[HN Gopher] Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released
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Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released
Author : LucidLynx
Score : 149 points
Date : 2023-12-10 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (doomwiki.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (doomwiki.org)
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it
| after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop,
| more or less. Who is John Romero?
| leetrout wrote:
| I was just reading or watching something about this last week.
| I will see if I can find it.
|
| Horribly paraphrased:
|
| Carmack was able to pull off impressive tech without impressive
| level designers was the gist of it.
|
| Romero is talented at the design side but at the time that
| didnt translate into better games / companies like the
| fundamental tech did.
| kristofferg wrote:
| Sounds like you are paraphrasing Carmacks perspective. I am
| pretty sure all Ids 3D games would have been duds had Carmack
| been in charge of game and level designs.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| He is a good game designer who invented some of the common
| tropes of FPS. After Quake and Doom he tried things that were
| sometimes too ambitious or just didn't work out.
|
| First of all, most game designers don't have as much success as
| he had after Id. Second, how are you going to follow up games
| as successful as Doom.
|
| Also don't forget Wolfenstein, Hexen..
|
| (Full disclosure: I met him once and he was nice.)
| k__ wrote:
| I was surprised too.
|
| When I talked to fellow gamers about the awesome stuff Carmack
| does, they were all like "he's just a engineer, Romero is the
| real genius!"
|
| But somehow I didn't see anything impressive from Romero, while
| Carmack was doing cool stuff all the time.
|
| Sure, it wasn't artsy like Romero's work, but it was still
| impressive.
| Shorel wrote:
| I always perceived the opposite. Carmack is the real genius,
| Romero is just a lucky level designer who happened to be in
| the right place at the right time.
|
| Many other level designers rapidly surpassed Romero.
|
| Carmack was doing a great job until he started building
| rockets.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| Romero seems like a guy who has a ton of fantastical designs
| that needs a more conservative designer to help trim them down
| and bring them into reality. For id Software, that was Tom
| Hall.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Have you seen Rise of the triad? Tom Hall also needs someone
| to trim him down.
|
| One thing that kept both grounded was the brutal timing of
| their releases. Doom had 6 months or so, and if it failed
| they knew they had to go back to boring jobs.
|
| Apart from that, Masters of doom paints doom-id culture like
| the 1970's rock n roll band stories. A group comes together,
| works as well oiled team for a while and produces genius
| results. But the success and differences in personal growth
| trajectories inevitably pull the group apart. There is
| typically a painfull divorse phase between the main egos. The
| reality was that this kind of synergy never lasts more than a
| few years in any case.
| pengaru wrote:
| The impression I got just watching as a casual player
| throughout the duke nukem/keen->wolf3d->doom->quake days and
| the subsequent breakup of id and interviews Carmack has given,
| is that Romero let the early fame and success get to him and
| lacked the self discipline to keep pulling his weight while
| Carmack was substantially carrying the company along from his
| perspective.
|
| They had equal shares and were all very young, the only option
| for them at the time appeared to be parting ways. Carmack has
| voiced in multiple more recent interviews that in hindsight
| there were probably better options to make things work out, but
| they didn't have the maturity and experience at the time to
| pursue them.
|
| Given this context I don't think it's surprising that Romero
| would crash and burn on his own after being pushed out of id.
| The self-discipline and maturity side was only more critical to
| success without the id team's support, not less.
| lambda wrote:
| This is a common pattern in a lot of creative industries; some
| people have early, groundbreaking success, but once they're
| successful have a tough time replicating that. Some combination
| of now that they're rich, no longer really the pressure to
| succeed as they already have, they were in the right place at
| the right time and no longer are, they have less pressure from
| other people telling them "no", they no longer have the passion
| of youth in their favor, they were better at the "inventing a
| new genre" than competing in a more mature marketplace with
| everyone else who has already learned from their previous
| success, etc.
|
| I don't know enough about the specifics of Romero to say which
| it is, possibly more than one, but it doesn't seem to be unique
| to him, I see this kind of pattern in pop culture all the time.
| atrettel wrote:
| This phenomena is sometimes called the "sophomore slump" [1]
| in some creative industries and "second-system effect" [2] in
| software development. To add to your excellent list of
| reasons why this happens, I'd also add that early success may
| be the result of spending much more time on the first
| creative effort than subsequent ones. Some musicians spend
| years making their first album but then have only a year or
| two to try to repeat the success for a second album,
| especially if a label wants them to release another album
| while they are riding high and before their fame fades
| (supposedly). Second-system effect refers more specifically
| to feature creep in second projects in a series, but you can
| imagine the same thinking applying to creative industries
| too.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophomore_slump
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
| Vecr wrote:
| Also regression to the mean, pretty much all successful
| products are unlikely in some way or another (i.e. required
| "luck").
| twotwotwo wrote:
| Not inconsistent with this, what seems warped to me is having
| these huge expectations for individuals after their first
| success in the first place. (Writing this thinking about
| someone like Romero working on something like a game; lot of
| what follows doesn't carry over to, say, music or writing.)
|
| They needed talent to pull it off, but also lots of stars
| aligned for a bold experiment to work out, and true
| experiments don't always work out. Conversely, for each
| success there were many talented folks who tried good ideas
| and didn't see them work out. The more surprising the first
| success was, the more foolish you'd be to expect a repeat, it
| seems like.
|
| If that's the basic problem, you can't "fix" it in the sense
| that you can't make someone keep churning out revolutionary
| new things. But you might get better outcomes and fewer
| embarrassing failures the more you think of individual talent
| as one factor. Folks still have to iterate, get feedback,
| work with good people, sometimes put a lot of work into an
| idea then see it they have to rework it, or even release some
| quick experiments that don't do that well. You don't maximize
| your odds of great results by sending someone off to work in
| isolation as long as they want.
|
| One thing I see hints of here and there, but don't really
| have a _great_ picture of, is the inner workings of
| organizations that produce new /weird but successful things
| more than just once. It interacts with business, luck, and
| changes in the world outside of course, but internally--how
| do they balance single vision vs. input from many folks? Do
| they build a lot they throw away? Do they go outside the team
| a lot for feedback (in Romero's world "playtesting")? Of
| course there's no one Right Way to do things, especially
| across domains, but it could be fascinating to see a bit more
| how various places work.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Reminds me of Notch. He took his incredible Minecraft success
| and pitched this new game where you'd have a space ship and a
| CPU with limited resources. I downloaded some tech demo and...
| it was just another janky Java-based FPS engine. He had that
| adequate but short-lived card game but that's about it.
|
| I'm not sure there really is any surprise here. We all know
| that being a success doesn't imply generalizable skill, whether
| it's a one-hit-wonder song, game, app, or business.
| ginko wrote:
| 0x10c had serious promise. In many ways it was one of the 300
| attempts at creating a successful SS13 clone (but with Mojang
| on it it _might_ have worked?).
|
| Who knows.. Even Minecraft was catching lightning in a
| bottle. It was there just at the right moment at the right
| time. The odd choice of Java was just the right thing needed
| to make it take off. First since you could play it in the
| browser(remember applets?), later when easy decompilation and
| modding arrived.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Huh. I don't ever remember Minecraft being playable in the
| browser.
| ginko wrote:
| https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That's an incredibly compelling development loop.
| JASchilz wrote:
| Romero recently released a book, _Doom Guy: Life in First
| Person_, if you'd like a long-form answer to that question.
|
| Other commenters give more substantial answers, but I can vouch
| for the book as having a lot of history, clearly being written
| by Romero himself, and having a lot of self-reflection on the
| questions you're asking.
|
| Here's some additional HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649594
| lazyllama wrote:
| You could pretty much say the same thing about Carmack. He just
| kept making the same doom and quake game over and over with
| better and better tech. Carmack's space company venture didn't
| work out, then he went to work at Oculus where he couldn't get
| anyone to listen to him and got frustrated and left. Now he's
| at some AI startup.
|
| In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made
| everyone a ton of money by working out licensing deals for
| their game engines. Carmack wouldn't be able to continue to
| work on his tech and hire Abrash (who optimized Carmack's code)
| without the money coming out of these deals so he unfairly
| complained that Romero wasn't pulling his weight for the
| current project and treated him like crap until he got fed up
| and left.
| andybak wrote:
| Carmack was key for many aspects of modern VR and I'm
| currently still enjoying the fruits of his labours. Even a
| partial success is pretty good for someone like him.
| LoFiSamurai wrote:
| Right, saying he couldn't get anyone to listen to him is
| super reductionist. No one cared about hobbyist VR until
| Carmack started working with Luckey and got the software to
| run a lot faster. It was him taking it seriously that
| helped get the ball rolling for the VR boom.
| thomond wrote:
| Daikatana really torpedoed his reputation, it never recovered
| from that.
| yowzadave wrote:
| I think with creative work, there's a huge amount of luck
| involved in what achieves popular success. And in a
| collaborative medium like video games, the success of the
| enterprise also depends on the team working well together. I
| think in many cases we see a great success and assume the
| artist behind it is a unique genius; it's possible that we're
| just seeing survivorship bias, and that there are many others
| who are equally talented, and could achieve the same level if
| they had the opportunity, the right collaborators, the right
| motivation, etc.
| prvc wrote:
| Also, today is the 30-year anniversary of DOOM's release.
| oittaa wrote:
| Carmack and Romero will stream on Twitch at 20:00 GMT.
| https://twitter.com/romero/status/1720489883590939047
| aidos wrote:
| What a time to be a kid. Computers and games were _absolute
| magic_.
|
| Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished
| the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate.
| Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was
| particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in
| his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring
| software and a serial cable for multiplayer gaming.
|
| Again, it was _magic_.
|
| Edit: without wanting to sound too "get off my lawn". I was
| loading up some games on a tablet for a flight with the kids
| today and they just don't care that much. They could get a new
| game at any moment. For us a new game was a rarity. If one of
| us got a new game from somewhere we'd bmx over to our mates so
| they could copy it. I recall a friend getting the quake demo
| and zipping it on to 8 disks for me, the 6th of which was
| corrupt. It took a week of back and forth before I finally got
| to play it.
| rvanmil wrote:
| I fondly remember playing Doom with my brother. Our dad had
| made a serial cable for us. One of us was playing on the PC
| and the other one on a laptop with a grey scale display and
| terrible ghosting. We had so much fun and it felt like
| _magic_ indeed :)
| bentcorner wrote:
| My dad had a similar laptop. Playing video games on it was
| pretty trippy with all the ghosting.
|
| Back then a cousin and I found a cheat exe on some BBS that
| gave you infinite ammo in Doom 2, it also gave us a virus
| (Michaelangelo, I think?). My dad somehow disassembled the
| exe to remove the virus so we could keep our infinite ammo
| cheat. I'm spoiled - I would struggle to do the same
| without online resources.
| aidos wrote:
| In the original Doom you could use IDKFA and IDDQD for
| infinite ammo and godmode (from memory!)
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| IDKFA: I Did Kill Fucking Alien
| bombcar wrote:
| IDSPISPOPD!
|
| Got it right!
|
| Back then cheat codes were _hard_ to find, especially if
| you found doom on shareware floppies and didn't have BBS
| access to the DooM FAQ.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Back then cheat codes were hard to find,
|
| And a couple of years later we had dlh.net
| fsniper wrote:
| Another part is the reach for hardware was harder/impossible.
| At a far far later time I recall waiting for 1 year to
| upgrade my pc to 4mbs of ram so I could play Mortal Combat 1.
| I kept the MKI floppies more precious than Gollum's. If I am
| not mistaken it was a 386dx or 486.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Hah, while I had a 386, it was an SX, as in without a math
| co-processor. I managed to find a TSR program on a local BBS
| that would _emulate_ a math co-processor though, allowing me
| to play Doom.
|
| It was not a playable experience. Even at the smallest screen
| size, it still ran at about 1 FPS.
|
| But, _I was playing Doom!_
| mlyle wrote:
| Maybe it was Quake. Doom didn't use math coprocessors.
| mrob wrote:
| Doom used fixed point math, not floating point math. It
| didn't run well on a 386 SX simply because 386 SXs were
| slow, but it would run without FPU emulation, and at better
| than 1 FPS.
| mjg59 wrote:
| The dx didn't have an FPU either - the difference was the
| size of the data bus (sx had a 16 bit data bus, dx was 32).
| It was the 486 where the sx/dx notation indicated floating
| point support.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Thirty years ago, computers were magic. Forty, too. Haven't
| you noticed, though? They're still magic.
|
| I do not miss the nonsense with unreliable media, however.
| Loading Elite from tape took five minutes and if humidity or
| temperature were unusual or the moon occluded Santraginus or
| whatever it'd be spewing endless CRC check errors. Some
| hardships are valuable learning experiences, but this one is
| just trauma.
| karmakaze wrote:
| The magic now is so beyond that it doesn't feel special
| anymore. Maybe it's because I read about new games more
| than I play them. Seeing what Ureal can do makes me think
| anything is now possible so loses some shock factor, though
| I'm sure first hand in-game would still be Wow! I'm still
| waiting for the killer immersive VR game.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Watching footage from, let's say, GTA V or such makes me
| realize that I fell so far behind in gaming that I'm best
| off sticking with nethack...
| lovelyviking wrote:
| This _magic_ feeling. Can we find it in modern games ? I was
| searching and just couldn't.
|
| Did you manage to find something ?
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| The 2023 Doom Cacowards were also just published. It's a
| community collection and celebration of the best Doom maps and
| mods released this year! I personally recommend MyHouse.wad.
| https://www.doomworld.com/cacowards/2023/
| charcircuit wrote:
| $75 for just levels. The game doesn't come with it. That's asking
| more than a AAA game.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Uhm, what? SIGIL II + THORR = EUR6.66. And it's DRM free and
| free to download if you're short of money.
| wulfeet wrote:
| The game is free. It's open source and runs on everything.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| It's free and only 2MB. You're looking at the fan merchandise.
| https://romero.com/sigil
|
| Direct download link: https://romero.com/s/SIGIL_II_V1_0.zip
| karaterobot wrote:
| There's this expectation for how much a AAA game should cost,
| which seems entirely cultural and not based on an accounting of
| the resources that went into it. Remember when the standard
| price of a AAA game was raised by $10, and there was a bit of
| outrage (from some camps), despite the fact that the previous
| standard price dated from a time when game budgets were less
| than half of what they are today?
|
| Clearly, many gamers don't consider the amount of work and
| resources that go into a game being the decisive factor in its
| price!
|
| With that framing, Romero's pricing makes perfect sense. It
| doesn't much matter if he's designing levels for a game rather
| than developing a game, because the resources that go into the
| game's production are irrelevant to the cost.
|
| What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that
| doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product. Unlike AAA
| games, who are targeting the marginal player--that is, the
| person who isn't necessarily going to buy the game anyway--
| Romero is selling to true believers (in him, in Doom, in their
| nostalgia for their childhoods, whatever). The cost is _extra_
| irrelevant to that group.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >There's this expectation for how much a AAA game should
| cost, which seems entirely cultural and not based on an
| accounting of the resources that went into it.
|
| The price of a video game is not a function of how much it
| cost to make it. The price is set by maximizing unit price *
| expected sales where expected sales is a function of cost.
| The demand curves are cultural and that is how it works for
| any industry.
|
| >despite the fact that the previous standard price dated from
| a time when game budgets were less than half of what they are
| today?
|
| Conversely, gaming is a mass market that appeals to a larger
| amount of people than it did in the past. The masses may be
| less willing to spend as much as an enthusiast.
|
| >What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that
| doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product.
|
| He chose to make it a niche product. It would not have been
| that much extra work to make it into a full game and release
| it on Steam. He could have even outsourced that work. There
| are freely licensed doom clones that could be used so it
| would not need much development time.
| dissident_coder wrote:
| Is this downloadable from the built in mod manager thing that's
| built into the modern releases?
| bparrish0 wrote:
| John Carmack and John Romero are going to discuss Doom live on
| Twitch in about 55 minutes (8PM GMT).
| https://www.twitch.tv/theromero
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Is there a way to watch it from the start?
| brandonp0 wrote:
| I don't see a way. I'm sure you'll be able to start from the
| beginning once the stream is over.
| Vogtinator wrote:
| Yes: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2000693432
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Thank you
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Well, the ending was interesting. I wonder if the two of them
| are on good terms.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Hard to beat the Dwango mods for multi player on the BBS.
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(page generated 2023-12-10 23:01 UTC)