its been a few years for me but I believe Zdaemon is what everyone was playing but now everyone plays Odamex. Theres also zanadrum or something which is a continuation of skulltag I think? ask in IRC channels #IDL or #nadoom on quakenet. :D
Are you sure regarding Zdaemon and Odamex? I like and play them both, but activity-wise you must have mixed something up. On Zdaemon I see at least 20 and up to 80 players at peak times. They have almost daily special events and I play CTF every night on a public server. Unfortunately, on Odamex I mostly see 0 (yes that is a zero) players :(. When you are lucky you see around 4 people spread out on different servers either waiting for a duel or playing coop. During rare peak times I see around 15 players in a passworded CTF server. They also have two nice events (Saturday and Sunday) where you might encounter more players, though these events are sadly short-lived most times.
the main dever of skulltag abanded the project for a doom like singleplayer game. he gave the source code to the community. so zandronum is the follower.
Probably because it's one of the two games that id software ever released out that have a decent tactical gameplay to aim ratio, the other being QW of course, making for a truly fun and joyful game.
duel isnt the only mode. i play coop for fun with zdaemon. enemys and weapons are great, the beauty lies in its simplicity. as carmack said many times, doom is shooting demons with shotgun xD
Doom 2 duel is kind of annoying tbh. i was gonna go to qcon to compete in the tournament cause honestly i've come close to beating jkist when i was warming up for it after not playing it for long time. I'd take qw over it anyday.
duel sucks but ctf is great fun (specially with some new school dm flags added in so you can rocketjump and shit... I'm no traditionalist!).. in NA Team modes are more alive than team modes in NA quake (leagues & clans of course.. not pub garbage)... that shit is sad on a variety of levels.
not to complain, but lack of thirdplane of movement (mouselook+jumping) and instahit weapon dominance (double-barrel shotgun) it could have been a good game. they dont seem to want to balance it at all, just like quakeworld. sticking to original rules of 1994 thats just to onedimensional. qw could benefit from better weapon ballance as well.
its not a bad game, just the double-barrel shotgun thing. its just silly, really when one weapon is used over every other in almost every situation. lets remove all the other weapons and just make it really simple cause thats what it is, a one weapon game.
You obviously have not seen much doom duel/dm then. Some maps dont even have an SSG (remember the entirety of doom1 had no ssg), and in many other maps it is more advantageous to use other weapons. Quakecon just picked a mapslot that was ssg centric, thats all.
I think if mappers made maps that utilized the other weapons, items and mouse look, it would be a breath of fresh air in the duel scene. I personally endorse NS game play and I do my best to force others to at least try it. Doom is quite flexible in that it can retain it's core gameplay while still waving around more modern gameplay features. I think there is a decent interest/demand for NS, it just needs more exposure.
For those interested in doom you basically have 3 options:
-Zandronum: great for modding and wacky game modes. Not very competitive and in general doesn’t have the most skilled players. Still can be loads of fun depending on what you are looking for.
-ZDaemon: This used to be the place to be. The port worked pretty well and was where the top competition was. Unfortunately the admins seem to care more about having power over their player base than maintaining a healthy community. The ZDaemon player base has dramatically shrunk over the years as many players get banned for petty reasons and many others are just driven away from the community through other methods. Still, if you want a more traditional doom experience this will be the easiest place to find it, as there are a decent amount of people frequently playing at any point in time.
-Odamex: This is the port backed by the hardcore veterans (and also used at QuakeCon). It’s currently a work in progress, aimed at taking over the niche ZDaemon used to occupy. At this point, the player base is pretty much only the veterans of the community, barely any casual newbies. So, at most points in time, the servers for Odamex will be empty as the player base in size isnt nearly what it is on ZDaemon or Zandronum. However if you get on irc and ask for a game you should have no problem finding one. If you are looking for a more competitive/skilled scene this is where it’s going to be.
I think it’s great if anyone is interested in doom. Just come into #IDL on quakenet irc and people can help with setting up configs etc. If I’m on ill do my best to help anyone out.
I think the command is fov, but its disabled on all competitive servers ctf/duels, its diagnosed as cheat in doom, i think it will possible enable in mods only as Zombie Horde, Ghouls versus Humans etc..
yes just noticed in mp its not even changable. Was talking about sp in the first place. It always resets after dieing. (I found out binding it to forward key does the trick.)
Edited by acid_reptile at 07:22 CDT, 16 October 2013
1) Most played map:
*1v1: dwango5 map01
*ctf: zdctfmap01, zdctfmap04, zdctfmap08
*teamdm: dwango5 map01
a couple of notes here: in the doom ctf scene a lot more maps get played than what most people would expect. This is because there are a couple ctf leagues and they schedule 1 game per week, each on a different map. The ctf maps I listed are the maps that every player will know and where the skill level has been taken highest. Teamdm isn’t played that much in doom so there’s really no such thing as an overplayed map there.
2) default settings:
When doom came out in 1993 it was pretty raw. It didn’t have many of the features that come standard in fps games today (crosshairs, ability to pickup a weapon without switching to it, etc) and had some bugs as well. Some good (example: movement tricks), some generally considered bad (example: spawn points facing in a certain direction make no noise). After the doom source code got released certain bugs got fixed and certain standard features from other fps games got added and became standard in doom. Here’s how a standard game today will differ from one 20 years ago:
- crosshairs can be used
- you are not forced to switch to a weapon upon picking it up
- the wallrun movement trick can be performed in north and south directions instead of north and east.
- players are only as tall as their sprites (they used to have infinite height)
- all spawns make a respawning noise nowadays
- the sound range today is about 1.7x the distance it was in 1993 (you can hear farther now)
- spawns are random instead of predetermined
- players can now force how they see their opponent’s color/skin
- players can force off the bobbing motion of the doom guy when hes running
- players can erase their weapon sprite from their view if they want
In addition to these general gameplay changes, here are specific standard rulesets for each gamemode:
1v1: no freelook, no jumping, weapon stay, no item respawn, 50 frag fraglimit, forced respawn after 5 seconds.
ctf: freelook and jumping enabled, weapon stay, items respawn every 30 seconds, 10 minute time limit, 5 flag flag limit.
teamdm: weapon stay, items respawn every 30 seconds
notes: the general gameplay modernization I mentioned above can be a pretty controversial topic in doom. There are some very vocal community members who push for playing without the modernizations. It’s probably very similar to the whole netquake vs quakeworld camps for the original quake. Top competitions use the modernizations as standard, except for a few tournaments in europe which still run with the original 1993 behaviors. The quakecon tournament used the standard 1v1 settings with the following differences:
-10 minute time limit
-30 frag frag limit
-3 second forced respawn instead of 5 seconds (very lucky for me :) )
3) Configs: I certainly recommend editing the cfg file rather than going through the in game menu. Some tweaks you might find useful:
-turning off weapon sprites
-turning off bobbing motions when running
-learning how to write scripts to help with the sr50 movement trick
-writing a script to switch to fist while simultaneously setting your weapon switching preference to automatically switch to new guns (explanation: When switching weapons you have until you start bringing the selected weapon back up to select another weapon instead. This lets you start switching to weapons you don’t have in anticipation of picking them up for shorter switch times. With an above script you just need to activate it before you pickup a new weapon and you will switch to the new weapon faster)
How you write all these depends on the port you are using. odamex uses different syntax in their cfg files, and all 3 ports have different names for the variables you need to change.
4) draws: typically draws don’t happen in duel. Traditionally duels are played to 50 frags without a timelimit, though I could see this standard changing due to id software’s decision to change it up at quakecon. In ctf you do see a lot of draws though.