
DoomRL Open Source Release - mariuz
https://github.com/ChaosForge/doomrl
======
Nr7
Some backstory: [http://www.pcgamer.com/fan-made-doom-spin-off-
from-2002-chal...](http://www.pcgamer.com/fan-made-doom-spin-off-
from-2002-challenged-by-zenimax-legal-team/)

~~~
CydeWeys
It's a shame that it took a threat of a lawsuit for it to be released as open
source. This wasn't a game that was ever charged for, so I see no reason it
shouldn't have been released like this 15 years ago. There's actually a weird
culture in roguelikes (and similar ASCII games) of _not_ releasing the source,
and using opaque, non-open development processes. NetHack was open source but
only recently switched to an open development process recently, and may other
popular entrants in the genre such as ADOM and Dwarf Fortress are closed
source entirely.

~~~
problems
Yeah, I think that might be a matter of wanting to keep things secret from
players.

Of course, it doesn't keep things secret from players with a copy of IDA and
too much time on their hands, but it probably adds to the mystery for some
people.

~~~
clarry
I don't think it's about keeping secrets.

Stuff are often covered in great detail in changelogs, development blogs,
forums, etc.

And players figure stuff out.

All the info will be on wikis. It is not effective.

If people want to spoil it, they check out the said wikis. If they don't want
to spoil it, they don't check the wiki or the source, if it is available.

~~~
Cursuviam
In Dwarf Fortress's case, the closed sourcedness is because the creator wants
to be the sole driver of the project until it's "done."

~~~
CydeWeys
If they don't accept PRs then they will still be the sole driver. But if I
were in his situation I'd at least take PRs for simple bug fixes. That gives
you more freedom to work on creative stuff.

~~~
gwern
Given the ecosystem around it and the reportedly parlous state of the DF
codebase, I would guess, somewhat along the lines of Minecraft, what would
happen upon open-sourcing is that people would start big cleanups and
APIfying, and he would have little choice but to either accept PRs en masse or
quickly be left in the dust with an obsolete codebase while everyone begins
using a version forked from whenever he balked at a re-architecting patch.

~~~
CydeWeys
He could add trusted contributors to handle that load for him. No one says he
has to handle merging all the PRs himself. Dwarf Fortress has a huge community
of very technically-minded people. The end result would be better with more
contributors, especially if it freed up the attentions of the main developer
to focus solely on the creative stuff while bugfixes and maintenance tasks
were handled by the community.

~~~
gwern
I don't mean he's going to go 'woe is me I have too many PRs to look over'. I
mean that inevitably, his goals and coding aesthetic preferences are going to
conflict with the community: 'I don't want to add that feature' or 'I think
this is too complex and just caters to API users' or 'I dislike this
architecture'. Right now, his version is king because he is the only one who
can make meaningful changes to it and it is very difficult for anyone to patch
his binaries, dooming any fork; allow access to the source code, and suddenly
he's merely an ordinary coder who happens to be very experienced with the
codebase. Think eGCC and GCC.

------
wyldfire
It's an extra click to get to a video/screenshots [1].

I remember playing turn based RPGs and really enjoyed them. It was really hard
for me to adjust to the frenetic pace of RTS when they arrived.

This video looks a bit faster paced than the turn-based games that I recall,
but it's been a long time.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2020043306/jupiter-
hell...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2020043306/jupiter-hell-a-
modern-turn-based-sci-fi-roguelike)

~~~
ZenoArrow
If I've understood correctly, the action in Jupiter Hell happens only after
user controls are used, so it's still turn-based in that sense. Looks like a
promising game to me, hope they make their Kickstarter target.

~~~
fluxsauce
The animation system uses tweening and will respond to queued actions, so you
can give sequential commands faster than it renders and get more interesting
animations. It's still a RL and you can take as long as you want per command.

[http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2016/11/episode-130-jupiter-
he...](http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2016/11/episode-130-jupiter-hell-
successor-to.html) is a really neat interview that explores the genesis and
production of the project and goes into the visuals and philosophy. It was
also written before the TM concern.

------
jam
I was sure from the title that this was a reinforcement learning agent set up
to train itself to play Doom...

------
module0000
DoomRL scratches the space marine variety of my crawl itch(crawl as in Dungeon
Crawl Stone Soup: [https://crawl.develz.org](https://crawl.develz.org) )

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andrewclunn
As somebody who had to code in Pascal (in this millennia) I just... I'm not
sure I can get passed that to enjoy the game. I think this is the moment where
I realize that I'm a coding language bigot.

~~~
seba_dos1
I haven't used Pascal for a very long time now, but AFAIK Free Pascal is going
pretty nice and modern.

Apparently, there are some very nice and polished games implemented in Pascal,
like Hedgewars or Ultrastar Deluxe.

~~~
andrewclunn
Interesting (looked it up thanks to your post). As a means of recompiling old
code for newer systems that is a great solution.

~~~
int_19h
The most interesting part is that they've also made a very nice _cross-
platform_ clone of 1) Turbo Vision (yes, text mode and all), and 2) VCL.

Then, using that TV clone, they wrote a cross-platform clone of the original
DOS Borland Pascal IDE - that even comes in the base FPC distribution. Works
great in Linux console:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FPIDE_1.0.10_de.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FPIDE_1.0.10_de.png)

And using VCL, they wrote a cross-platform clone of Delphi (circa version 3)
IDE!

[http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots](http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots)

