The previous text was couching its words a lot ("don't emulate...
exactly", "this is a tough call"). Let's be more explicit and emphasize
that work should be original and not a clone of Doom. Besides being
safer from a legal standpoint, it's a better goal for the project in
general.
The previous wording ("but Freedoom by itself is just...") read like we
were putting the project down a bit. Let's not do ourselves a
disservice.
A second paragraph further down was framing us in terms of being a "free
alternative" to Doom. Let's ditch that; we are our own game. We can also
leave out the technical jargon about IWADs etc.
This moves the paragraph about compatibility further down the page into
its own section. I am *not* doing this because we are deemphasizing
compatibility as a project goal; rather, I'm doing this because I want
to *emphasize* the idea of Freedoom being its own independent game. The
idea here is to try to get away from the misconception some people have
that the goal of Freedoom is to be a "clone" of Doom.
This is left over from before the change to vanilla as the target
for levels. The change should inherently ensure that scenes will
never be too complicated.
The test-vanilla-compliance build target (also invoked by the "test"
build target) and script can be used to test the level WAD files for
vanilla compliance. Also, a subset of the errors found can be fixed by
the "fix" build target. To summarize:
make test # Run all tests
make test-vanilla-compliance # Run test-vanilla-compliance
make fix # Run all fixes
make fix-vanilla-compliance # Run test-vanilla-compliance -f
A generic term like this isn’t really suitable for trademark, nor
likely to ever be disputed. The community and the engine both heavily
bias toward “episode” and indeed most other games do.
Closes: #682
Non-reference AsciiDoc implementations such as AsciiDoctor (used by
GitHub) or even the simplistic parser in loccount choke up on these
characters for different reasons. AsciiDoctor doesn’t seem to even
parse them, displaying them as-is and not with emphasized text.
loccount would get hung up on possessives, expecting a terminating
character for emphasis that never comes.
Annoying, but easy to work around. the curly ’ character can be used
for possessives and _underscores_ can be used for emphasis.
Given that there are a handful of animations that are fundamentally
incompatible between Doom II and Final Doom, and we have decided that
the correct thing to do is to prefer Doom II compatibility.
Additionally, there are only maybe a half dozen Final Doom mods around
and they pretty much all focus on being unofficial sequels. We won’t
remove nor continue to improve the existing TNT/Plutonia-specific
resources, let’s just make it a little less of an issue when those
mods are broken (assuming it’s due to the Doom II conflicts...).
Most maps in Freedoom have been converted to a limit removing target
as an interim goal for 1.0’s ultimate goal of vanilla compatibility.
We can stop saying Boom compatibility is required now.
GitHub’s AsciiDoc parser barfs on the standard AsciiDoc syntax to
represent such characters with only ASCII… Well, everybody should
support UTF‐8 these days. Let’s just use these directly.
The introduction uses wording mostly copied from the web site to
maintain consistency within the project, and the usage of the term
"IWAD" is greatly reduced. I still define it, but only so that
someone might become familiar with the term when other people use it,
rather than as a primary term. Like wise, "port" and "source port"
are largely replaced with "engine," but while defining the former so a
newbie can understand what community members are speaking of.
"How to play" has some additional information about how to actually
get an engine to play the game. It was previously lacking. Odamex is
the only port actually outright named as a recommendation, but I try
to keep from sounding like it's the _only_ choice.
The "general rules" to follow has been reduced from four to three, the
first one heavily rewriting so as to not imply that derived works are
completely forbidden.
The "Using Git" section also had a major reworking. I don't really
like the section entirely myself. Either needs more revisement or
ejected entirely.
Quite a few linguistic tweaks in all of the sections.
Game names are more consistently italicized.
Git is not within the reach of most contributors, so let's
de-emphasize its importance. It would be nice if more people
submitted things via pull requests, but it's a fact-of-life for
Freedoom committing to be done by more technically-minded people
(typically its maintainers). Point instead to the forums, issue
tracker, and file sharing sites as the common and accepted means of
submitting work.
In a world ravaged by software that determines file type by the last
part of the file's name, *.asc is somewhat troublesome given file
managers that think these are PGP keys. Also GitHub won't render
AsciiDoc without one of a few extensions, at least *.adoc is somewhat
clearer and not as obnoxiously long as *.asciidoc
