the hell this incredibly good movie is, I see a 720 spin to grind by Mambo.
It finally writes the name on the lower right corner in black letters. It says 'Mambo' and the the o changes into an a, Mamboa.. Ok so at this point I was pretty shocked. When doing this trick where the name was first written, I noticed he wears the same Senate brand hoodie I had ages ago.
Before he does this trick , Markus says to me 'he's on drugs man! LSD!!!' but I was glued to the screen and bang this incredible hammer is thrown.
This trick was in an indoor skate park which was INSANELY HUGE!
Movie goes on and we're back at the starting outdoor skate park.Shows Mambo again and at this point I started yelling to Markus, fuck sake dude , this guy looks just like me and has my name, the fuck is this man
I still couldn't believe and was denying to myself it's me, it was impossible that I'm on this movie. I never remembered anything about it, nor anything about EVER filming ANYkind of movie ever.
So in a matter of minutes I start being really really really shocked.
Until the final nail comes. BANG a close up to Mambo's face, and yes it shows my 2 neos on my face. At this point I couldn't escape it anymore, that Mambo kid was me. And he was the main character in this movie.
This , close up of my face, is the last scene I remember, after that I fell into a huge huge shock. We watched the thing further , but I can't remember NOTHING absolutely NOTHING after those 15 minutes of the video and realizing it's me on it.
I have no idea what happened after those 15 mins, when did the video finish, what we did the rest of the day.I just remember waking up next morning.
I was probably the most excited person on earth that morning.
My mind was very confused, since I could only remember 15 minutes from the last day. First thing I wake up I look at the TV and say to myself 'HOLY SHIT I AM IN A MOVIE!!!! WHICH I CAN'T REMEMBER'! which means 'HOLY SHIT I HAVE AMNESIA!!!!! LOSS OF MEMORY!!!' , I check the vhs player and the tape is gone.
I am a complete mess in my head at this point, it was such a huge shock I can't explain.
Markus wakes up! I tell him 'man can we watch the video again '
He says 'I'll make you a copy no problem man'
At this point I was too excited to think brightly, I thought my life is about to completely changed.
The kid in the movie/me had TONS of cash , there was a point when he had a suitcase full of dollars with some dudes in suits around him.
Basically I was sooo soo fucked from all this shock from watching it and the discovery I am on it.
I was thinking I can remember things, but I actually became a bit mad after waking up that morning.
I've decided to go to Slovenia, I honestly thought ALL my family is against me since they didn't tell me anything about it.
My mind is blown , I come to Slovenia with a train (man it was a long trip), with hopes Markus will bring the video/a copy when he comes back to Slovenia.
I quickly tell my family about it and they have no idea about this movie?
So WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ?? At first I thought they're hiding the truth.
So slowly I realized they genuinely don't know anything about it.
Then how the hell can I be on that video?
It looked like it was filmed in the USA and all over the world.
OK, this is unbelievable at this point.
My mind exploded, which lead me into psychosis...




Markus comes to Slovenia around 2 weeks after I come back from Vienna.
First thing I of course ask him about the tape and he goes 'oops I forgot it man'
HOW THE HELL COULD YOU FORGET IT YOU F***** IDIOT. I thought to myself.
Markus and his buddy Thomas come to my flat. We go for a drink with them and my mum.
Mum asks him the hell is up with me as I'm really weird and that what's this tape.
Markus tells her, that we watched a video which had a guy who was very similar to me, but that it wasn't me.
However I still laugh at his statement, because well, it's me 100000000000000% on that video. I would never ever even bother about it if I wasn't 1000000000000000000000% sure.


To cut the story short, he kept promising me the tape, but always came up with a new excuse, to the ultimate excuse was that he lost it.

I said, fuck this, I'm gonna go look for it on the internet.
I remember so good my first 'vg roots' google in 2003.
I googled and the result was 'vg 20 roots'.
I was instantly very shocked to see there's no sing anywhere of the vg roots I saw.
VG 20 Roots is a rollerblading movie that is completely different to vg roots and ti came out in 2002, while vg roots was from pre 2000.

There I was. Fucked in the head from this episode and with no hope to get the video ever...

Markus came up always with a new excuse until years passed and he all of sudden said we watched 'VG 6' which is an old rollerblading movie.
2007: after a trillibillion calls and begging him to give me the tape he brings me a copy of 'vg 6' .. I knew this was a massive lie but I took the tape and told him in the face he's insane and that's not what we watched in Vienna in that far 2003 november.
His reply? 'it's the only video I have' (this guy is such a massive liar)
I go and watch VG6 only to discover , there's no Mambo kid on it, no insane tricks, not a movie, just a shitty old rollerblading flick.
I just laughed the whole way through it and though about how much of a lying prick Markus is.

Ok so at this point I tried everything to get it.

No way in hell I can get this tape, and I really HATE movies in general nothing keeps me glued and interested, but VG ROOTS was so good I was totally hooked ...

Around 2009 I decided this tape is a secret and there's no way in hell I'm getting it by myself.

It's 2012 now.

No tape.

It's still top secret.. Markus has a copy of it, but he won't give it to me.

At this point I'm asking myself, when?

I'm not wasting energy around it anymore, I don't look for it, I moved on with life , but down there, inside my mind, the thought of getting it someday is always present.

If you can somehow help me, get in touch....[/spoiler]

Soul wrote: I, for one, believe Samsara/Naraka and Cyberrunner are going to be the next big mods of 2013/2014. Go Terminus!

Aw, thank you.
I'll try my best to keep making them even better.

Soul wrote: I, for one, believe Samsara/Naraka and Cyberrunner are going to be the next big mods of 2013/2014. Go Terminus!

TBH I'd count samsara already big as it has a very high view count on the forums..

I remember before GvH the thing that attracted 32 players was just standard survival, and it was pretty fun even if it was a complete clusterfuck. I kind of miss it. Alpha/Delta invasion also used to be huge for a while.

That tends to be the trend that most game modes take now. At first, many people will play it, sometimes filling the maximum player slots in a server. However, the number of players gradually becomes moderate unless something significant is released regularly for that particular game.

Dr.Robotnik wrote: That tends to be the trend that most game modes take now. At first, many people will play it, sometimes filling the maximum player slots in a server. However, the number of players gradually becomes moderate unless something significant is released regularly for that particular game.

This.

I can only really base it off AOW2, since that's what I kind of have the most experience with, but here goes:

Watermelon wrote:- Do people want easy frags (ex: GvH had ghouls which back then could just tear through a ton of people)
- Do people want simple stuff
- Do people want fancy stuff (graphic overflow)
- Do people want tons, or little content
- Do people want something we haven't seen before (ex: account system saving progress and allowing purchasable items or something in game?)
- Something a bit more eternal (ex: RPG online that continues on and allows people to level up slowly, maybe something like pokemon where you have to train them to compete, and the amount of people to fight in game is quite large; keeping the player amused for a long time)
- Do people want a highly competitive environment

• AOW2 was kind of the opposite of simple, even back in the oldass version I remember joining for the first time. I think there were only the AOW01 and AOW02 maps back then.
  And mind you - this is so old and broken that even the powerup crates didn't have a real respawn timer, so that you could just spam them endlessly by walking back and forth.
  
  It may have been an attractive part of it, since there was much to learn and master!
  
  ----------------------------------
  
  Easy frags? Maybe. The balance was definitely complete dicks back then, and even as dumb as it is - it was still somewhat fun.
  
  It was definitely a big part for dumb old kiddo me to compete over who could rack in a lot of frags. (First it's about trying to reach the high scorers, then beat them? iunno)
  And the retardo balance where everything kills you definitely served that well.
  
  ----------------------------------
  
  One thing it definitely wasn't was fancy, though. It was so ugly that it was outright mocked for it. (And boy, does that say something!)
  hnnngh
  good thing i'm very slowly fixing that
  
  Back then it was okay to me, but now I would get into a spriting frenzy over the huge goddamn mess it was.
  tl;dr It probably wasn't the fancy part of it. It was terrible in that regard.
  
  ----------------------------------
  
  It was probably also the whole lot of things you could try and beat people up with - and get good with.
  Content most likely had something to do with its popularity, but I can't be sure because it's been so long that I can't even recall what pulled me in.
  
  ----------------------------------
  
  The whole mechanic of credits that you use to buy classes with certain loadouts doesn't really seem all that widespread to me.
  I mean sure, it's not the only one with it - but it's the only one I know of that actually has physical dependencies that the opposite team can destroy to lock you out of getting specific things.
  
  ----------------------------------
  
  Competition however - while I can't completely recall it - was a big part of it.
  Since with all those things to be good with, all the buildings to kill - and weapons to counter - there definitely kind of is room for competition on who's on top.
  
  I was initially unsure about this last thing, but it all boils down to all those things combined really made AOW2 quite something to compete about.
  Sadly, this feeling of competition is entirely gone for me now after some small four-five years. And it's been a while, so it's hard for me to judge its current stance.

and thus ends our little wall of text of bloax reflecting upon what's left of his old experience of aow2

Most tragically of all is how little it is that I actually remember, and thus how little I can contribute here.