So we made a mod called 'Doom Zero' that was designed specifically for actual vanilla Doom II running on a real DOS machine. Of course it was announced for release on Doomworld and Moddb, but it turns out the crazy die-hard Doom community doesn't care about DOS gaming. The result? Everyone keeps asking me to make it compatible with source port 'X' or source port 'Y' (I don't know why some people like using some of these rubbish source ports, I thought the measure of a good source port is its accuracy with the vanilla version of Doom but whatever). But the more egregious thing is that a lot of people also want to pair Doom Zero with some other mods like 'brutal doom' and 'beautiful doom', etc, even though I told them that stuff like that will break Doom Zero because of it's custom animations/sprites/textures and what have you.
But some members in the Doom community can be a bit weird and pushy. Conversations might go something like this: Some guy says: "Hey guess what? it works just fine with the Slayer Rampage mod!". And I'm all like: "No, don't do that, it will break the balance of the game". Or another guy will say: "I'm doing a lets play using Beautiful Doom". And I say to him "That won't work" but he's like "it's OK its running fine but can you please fix a crash on map04?". Me: "No, Doom Zero isn't crashing the game, your mod in conjunction with Doom Zero is crashing the game".
I swear when I talk to these guys I get the vibe that (to them) vanilla graphics is too below them and they feel that the game is only worth playing with better smoother graphics, with louder, more over the top guns, blood and gore, etc.
Then I realized something: I made a mod for DOS gamers, not just Doom fans. Here's the deal: Doom Zero has been in development for over 2 years, it is a full 32 map set with (of course) some new animations/sprites/textures, etc, and is probably the most technically advanced vanilla compatible mod for Doom II ever (at least according to my limited knowledge) by pushing Doom2 to it's absolute limit without breaking the engine by not going beyond the texture and visplane limitations. and I don't want all of that work to go to waste. And you know what would be really great? People actually playing it the way it is meant to be played. in DOS! on a real DOS machine. I mean don't get me wrong, You can play it on something like GZDoom on a modern PC, nothing wrong with that, but a lot of effort was put into making a true Doom2.exe compatible mod. Also the doomzero.bat launcher disables the X axis mouse movement so non of that "push mouse to walk" nonsense.
Come check it out at Moddb. Search for Doom Zero
See what you guys think. I am very curious. I really am.
