lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox



vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

A big update to the official port of classic Doom went out today on Steam, PS5, and Xbox, running on a nifty-seeming new engine that adds Boom compatibility, opening up support for a much larger slice of the past 30 years of user-created mods. I have some potential concerns about what that, on its own, will do to the open source port ecosystem over the long term, but that's not why I'm writing this. I'm writing this because the new port adds another feature: uploading people's work without their permission and putting your name beneath it, in a massive breach of trust and violation of norms the Doom community has done its best to hold to for those 30 years.

The "Mods" menu offers you a selection of officially supported mods (brought over from the days of the previous Unity port) that were added in collaboration with the mods' creators (cool!), and then a "Browse" item that takes you to a giant chum-bucket of random shit people have uploaded, with the "Upload" item below. And you can pretty much just... upload whatever files you feel like with it? And put whatever text you want to go with it? And it goes through an approval process of some sort, but given how quickly stuff has gone up in the past couple hours, there's clearly pretty much zero vetting going on, there could already be CSAM in there, snuff, PII, whatever - and I've seen it confirmed that this community-uploaded stuff is available from at least PS5, which I have to assume violates all manner of cert and ratings guidelines, with no feasible "experience may change with online play / hentai-strewn school shooting simulator WAD from 1999" disclaimer-ing their way around it.

I don't particularly care about the copyright concerns of Nintendo or whoever, though. What I immediately saw and hated was random shithead's names beneath community works, clearly uploaded without anyone's permission. There's a "Report mod" button on each mod's page, which puts the onus on the creator, who in some cases died 20 years ago, to take that random shithead's name off or take down the work entirely if they don't (didn't previously, certainly) consent to having it distributed with this particular commercial product. And a bunch of shit that just doesn't even work! Last year's beloved breakout work MyHouse.WAD requires ZDoom-compatible features, and I didn't try downloading or running it but I'd assume it either crashes or insta-quits silently.

For historical context, pretty much every Doom WAD that's been distributed comes with a README file, and it's long been part of the boilerplate for those to have notes about distribution, something like:

Copyright / Permissions
You MAY use the graphics and sounds in your own wads as long as you give me credit in your text file and include a link to this wad. If you include your own credit sequence in your wad I would like to be mentioned there, too. For graphics listed in the credit section of this file, give credit to the respective author(s) instead of myself.
You may distribute this wad as long as you include this text file and the other files intact.

Guess what isn't included in anything downloaded from the user-uploaded chumbucket?

The comparison that immediately occurred to me was D!ZONE, a low-effort scrape of peoples' usenet/compuserve WADs burned onto CD-ROM and sold by budget publisher WizardWorks in the mid 90s. id Software realized too late that they hadn't actually stipulated that a company couldn't do this, and WizardWorks made a good bit of cash off other peoples' work. 30 years later, id has decided to do something similarly indifferent to creators' wishes.

So yeah I am madposting right now because like I said this is a massive breach of trust and a shitty thing for id/zeni to do to a community that created the phenomenon they are now monetizing. And if you see any of my work - Arcadia Demade or any of my gameplay mods1 - up there, know that it is there explicitly without my permission, which I will never give now that my trust in this company has been permanently broken. And if you're the specific person/people who signed off on the decision to add mod support in this fashion, you should feel terrible. What a bummer.


  1. which, much like MyHouse.WAD, require ZDoom features and just flat-out won't run.


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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

god i was just thinking about d!zone too

i'd heard about the mod upload free-for-all but thought, surely, there must be something else to it, it can't be this boneheaded of an idea. what a fool i was

if only there were already some kind of doom wad collection that were more curated! then this would be completely unnecessary

oh wow, the "Upload a Mod" page doesn't even ask the most basic question of "did you create this?" or "do you have the permission to upload this?" wouldn't mean much without enforcement but they don't even hint at any form of community standard being in place.

I did download and try the "MyHouse.wad" that I spotted on there just to see how broken it was. ...It isn't even MyHouse.wad, it's a little empty 1-cube room with crate textures on the walls. I thought to go back and Report it but it was already gone when I checked again.

And yeah I already hated this when ModDB did it (probably tons of community work is uploaded there under somebody else's names), it's so much worse when the game itself does it.

The worst part is knowing that this isn't the first time Bethesda's pulled this nonsense! There was that whole mess from around the time they put out the Skyrim Special Edition where people could just upload mods off of Nexus that they didn't even make, and it led a lot of mod creators to just up and vanish as a result!

love it when people upload the non-scary version of myhouse.wad and then people play it and post on the forums about how this version of doom sucks because myhouse.wad is broken and i die a little bit more on the inside each time.

Hi, thanks for your posts on this new Doom Product. Almost everything about it makes me feel uncomfortable and it's been disheartening to see so many people in the community saying things like "best port ever, this is how you treat your fans with respect" etc. I think I need to step back from Doom for a while.