Tech Over Tea - Chatting DOOM/Wolfenstein With ECWolf's Creator | Blzut3

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Today we have an early developer of the ZDoom project on and the creator of ECWolf to talk about the early days of the project and how all of this actually got started.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://maniacsvault.net/ecwolf/Super 3-D Noah's Ark: https://store.steampowered.com/app/371180/Super_3D_Noahs_Ark/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as well as your host, Brodie Robertson, and I forgot to bring up that part of the overlay. Ignoring that, today we have the maintainer. This is like a, you might think of the random side topic, the timing of this will get into that. We're the maintainer of EC Wolfon, who's also been involved in Z Doom in the past.

The reason why he's here is, I got an email like seven months ago during the whole GZ Doom situation and I didn't see the email I followed up and now you're here so introduce yourself and we'll go from there Hi I'm Bielzat

Real name is Braden Oberzat but usually just go by my nickname just because the era of the internet that I'm from so I was the third maintainer of ZDome along with Grafzal and Randy and that was started in, what was it, 2007, I believe it was. I should have somewhere here. Yeah, I started in December of 2007.

I was basically a drive-by contributor for a while, contributed patches regularly enough that in 2010, I was officially promoted to the maintainer. So, yeah, it's working along. side Graf who joined, surprisingly, only like two years before me in 2006. I think Z-Doom started in 2005. And then, shortly after Graff joined, there's one Z-Dium actually switched to using a version control system.

Oh, was everyone just, like, winging it beforehand? But beforehand, I mean, it was just Randy, so whenever you do it ever please, there would be a zip file with the source code in it, and you just send patches. Okay. So yeah, in 2008, I started ECWolf, which is kind of an offshoot of the ZDoom project. Officially, it's a fork of the Wolf 4SDL project. But what I did was take some of the ZDome, I guess you would call it front end code, and tie it into there, as well as bring in a bunch of the scripting capabilities that ZDome offered.

and present a very similar interface. Some of the code is taken directly, other than new from scratch, but implement the same scripting formats. And I still work on that to this day. ZDoom was officially terminated by the Project Reader Randy in 2016, December. I think you said 2017 in the video just because it's rounding.

Maybe. I don't recall yet. It was a while ago. go. But, yeah, so after that, I kind of took more of a sideline role. Part of that is due to sort of disagreements with Graff, and part of that was just because I felt that I was more needed for the Woffenstein 3D side of things, because at least at the time, I had the only maintained source for it for Woffensstein 3D. Other products I worked on, Zandronom, which is a multiplayer fork of ZDoom,

and the server browser for that Doomseeker. And what else? When I was in college, I made contributions to the ISOC++ standard. So I was partially responsible for the concepts, TS in C++ plus 14, which then I got merged in C++ plus 20. So I have some contributions to GCCC,

as part of the Group Summer Code Program. I think that's the main highlights. I've had random side projects here and there, but I think that pretty much covers the important ones. Okay. If I take a weird pause, there's like your audio and video are completely desynced. So I have to just listen and try to work out

when you're going to stop talking. Just, I don't know if this is a disc, thing or what's going on here, but I'll try not to cut you on. I do a bad enough job when voice is synced. Yeah, unfortunately, I probably don't know. Oh, and now it re-synced. Okay, fine. Whatever. Let's not talk about it anymore. Just don't, don't, if we don't address it, it won't change again. So, when I looked up, like, you know, I, every time I have someone on who's worked on a project, I go and dig around about the project. When I was looking up EC-Wolf,

generally it was being considered, like, the best option to go with when you want to go play Wolfenstein. But, like, I think a good place to start here is what is the deal with, like, all of these different options in both Wolfenstein and with Doom and all of these different source ports? Like, most people probably know that the code was open-sourced at some point, in history, you probably know the exact year. I don't have it on hand.

I don't have the exact date, but it was 1998 for Doom. Okay. Um. Or 97, sorry. Right, right. Okay. So from there, it kind of opened up the floodgates for people to do all these different things. But, like, what, like, why are there all these different projects? What, what do people not agree on? Uh, yeah, I think early on it was just sort of, uh, free for all for people to just, because, I mean, there weren't any, so everybody started working at the same time. So there was a large query of solar sports early on. And by the way, the term source port was pretty much, I think, coined by the Doom community

because the source port, the original source release for Doom was for the Winnex version and not the DOS version. So one of the first things that had to be done was porting the Winnex Doom source back to DOS. And so hence the termed source port. Mm-hmm. One second. Oh. They do seem to get out. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, in the early days of Doom source ports, there was kind of more of an emphasis on feature development. A lot of it was trying to backport features from the newer games, such as Quake, back into Doom. and I think that pretty much dominated the scene until a source board called Chocolate Doom came about

and chocolate doom's thing is that it is like one-for-one bug compatible with the DOS version so it kind of creates a clean code base that you can build additional things on to but also very popular just for the purest uses their main port as well. Right. Okay. So there's a whole bunch of off-streetes on that. I think the three main branches of things are, of course, the Z-Doom family, the Boom family, or probably it's more common we know it is now to date a PR Boom family,

and then Chocolate Doom. Okay. There are a bunch of others. A lot of them are, yeah, a lot of the other one died. A lot of the other ones are kind of not super popular at the moment. I guess honorable mention to Edge, which was once a very popular report and then kind of disappeared for a while. And then a couple of teams that revived it. So I think they're doing decently well.

haven't really heard too many people using it as domain. So it's kind of a lot of people just sort of, I guess, playing around with the code base. And I guess it's probably the same, it's probably the same with this as it is with anything else, right? There's a lot of not invented here syndrome where it's like, yes,

there is this other version that maybe does everything I want, but I didn't do it. So I want to do it. I don't, I don't know, we think it's so much not invented here syndrome, although there is certainly a bit of that that has gone on as time went on. Early on, I think there was a lot of just people like taking ideas from one and implementing it in their own projects.

And, yeah, like, the early period only lasted probably until about 2003, and then Zedun became pretty much the dominant port. And even today, I would say that Zedium is probably the most popular port, second to the official fort from Bethesda. And as a result, there's sort of been a faction that built in the community that's like anything that Zedium does, we want to do the opposite. I think that's a tale as old as time when it comes to this kind of stuff. I think it's getting better now and I don't know if any of that has to do with just the tensions

with the way that Grapp has rubbed people the wrong way in the community Right Yeah so we can My understanding is there's like a very long history there And even as someone kind of outside of that Just doing

Going and looking at some of the stuff that's happened throughout history Like there's the example that people bring up of the the mod competition from whatever year it was where someone was building a mod

that relied on glitches in a specific version and it didn't work in the project he was working

on so there was like a whole mess with that but I'm sure there's so much more you can speak on yeah

I mean in part in some ways I think the general public perception of him and

the perception that developers have had working with them are somewhat disjoint. I think the general public, what they most know is like they want a feature added to the port. And so they put up their feature suggestion out and graph is the kind of person who isn't afraid to just tell people no. Right, right, right. Which is actually a pretty admirable skill because oftentimes people tend to be, tried to be a little too polite and things just sort of disappear off into the back. ground. The problem is, I think he would not give any exposition on why it's a no. Right, right. So over time, he just sort of got this reputation of, oh, I'm going to suggest anything,

and he's just going to come in and say no, and that's the end of it. But the realities, I think most of the time when he did that, there were either technical reasons or it's one of those things where nobody that, none of the maintainers on the project were going to work on it. in any foreseeable future. So what's the point in keeping the ticket open if it's just going to rot there? And if somebody is actually interested in submitting code,

they're going to do it whether or not the ticket's there. Right, right. And the developer side of things, the problem mostly centered around if there was something that he was not interested in. So the most notable example is one person that joined the team and how to focus on multiplayer improvements in there.

Graf is a big single-player-only type of person. Zedium has always had multiplayer support, and I mean, we never had any, I've never been any thought that it would be removed, especially as long as somebody was maintaining it, but something definitely went down. I don't know all the specific details, but I think

Graph was changing something that kept breaking the multiplayer side of things and then I assume he told the developer that he didn't care that things were breaking in so the guy left the project and yeah there are a couple of people that joined the project and went and

every time it was because of disagreements between Grapp and them so yeah but yeah I mean Generally speaking, the Zidium product has been very open to whatever you're interested in working on, submit patches for it. And, yeah, we're open to pigments taking whatever as long as it wasn't. Because the Zemun product intended to maintain backward compatibility with mods. So if we looked at something and we're like, yeah, this is probably going to be a problem down the road.

We would be objected for that, things like that. Oh This desync is gonna be This desync is gonna be a nightmare God damn it So anyway Moving on from that Basically

A lot of the issue kind of came down to Not really wanting to I guess not wanting to like document why things weren't going to happen. It was like, and in some cases,

I can imagine, he probably had answered the question somewhere, but then didn't want to answer it again and because it's like, oh, I already answered over here, just go and find the thing

I already said at some point. Yeah, yeah, quite often. And I think other times just generally just not wanting to do the exposition part. Sure. Which is fine in some senses, but yeah,

I mean, it does sort of build up a reputation when you do it that way. Right, right. Yeah, I can definitely understand that. But I don't know, like you've had first-hand experience there. Like, what is, what was your general sort of perception there? Like, was it fine sort of managing, like managing working with it? Like, what was your personal experience with that?

Yeah. So, yeah, the early days of ZDium, like when I first joined, there was basically no coordination at all. We didn't even have a developer forum or anything like that. There's no IRC channel or anything. So I just started submitting patches. Graph actually widely rejected my initial patch, and then I did some exposition that was just like, actually the feature is sort of isolated. to its own little module. So even if down the road there's issues,

we can just sort of create a new thing and it just can live off on its own. And then after that explanation, he merged the patch. And then, like I said, a couple years later, I was given keys to the repository. And at that point, I was free to work on whatever I want and commit directly without any review

or anything like that. And yeah, I mean, the supply surprisingly for how little coordination that there was going on, the ZDium project held together pretty well and for the most part was stable. I mean, it is kind of funny looking at particular ZDium versions in hindsight because, as I mentioned, the Xandronom project was forked off of it. Whenever we would do a sync to a particular time in ZDium history, and then the Zandronin project would say,

on that version for a while. And it's like we'd find all these bugs that were fixed in later versions. It's like, I don't remember this version being that buggy before. But, yeah, so. I guess what you have more time to look at it is like, you start spotting a lot of things that you would never have found in the normal sort of time frame. Yeah.

So eventually we did get a developer forum, which included the three of us plus any like drive-by contributors and stuff that for discussing things that did not need to be discussed in front of the peanut gallery because, you know, sometimes you toss out an idea and then all of a sudden it blowing up is like, how can dare they even think about removing this feature or whatever? It's like, you don't want to deal with that. So that's most people that will be discussed in there. Let's see. In 2013, is, one of the project switched to get, and that is pretty much what opened the floodgates to contributors. Before that, we were mostly the three-person team and some occasional drive-bys. After that, we quickly expanded to six or seven, depending on the specific time that you count.

and after 2016 a bunch more people joined including the current team that's maintaining UZ Doom So in those very early days there just wasn't any

sort of really management of the project it was kind of just And when you have like three people you really don't need that much in the way of management yet makes things more convenient to have source control

absolutely and you should have source control. But when everyone knows each other, you can kind of get away with not really, not really formalizing anything. Yeah. And it is interesting in the sense that the three of us kind of all had the same general idea

on what Zedium is supposed to be, even though there was not really any document that said this is what it's supposed to be. And the way I would describe that is Eden was always player-focused port, so adding features that improved the quality of life, which is kind of a thing that people get confused, because, of course, we add all the modding features, so how very fancy mods and turning Doom into completely new games.

But there would be features like people would want to disable the ability to do, like, saved states or disabled the auto map and we would and those were always hard nose from us because it's like if that's an experience that the player wants that's what they'll get. If they don't want to cheat, they can just not press the button to cheat. Right, right. You don't force it on the player.

You just give the players who want to use it, the option to use it. Yeah. And yeah, like one of the things you'll see throwing around in public with that Zem is sometimes described is a new engine that happens to play Doom, whereas the internal development team views it as, it still is at the core of the Doom engine. I think the way I would sort of describe it is

when we make enhancements, the algorithms are mathematically the same as what the original dream engine did, but because the way computer precision works, sometimes things don't exactly calculate exactly the same and so that's why ZDune doesn't support like the demos that play

when you start up the game so there is some I guess this is also part of the reason why there's so many different options there's some sort of debate about what is the most what is the correct way to play it do you want a pure experience

do you want a nice fluid like what what exactly you're looking for from this? Right. Yeah. And the goal with ZDoom was that if you take someone like yourself who isn't necessarily playing Doom every single day, you'll start it up, you'll look at it,

you'll go just seems to play exactly like vanilla Doom as far as I'm concerned. But obviously the competitive people will notice things pretty quickly. Like one of the probably more controversial, changes is the change in the random number generator. So Doom had a fixed table of 256 values. And Z Doom changed that to a proper pseudo-random number generator with Mersen Twister implementation. The problem with that is the Doom random number generator is weighted in such a way that the Super Shotgun actually does more damage in Vanilla Doom than it does in Z-Doom.

Right. And conversely, like the BFG 9,000, the Final Boston, the first game you can literally beat by just walking up to it and firing one shot, whereas it takes two shots in Vanilla Doom because you wait out the random generator roles just sort of come out. Okay. If we're getting into random number generation, we have really,

really delved into the weeds of what makes it a good version of the game. Right. Yeah, like you go on like the Doom Wiki and there'll be a comparison of the source ports and it will say like vanilla accuracy and zium will be marked low and like there's some tension on that description i personally think it's fine because it's like yeah so it's on the criteria that it's set forth like yeah zinum is a low accuracy port but in this case low is still a pretty high bar as far as accuracy is concerned right okay okay so Um, my, so let me see.

Um, one second. So you have these like, uh, where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? There it. So you have like the classic Doom games you can buy on Steam as well. And you can do the same thing with Wolfenstein. If you would have just play what you have there, how does that experience differ from like what you're going to get? in, you know, some of these, like, more popular source ports like, you know, GZ Doom and things like that now. So the out-of-the-box port, since its software has gone back for Doom at least as well as Quake and Quake 2 and done updated port, out of the box, there's probably not a huge difference. The main thing you'll notice is like free look and jumping support, which is basically,

cheating in those games. In hindsight, we probably would have had those disabled by default. But again, backward compatibility. There's years and years of mods that expect that jumping in free work. And so, yeah, we're not going to just change something that breaks a bunch of stuff. And again, for the most part, like, yeah, when you're playing the vanilla game, some people like to have free work even though it allows sequence breaking something just because it feels more natural than

to play and you kind of have to go out of your way to do a sequence break with it with jumping is kind of a different story I think that's the one that we definitely would have disabled if we were to do it all over again but so what was it that sort of got you interested in working on this in the first place place. So I was doing doom modding for many years prior to getting involved. The mod that I was working on was called Jurassic Rip. And the project reader that wanted to change the status bar

to be more of what is seen in Heritage, where you have an inventory system weighed out. And And there wasn't any way to really change it except for doing some weird hack with Webble scripting that had some limitations. And so I set out to, at first it was just a simple configuration to say, instead of using the Doom status bar, used to one from Heretic. and in hindsight I probably should have designed something a little bit more complete at first because this simple script sort of organically grew into probably the most horrendous scripting language that was ever devised and it's kind of amazing that so I want to think that Zedium has done really well is being very easy for people to get into

as far as modding. And so there's a lot of people that don't know any programming that will get into doing programming-like things with ZDoom with very little effort. And so one of the ways that that's accomplished is that there's just a whole bunch of domain-specific languages that do one thing very well. And people that are seasoned programmers

consider that a fault because it's like, why can't you just have one thing that can do everything. What's a good example that I can show of like a reference what the language looks like? The best example would be the decorate language.

Decorant. Let's see if we can find it. Decorate tutorial. Yeah, here we go. So, I mean, it's a pretty simple language. starts with an actor keyword and give it a name. Then there's a bunch of properties. Most of the properties are self-explanatory.

Some of them probably have some arcane names because of historical reasons. And then there's the animation table. Yeah, I mean, for basic things, the animation table doesn't look particularly scary. But it's interesting because you end up basically, programming and assembly language, but this is a language that is targeted toward people that don't know how to program. But we managed to do it. In recent years, GZ Doom has changed to a language called ZScript, which has included imperative programming on top of that. So things look a little bit more normal now, just a custom C-like language.

Let me see, create. Here we could create. new projectiles. Okay. Oh, yeah, I see, I see. And I guess going back to the project readership discussion a little bit, during the time that the project was called Z-Doom, one of the things that was like a no touch from Randy to the main product reader was Z-Script. That was supposed to be his personal project, and it's like we could do anything we want as long as we didn't do that. And eventually it got to the point where Randy was absent for a long period of time, and it got to the point where this thing not getting done was becoming a hindrance.

And so Grapp basically decided he was just going to work on ZZ Doom going forwards, and if something happened with ZDome, then we'll figure out what to do then. So then Grapp went and implemented Z-Script himself. and that's one I think Randy admitted that she wasn't going to have enough time to commit to it

so she terminated project and just handed it over to Grapp and so that's pretty much a story that went on there so that early that early changeover was fairly

how did you say like fairly calm it's like I just don't have time for this right now you take it over you're working on this more Yeah It is

You can probably read a little bit something Into the fact that She didn't depend over the ZDium name That's fair GZDN But I don't know if there were any discussions Between her and Graff At the time

Or what I Pretty much found out the same time Everybody else was going there Again going back to not being a whole lot Of coordination in the project At this point, who actually runs the whole like Z-Doom domain? Because it's like you've got Z-Doom now links out to like a bunch of other things. It's kind of like a meta project.

And all of the community around Z-Dome, it's just about these other forks of it. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure who owns the ZDoom.org domain. But yeah, one, Randy just continued the Z-Doom project. the intention was to sort of turn the ZDoom.org site into sort of an umbrella project for the descendants of ZDoom. I think that sort of de facto just turned into the GZDoom website, which kind of presented a situation when UZDeme happened, and then it's like, so what do we do at the site?

And I'm thinking it was supposed to be an umbrella project, so there's really no problem with presenting both of them there at the same time. But obviously, E.C. Wolf would technically be under that umbrella, but I always had my own website, so there was never really any pressure to move it to ZDome.org. So I guess, yeah, how did ECWolf get started then? How did that all come about? Yeah, so E.C. Wolfenshire was literally started because Wolfenstein 3D did not have volume controls, and I wanted to turn on

I wanted to independently control the sound effect volume from the music volume. And one thing led to another and eventually I was maintaining a whole source point. So yeah, ECWolf worked from Wolf for SDL. And if that project didn't exist, I don't think ECWolf would have, even though these days I know enough assembly

that I probably could have worked through it. the history of Wolfenshire 3D source ports is a bit more of a mess so I don't I think the source code would release around the same time

the Dume source code was released but I don't know off the top of my head when let's see if we'll find out July July 21st 1995 no this initial

that's possible a source code for the original yeah this I think that's right July 21st 995 that's what I'm seeing someone correct me for wrong um

and yeah so a handful of source ports came out of that but all of them we wrote the vendor from scratch and uh I think all of them were open GL accelerated now the interesting problem with that is Wolfenstein 3D was programmed in such a way

that what the renderer showed fed back into the gameplay logic. So, like, you couldn't pick up an item unless you were working at it. Right. Right. Okay. And so now if you change the renderer, you don't have that feedback anymore. And so that creates a whole bunch of bugs in the game. And so a lot of those early source ports were very buggy. Even beyond weird issues, like, I know one of them there would be outlines around every single graphic

and I'm sure that was just some quirk of the drivers because early video drivers were not very stable but and it was 2006 somewhere around there

a guy named under the area is Ripper real name is Mortis Kvall started a project called Wolf 4GW, which forwarded the 16-bit code base to 32-bit DOS. And then he took that project and turned it into a Wolf 4SD. And so that got rid of the assembly code, but retained the software renderer. And still it worked January the same way.

The Wolframs project did do enhancements, so it did get rid of the you need to look at an item in order to pick it up. and some of the render feedback stuff was removed but not all of it is that one of those things because we talked about random number generation is that one of those things that people argue about whether or not that's a good thing or did everyone just kind of did everyone give up on complaining about that one the wolfstein treaty community hasn't had as much choice in source sports I think there has not quite as much argument with that said

with uh E.C. Wolf coming into the picture and uh basically upending pretty much everything that that community knew. So the Wuppensstein 3D community when I showed up on the scene was very tiny. There were basically two forums, the Die Hard Wolfridge Forum and Wolf 3D Haven. And both of them were basically a small town mentality. So then you have me showing up with this source port that implements basic things like WASD controls and making Wolfensstein 3D accessible to the masses. And I basically faced V-a-mit rejection because I'm impeding on,

my impression is my rejection campaign with imposing on the small town with all these people that are now coming in and asking why don't their mods work with my source for it, even though, yeah, so the Wolfensign 3D modding community would most, mostly based around direct hacking on the source code itself. So every single mod is its own source port in a way. Oh, God. Okay. Right.

So there kind of was a lot of source ports. It's just not in the same sense as what you had with Doom. Right. They weren't interchangeable for, but Doom, you can, to a certain extent, a large set of mods with any source port. So,

so, lost my train at that uh... Modding Small Town Rejection Changing the game You haven't got it

I lost it I remember what the question was Was it about choice And Oh it was I don't even really exactly what I was What the question was At this point

I think it was just kind of in general like sort of the beginnings V-C Wolf and what was going on in Wolfstein community at the time And then you asked something about If there was as much debate Oh yes yeah I brought up the random

Yeah feature complaints yeah So the Wolfenside Community Does Florida still Have a diehard Wolfport SDL Fan base Even though it's The source port has been unmaintained for years. There's been a couple forks that have come off of it,

and all of them tried to keep the same name. So it ended up being really confusing to figure out the history of all that, because there's like three different project called Wolf for SGL. I did convince one of them to finally rename their project to DD Wolf. So that's at least solved. But, yeah, none of them. were blessed by the original developers, to the best of my knowledge, anyways, because when ECWolf started, I was initially contributing back

anything that wasn't major gameplay changes. I managed to get a couple patches, I think, into the Welfare SDL code base before the developer just disappeared. I was sending patches and just didn't get a response anymore. So at that point, Wulfur or SDL was the only maintained Wolf 3 resource port, and then EC Wolf took over is the only maintained one. Now there's, I think, four reflection HLE, which is essentially a chocolate doom equivalent. And I actually have made contribution to that because, to me, the main purpose of that kind of afford is for reference purposes.

So if there's some weird behavior, some of the behavior is like a memory corruption happens. And it happens in a predictable way. So certain mods can depend on that memory corruption to work. And so what's handy about force like chocolate doom and whatnot is they'll capture that behavior and make it defined behavior. Instead of crashing because that's what a modern operating system would do in the same situation. and yeah so the other one as far as I know

one of the developers of the Wolf for S to L.D. Wolf is still going and as far as I know D.D. Wolf is still going and then yeah there's E.C. Wolf and I think that's the four that are still active that I'm aware of. Maybe this gets into like even pre-source port stuff

but why do you think there is such a big distinction with Doom and Wool? Wolfenstein here, where Doom has so much going on, but Wolfenstein even now is kind of still just a few projects here and there. The main thing would be the assembly code. Like I said, that was a big holdup for a lot of the early projects where they just got really buggy because the way that the original code was made. the Doom's source code however was entirely C or I know there were assembly code in there but I think there were C fallbacks

so you could just compile it out of the box on whatever and so that made it much more accessible to develop for the other thing is Wolfensscien's Siencrowd is a little bit of an acquired taste and that it is way more primitive than Doom and that shows I think some people would have a better opinion in the game if they stopped after episode three instead of playing all 60 levels at once

a lot of people don't realize that episode 4 or 3-6 is actually an expansion pack and so you end up playing through this really long game where pretty much the entire thing is the same thing over and over again and I think that burns out people

so I think there's just less interest in the game overall but yeah the flip side of that is since it was a primitive game, there's a lot of things that you can do to expand. And to that end, like, ECWolf kind of gives more, but your rises the triad vibe when you actually start modding it. Where's the triad? Why does that name ring the bell? Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Okay, that's why. I advised the triad did use the Wolfensign 3D engines, so far down the road, my plan is for ECWolf to have support for that. I guess I should mention ZDome and, we'll just say ZDium was one of the early ports that actually merged all the Doom Engine games into a single

engine. So that allowed mod authors to take stuff from one game into the other. And that unlocked a lot of power. A lot of the reason why the early ports didn't do the same was because

a lot of the early ones used the GPL license whereas ZDium used the original Doom source released licensed originally. And so that gave us a bit more flexibility at the cost of the usual things that you expect with the GPL freedoms. Although these days, it's kind of a dubious benefit.

Now that GZ Doom has been used for probably like 30 some odd commercial games on Steam, there end up being a question like, Can these games come to consoles and the answer is no because of the GPL. And if I could call out Valve for one second, they really need to release their Steamworks API under a license that is permissible through the GPL so we can stop doing these insane workarounds. Workerounds in what way?

So, yeah, so there are Steamworks API as behind a NDA. However, anybody can go to the Steam partner website and sign up and then get a copy of it. So why is there an MDA there? I don't know. And so that means that it's GPL incompatible because you can't introduce any further restrictions. And the way that games get around that is,

one, you could have a separate process and then communicate through a socket in order to bypass the GPL requirements. Some other games just want to take the spirit of the GPL into account. Nobody's going to complain if you're just like, hey, there's just one thing. The implementation on how to do this is very obvious, and you can get a copy of it.

I just can't show you it because of the NDA. And then there's also a thing, someone I think re-implemented the API is like Open Steamworks, so like you could implement it and just be like, hey, technically I'm winking against that, but actually I'm not. And then in the case of, so ECWolf is the, official port for the Super 3D Nozark release on Steam and GOG. And since ECWolf is dual licensed under both the original source license and the GPL,

and one before Ripper disappeared when I, so, yeah, Wolf for S.D.L. was originally, only nominally under the original source license. I asked Ripper if his intention was that it would be available under any license that it software licensed it under and he said yeah so then i submitted a patch to add the gPL compile option to it and uh yeah so because wisdom tree had a license with id software i'm not technically beholden to the gpL in that case but we still follow the spirit because why not release the source code so it's uh up on the uh ec wolf get hub so i you kind of brushed over it If anyone who's unaware, can you just briefly explain Super 3D Noah's Ark?

Yeah, so in 1994 and 1995, a company called Wisdom Tree, also known as Color Dreams, I think, Weiss and Steve Wolfenstein 3D engine from Id Software, and they were doing Christian Bible games, primarily for the Nintendo consoles unofficially, of course. And so one of the games they put out was a version that you would call it a first-person shooter, even though that term kind of fueled wrong in this context.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Called Super 3D Noah's Ark using the Wolfensine 3D engine, specifically the Super Nintendo version. The DOS version came out later and kind of backported some of the features from the Super Nintendo code back into the DOS code base. Yeah, there is a little bit of a misconception going on that it was done out of some sort of spite

for Nintendo forcing it to censor the Super Nintendo version of Wolfensstein Treaty. As far as Wisdom Tree is concerned, that is false. They license it just like everybody else. Whether Id Software felt it was funny because of that reason specifically. I can't comment. But, yeah.

If you are curious about seeing any other Wisdom Tree games, AVGN, like 12 years ago, did a Bible Games episode on that. So go and check some of that out if you want to. The one thing I'll say on that, he did say that, like, the game was just a re-skin of Wolfensine Treaty,

but Super 3D Noah's Ark does have 30 unique levels that were designed by some tree team so it actually is a new game but yeah choosing the same code I think it's just cool

that someone made this like that like yeah it's kind of dumb yeah it's like a weird thing it's kind of it's cool and fun that someone just went and made this and Doom had one of those as well

in the form of a check request that was distributed in cereal boxes back in the day it is kind it is cool that like there There were so many, so many things just built off of these engines back at that time. And since then, there have been so many of these like full conversion mods where people

have made these entirely new games based, I think it's especially cool and someone does it for, like, does it now. They want to go back and rather than, you know, going and making a game in, you know, a modern engine, like a Godot or something like that, they go and say, you know what, I'm not going to try to replicate that style. I'm just going to go all in and actually just build something off of that old code. Yeah, in the case of Doom, a lot of it is those, those are people that just were modding for Doom and eventually worked up to making a full-from-scratch game.

So, I mean, you already had the skill set, so why wouldn't you? And the license allows you to release them commercially. And so, yeah, that's pretty much how those come about. It is really cool. I think it's super cool that the code was even released in the first place. Like that's just not really a thing that basically anyone does. And by doing so, obviously it gave them a lot of like, you know, I could imagine at the time there were probably articles that came out.

Like, wow, look, this is so cool. They released the source code for their game. But it's just cool that they sort of opened that up, opened that opportunity up, because none of this would have been possible if they didn't go and say, okay, have fun with it. Yeah. Yeah, and, I mean, even the implications go beyond

just the have fun with the aspect. Preserve it. As I mentioned, there's like 30-some odd games that are using it commercially. So I think it, and like even outside of Doom, I think I personally owe my career to having worked on ZDome. So, yeah, just the widespread impact that's just a little gesture like that can have is pretty amazing. You've talked a couple of times about EC-Wolf, sort of pulling in a lot of things from Z-Doom.

Like, what has been brought over there? And, like, what does that sort of imply for what EC-Wolf is? So as I mentioned, a lot of it is the front end stuff. So mostly just has a generally same feel that Zedum had at least as of whenever I last synced with the code base, which was quite a while ago at this point. But in terms of like the scripting stuff, it's mostly just familiarity. So someone can take their skills that they developed for them. modding for the Z Doom and they instantly transfer over to EC Wolf because while the engines aren't

the same internally they still generally had the same design about them so I was able to take some liberties and how the scripts work for Doom and transferred them over to the Wolfensine 3D engine and there is no real loss and like accuracy. in doing that. So, with, maybe this is a dumb question, but what is there even to do on a project like this?

Because obviously the games themselves are ancient games, you've worked on ECWil for so long now. Like, is the project not just done? Like, what is, what is there still to do? Yeah, so for, for ECWil, there's still a ton left to do. After I completed college and went out into the real world,

I haven't had quite as much time to chew through my infinite backlog of things to do. But, yeah, so right now, E.C. Wolfensign 3D., Spiro Destiny, Super 3D, Noah's Ark, and then Wolfstone 3D and Wheat Hands from the... There was an arcade cabinet that was included inside of, the Wolfenstein 2 game that had an alternate reality version of Wolfenstein 3D where you play as a German against the Americans. And so you could extract that from the game. And it turns out they basically implemented the original 3D engine in those games. So, well, that's actually safe. I love that. It's the same game data format. So when you extract them, it actually can just run in ECW.

there were a couple things that I had to add to support those, but it was very minor. But, yeah, obviously those are the games that are very similar to each other. I have the Mac version of Wolfenstein 3D, like half implemented. So that need to be finished. But then there are all the other games that use the Wolfensstein 3D engine that I need to get around in implementing, which include Blake Stone, Corridor 7, Operation Body Count, and RISD Triad. So the goal is to kind of just support everything. Yep.

And that's the same thing that ZDome did well before. I guess how much... Well, what needs to kind of change in the code base to happen? Like, why do the other games not just work? What do they do differently that causes issues? Yeah, so how... Why is something to Wapenstein 3D engine would work? because they would basically hand you the source code to Wolfensine 3D and the editing tools.

Now, the game data only includes, like, the graphics and the story text, stuff like that. If you want to, like, change the behavior of how the monsters work, those all have to be done and see. And so all these games have different game logic that need to be implemented. Now, it still uses the same general framework, so it should all piece into the same scripting language that I have. But all that logic need to be re-implemented into the engine. Now, I did play a role when getting the Blackstone source code released. I want to say that would have been around 2014. There is a small problem in that Boykstone is GPL, whereas ECWolf is dual licensed, as I previously mentioned,

so I can't necessarily just take code from it. But what I mostly need is like the high-level things and the animation tables, which I don't think necessarily fall under copyright in that sense once they're translated into another scripting language. So that should be fine. Maybe one day ECWolf will have to drop the non-GPL license option, but today's not that day, so

I guess do you still enjoy doing what you're doing? You've done this for so long now. It's like you got into initially because you wanted to add a basic feature

and then expand it out from there, right? So you never had these initial goals to like be the guy who basically does Wolfenstein 3D but now that's kind of what the project has become yeah

yeah so far I haven't really had burnout in the literal sense I think the certainly the pace that things have been developed would suggest that I do but there's

and more behind the scene stuff that I've caused that more than necessarily I don't want to work on the project. Right, right, right. But, yeah, the thing that really keeps me going is just seeing people being enabled to create things. And, like, yeah, seeing people release games on Steam and building their careers off of things is actually very rewarding to me.

Sorry. So you also wanted to talk a bit about, which, completely side tangent here. You also wanted to talk about Linux package distribution, Linux software packaging. So I guess I don't really know where you wanted to go with that,

but I guess how did you start using Linux? I guess we can start from there. Yeah, so I started using Linux before 2007 in servers. May have used Red Hat Winix at one point, and then Windows when that came out.

My dad got a copy of that, so that was probably my first Winnex experience that I remember. But taking the actual series, there was a time where Mandriva Linux was popular, and I was running a home server off of that. But in terms of desktop usage, in 2007, I was informed about Ubuntu, sort of tried it on and off for a little bit there, but then committed to going to Winix full-time in 2008 with the release of Ubuntu 804. And silly me, decided to pick the KDE4 remix option. so I got the full force of

all the bugs that came out of that and surprisingly I'm still a KDE user to this day so I mean things are pretty well since KDE4 quite a bit yeah and in those days it's like yeah you pretty much had them to install the PPA for the way that's KDE

to even have a usable system but yeah so yeah I got involved with Zetium in Zandronom. Zandronom, at the time known as Skull Tag.

Oh, is that why I kept... Okay, I looked up some stuff about... Okay, that makes sense now. Yeah. I guess a quick tangent on that. The Skull Tag Xandronom fork was a very similar thing to the GZoom, UZDum happening. The original developer, Carnival,

real name Brad Carney. He went off, well, the first thing that happened was I think Skull Tag may have been like his first programming project, and as a result, whenever there would be a new major version, it would be completely related with bugs. The one where it was basically

usable. And at the release of, I think it was 9, version 0,000, 0.97b. The amount of bugs was so overwhelming that he quit the project. I'm on the wiki page for Skoltag. One of the links here is controversy of 0.97B. And after that, a developer using the pseudonym Torsemajo, real name is Benjamin, I forget his last name. came onto the project and brought a very method, I don't even know how to say that word,

a very conservative approach to progressing the project, and so he was able to continue as to get it more and more stable. And at that point, it was still closed source, and a couple of people, including my myself joined the project. And because it was closed source, we had to release Winix binaries in binary form. And so that was basically our first experience.

Originally we went down the usual first device you hear is, oh, you got to build binaries for every single distribution that's out there. So the first release that we did for Winix, I think we supported three or four different distros and had different binaries for each one. And then we realized that the Ubuntu binary basically worked on every single one of them. So we just eventually just stopped building a bunch of them and just only supported one. From there, I think it was 2012, I decided for my own convenience and obviously the convenience about everyone else to provide auto updates and I would essentially start my own PPA.

obviously not actually a PPA because I host myself instead of through Ubensi's infrastructure and so from there I've been building Dubian packages officially for many projects in that project family there and it became official a couple years later with the

2.8.0 ZDoom release. Obviously there was 2.8.1 and then the project terminated. And then I was building BZ Doom devian packages officially until that project terminated. The new ZDoom team wants to distance themselves from hand compiled and stuff and go to

CI only. And obviously they have their app image now. So whether they'll ever be an official dev packages I'll have to be determined once I actually get... Once I find time to get the project into a state where I can build a Debian automatically. And I think that's all I have to say for the initial part. Yeah, I think going down the route of, like, CI and, like,

app images is totally fine for Linuxfield. Like, I can see one to have, like, a proper Debian package, but if you just want something that you know, was going to work across everything. You don't have to worry about anything. Like, an app image is probably the best way to go about that. Unless you got some thoughts there. If you did some thoughts there, I'd love to hear it.

Yes, I definitely do have some thoughts. So, and I want to practice this in saying that, I think app image and flat pack are both great projects. They do, I think, people are a way to sort of hand wave the actual problems that are going on behind the scenes. And I think that is slightly detrimental to kind of understanding the actual problem of Linux binary compatibility. So, yeah, one of my criticisms whenever you see an article of, oh, Linux has terrible binary compatibility, is pretty much all of them are G-Webc broke my binary,

but that's because I had a bug. Right. And I refuse to fix my bug. And recently you did a video. There was one blog that basically broke down that no, actually the problem is you can't load like multiple gun times at the same time, or like the C library or C++. And, yeah, so I think what gets lost a lot is that,

binary compatibility on Linux is a multifaceted problem. So there is that where Linux has basically a global symbol table for each running process. And so what happens is if you require, if you ship like the C++ runtime and your GPU driver is, is built on C++ but requires a newer C++ runtime. Your C++ runtime is now conflicting with the one for the GPU driver. And

app image does not actually solve that problem. I think some people don't realize that there's a large list of libraries that are excluded from being packaged into the app image. And so you're expected to provide those from your system, but your system probably has them installed anyway, so that's why it just looks

like it works. Right. And a flat pack, on the other hand, solves it through isolation. So they have a way that you can inject drivers that they compiled into your flat pack. And so they can match the driver being run with the one that's on your host system, even though it's not actually the same driver. and the other problem that is

I think it's one of those things where I go it doesn't have to be this way is that the traditional distros through policy will not include like old ABI's of versions of libraries

and so like a new new library comes out, obviously the traditional distros typically will not ship that until the next major release. But the next major release comes out. All the binaries are broken because you're relying on the old ABI. Right. And new one's the only one that's provided. But there's no reason why they can't provide the old one other than it would be a security problem because that's not maintained anymore. That is one of the things where I feel like it would be easy to solve if people cared

enough. I feel like the Nix OS commenters are going to be scrambling down below about this. Yeah. I'm not super familiar with how Nix works when you run it as your actual operating system, but obviously if you use the Nix of the Package Manager,

it's able to provide those things. And in some ways it does solve that problem. Yeah, it is unfortunate that the main distros don't. One thing I have found is that canonical seems to be particularly good about

backwards compatibility. I don't know if it's like an official policy, but more often than not, I find that they will do like a rolling situation. So an LTS comes out. It will have any ABI that the previous

two LTS has had in its repository. So you can basically expect that your binary will work for five years, even through upgrades. It's not always the case that that's true, but I have seen many times where they've had that allowance, whereas like Debian seems to do more of a hard cutoff. So if there is an ABI change, things just work. Yeah, I mean, things like that can often be worked around just through different. managing your dependencies, well, there's going to be a group of people in the comments that are going to be like, oh, just static link everything. And, well, it doesn't work if you want to use your GPU driver because your GPU driver is dynamically linked.

And there's certain techniques that you can do. So like with the C++ runtime, you can kind of get two runtimes working by static linking the C++ runtime. That doesn't work for a C runtime because it has a dynamic linking stuff built into it. And then there's also a technique where you provide your whatever minimum version you need, and then you provide a SHIM library that looks at through system copy and sees it the system copy newer than the one I provide. If so, use that. Otherwise, use the one I provided. Because generally speaking, if you, as long as you use whatever is to,

newest of the two things Jen and we were. Yeah, this is... You mentioned Ubuntu there and like with something like Ubuntu, you can very easily solve that problem. When you're dealing with something that rolls more and a lot of distors that people tend to rely on

nowadays are, even if not explicitly rolling, they are some like partially rolling system. Like obviously, Arch is everything's rolling, free for all, go for it. But even something like Fedora, does have these point releases, still does roll through some of the updates and trying to provide the set points that you know things are going to work on, basically is just not part of the

distribution model at all. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really think rolling versus not rolling changes anything there. It's just a matter of policy. What they probably should do is have. like a second repo that you can opt into that's just like legacy compatibility. Right. And so whenever a library goes, end of life, you put that package out to this other repository. Build it as long as it still compiles. And if people don't care about, oh, there might

be a security vulnerability there, they can still pull in these libraries. And that would go a long way in removing the field that when it just breaks binaries all the time because, yeah, I mean, I also see people like, like, yeah, you can't run the Loki binaries anymore, but you'd be surprised how many of them run

if you just preload the standard C++ library with LD preload, and then they just fire right up, even on the way just. I think the... So a lot of the time these are available, but they usually, like, relegaged the third-party repos.

So it's just, it's something you can do. It's something that somebody cares about. Like, there's users who are providing these old compatibility, but it's just not something that's core to the distillery. I think a lot of problems with Linux distiller's ultimately comes down to, like, developers and funding. So many problems pretty much just come down to that. It's like, do we really care that much about legacy support?

that we're willing to sacrifice something else. And for a lot of people, the legacy support is less valuable than what it would be trading for. I reached up until now. There's a lot more interested in Winnex, and I think just generally more third-party packages. Obviously, at the same time,

we're also moving to its immutable distros, so is it going to be able to, matter in the long term if we're immutable and we have to do basically the app image flat pack thing anyways. Probably not. I don't know about that. I see there is a place for these. I don't know if they're ever going to become like the primary distros that people rely on. Maybe things change, but we have so much legacy documentation, legacy support built around. these traditional systems that unless they can really provide some major value for the regular user and maybe things change as more mainstream users take advantage of Linux but I don't

see a major shift that's going to happen with like the users that are currently there personally I think that probably will end up being a shift maybe not to precisely the immutable model that we know today. But Mac OS currently is essentially an immutable operating system, but it doesn't feel like one. And I think we'll probably find some way to move into that general direction. Actually, that's fair. I think that's really fair.

The issue is it really feels like a different thing. It... Yeah. Hmm. Okay. I'm certainly not going to say it's going to happen in the next five years probably. It's going to be a long ways out. Right, right.

There's probably a lot of cooling that need to be built around it. But, yeah, I feel like even from the enterprise space, a lot of the issues that people have is just like managing drift. And so, like, Red Hat has their Red Hat image mode now, which is their immutable version of well. And so I suspect. at some point they're going to try to push Enterprise over to that and I assume that's probably where most of the funding for traditional distros these days comes from.

I think one of the issues that do exist with the mutual systems that haven't really been fully addressed, because we're getting to the point where users-based software is, it's getting better, right? Like, Flatpack is a very popular format now. A lot of things are available in that. In a lot of cases, a lot of distros do provide

just nicks as a fullback. you really need something. But the problem that is there right now is dealing with the kernel side, dealing with those low-level changes because if you don't have... Say for example, you need Nvidia drivers, right? You need to have a separate version

just for Nvidia. And if you want to add in any additional kernel modules, you're basically at a point where you're going and effectively building your own distro at that point. You've got to actually make your own kernel for that. That's one of those problems where I'm sure there's some discussion being had on how to address it with immutable systems and this is not something that's going to affect most people

but for the power users right I do think that there's that still being kind of a mess and you kind of having to get into the weeds of actually building your own your own images then do make things more annoying than they need to be yeah yeah I like that does So it's certainly more tooling that need to be built around those. And that's not really my area of expertise.

Fair, fair. Yeah, going back to, like, the funding of distros and being why they don't really handle the backward compatibility, I would say my personal really hot take for Linux is that distros should not be providing every single package under the sun. So if we got rid of all of the stuff, and the Ubuntu universe repository and focused all that effort onto legacy compatibility. Yeah, I've brought this up to a number of...

See, when I talk to application developers, they agree with me. When I talk to distro developers, they will give me a 10-minute discussion on why their distro is providing so much value by packaging every single possible thing. Yeah, yeah And I think there's definitely some merit there Because if you're a distra maintainer You're going to have More knowledge on how to package applications

But I think what makes more sense there Is to work Like work cross distro On like Some sort of consistent packaging Put more effort Have that effort Going into Fedora packaging applications

and Ubuntu and Debbie and all these in distros to work more on putting things in a shared repo like a flat pack, like app images, these other things which are cross-platform. Honestly, I don't know how much like getting a common package format really matters because we can build tooling that builds multiple packages from the same binary. at work I distribute remote management software

that includes support for Linux and so we have a single build that's built with REL 7 because we support everything until like the extended support period ends and so we build it on REL7 I do some

magic to or certain libraries that are different between the distros that we support and basically code them at runtime instead of hard-winking to all of them. And yeah, so it's one binary. We package it as a dub. We package it in RPM. We tried to follow the packaging guidelines for the respective distro, so it feels native on both

side, but it's the same build. and so I don't mean we think that's a huge hurdle that there's many different package formats I don't think it's necessarily package formats I think it's because you can you can resolve that really with CI pipelines I think the main concern is this duplicated effort of like for example

is there any reason why is there going to be any difference with the packaging of I don't know Grep across Ubuntu and Fedora and Debbie and Art Like, a lot of this stuff, you're basically doing the same thing. The only difference is the resulting package format it is at the end. The actual project in most cases is going to be packaged in pretty much the same way.

Yeah, I guess until you get into the debate about the core utilities versus getting into. Sure, okay, yeah. Which, by the way, I used the EBunchy non-LTS, and so I'm currently running the Rusty core utilities. I had zero issues except for Git Subtree broke. Oh. Yeah, that was one of those where the bug was already filed and already fixed. They hadn't chip a new version yet. Yep.

Yeah, I think it was kind of crazy that people freaked out about the Rust Core Utils thing It's like, do you actually think Well, firstly, the non-LTS versions are the versions Which do tend to break more because it's not the LTS And you can get away the things breaking But also like, do people legitimately think They were just going to ship something which didn't work?

Right Yeah, like obviously it's not one for one compatible but a lot of the issues that are there, besides obviously, you know, there are bugs like the one you saw. But most of the issues are going to be the harder to solve issues, the less common issues. Most of the low-hanging fruit was dealt with like years ago at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my personal take on like the LTS person on LTS is like when you get new hardware, you probably should be on the non-LTSS.

because as the way to the greatest current moment, although you bunch who does have their hardware enablement stuff, but it's kind of delayed, so whether that works or not is kind of hit and miss. And then, yeah, once you get to an LTS release, if you're not like a power user, probably say on that.

If you are a power user, you probably want to wait a software every six months anyways, so that's usually where I'm at. My server is on LTS, my desktop runs non-LTS. And there's me. I just run Arch because it's funny. I want my software up to date within three hours.

I tried to use Arch Winish one time, but I used it for exactly the wrong purpose. So I was building a car computer for my brother. And the problem is that didn't have an internet connection. So when it came time to update the software, everything just broke because it was too far out of date. Okay. Yeah, maybe Arch is not the choice for that. No, no. Yeah, so I learned that pretty quickly, but yeah, I mean, overall, I'm pretty happy with the six-month cadence on getting major software drops and anything else is like, yeah, I mean, I can install it away to sting manually, so that doesn't really matter and not trying to rice out my desktop.

Is there any reason you're on that side rather than using something like Fedora, or is it just more of you've been here for so long you don't care? Yeah, it is partially momentum, and also I generally like Ubuntu's policies better than the Fadour of Red Hat side. I have an experience packaging for Bull. The way I would sort of describe it is Red Hat solves the problems that Red Hat has. And Debian spends a lot more time trying to figure out how things will actually mesh together. and so things usually just work more at least as a packager I think another way to describe red has red hat

solves what red hat customers have a problem with yeah there's certain things missing like trying to think of the exact example like on for app for apps you can specify, I depend on package A or package B, whereas with REL, that was a relatively recent addition. So at work, I have a problem where I can run with either OpenSSSL or GANU TLS.

And I prefer GANU TLS because it's more ABI stable. But out of the box, REL7, I think doesn't ship a new enough version of GANU TLS for the features that I need. So I have to depend on OpenSSL and GANU TLS. But if you're on REL7, the new TLS install never actually gets used. It just has to come along with the ride because in order for it to work on the newer versions of REL, I need to specify that dependency. Whereas with the Debian side, I can just say you need one of these two. And since the newer distribution.

versions will have Ganoo TLS installed by default. It doesn't install open SSL because the defendants is already satisfied. So that's one example where it's like, yeah, Debian just like solves the problem completely, whereas Red Hat is like, I didn't have this problem yet, so why would I have solved it? Okay, okay, that's fair, that's fair. That's actually kind of crazy that is a relatively new edition.

I would have thought that would be there for a long, long time. I don't remember if it was a rel 8 or rel 9. adds it, but it wanted those two. Okay. Okay, sure. When was Rel-A? That was release date? That was 2019. That's great. Because I know Arch had it like way before then.

Yeah, it's a pretty... Pretty normal feature. Yeah. But if you're coming from the world of we build all the packages, then why would you have a needer or dependency? Well, in particular, not so much Fadora, because I think Fodora is a little bit, because it's community basis, gives a lot more options. But REL kind of does the, we have the one thing and you use the one thing.

So it's not really a problem they ever had, I assume. Yeah, actually, no, that does make sense. Like, if you're providing a product rather than like a framework to build something, like that makes sense. I could see that. I think it's dumb, but I can see that. But yeah, I mean, there's certainly some things that I like about, well, as a developer of binary packages, they have their dev tool tool set stuff now, which is a really interesting patch over a GCC where they separate out the new parts of the C++ runtime and allow you to compile statically link just those parts. so you're still depending on the system copy for the base set of symbols, whereas the new stuff is baked into your binary,

so you get better compatibility. Backwards and forward. So, like, yeah, if you're looking to build binaries that run everywhere, I would definitely recommend using a well-build container. And, yeah, you get nearly the latest compiler and everything. so. Hmm. Okay.

Okay. They kind of started that on, uh, REL 7, but, uh, it was more REL 8 and later that, uh, introduced that. Hmm. Yeah, I've, I've always been pretty much on the user side. I've never really dug super deep into, like, packaging. So my concerns when I look for a distro are usually like very, very user-facing concerns. And that's how I ended up on Arch, because,

For me, having the latest drivers and latest software is a fair trade for a little bit of instability here and there? Yeah. My counter to that is getting the latest drivers on something like Ubuntu is really easy. Someone provides a PPA that's just the drivers. And so if you want to evolve, just that, it's pretty easy to do. That's fair. That's fair. And then in terms of like the random applications, at least since Ubuntu has done things like shipping the weighted version of Firefox regardless of their policies,

for the most part, it's like, yeah, the software that's... Well, that's because they ship it as a stack. I don't necessarily care about updating. There is that. Yeah. So, yeah, like the base software is stuff that I don't really care if I'm not running the latest and greatest version at any particular given period. And the stuff that I do care is easy enough to update. So that's kind of where I fall on that.

I'd rather have to deal with any potential and compatibility every six months and not have to worry about it for a while. And then it allows me to run basically the same thing on my servers, which I, if I mentioned, I run LTS, so I only have to deal with that every two years. Okay, yeah, I guess that makes sense that if you want to, if you want your like sort of maintenance to be consistent across everything you do that's my that does make sense i wouldn't want to run an art server and yeah oh uh my first job out of college was uh maintaining basically a

re-spin of uh sentos at the time and uh so i got really deep into the nitty-gritty of managing system d and whatnot so like i have a my home router because i got uh 10 gig internet in this town, but before there were like any home grade 10 gig routers on the market. Anyone who's been looking at the video would not believe that there's anything 10 gig about this. It could just be my side today. I don't know. Not sure why you would... Discord, big Discord. Ah.

I also kind of intentionally have the background dark, but... Yeah, who knows? Anyways, so yeah, I white-boxed the router and it's running Ubuntu, and I was able to use the knowledge that I gained there to get things down to where there's like 15 processes. I know exactly what every single one of them is doing, and it's configured in such a way that I can do the distribution upgrade every two years, and it stands up just fine and doesn't have any conflicts because I'm not like fiddling around with deep system files and messing with the, packages, it just stop in Etsy. Okay. That's fair.

We kind of covered most of what I wanted to talk about already. I don't think there's anything like really unless there's like some thing that you wanted to really touch on. I think like we kind of wrap up there.

My notes, I see if there was any particular thing. Yeah, if you want to jump back to something, we can definitely do that. If there's something you missed. See, yeah, in terms of binary compatibility, I did mention the global symbol table thing.

I guess the one thing I missed on that was mentioning that there is a problem with fixing that and that in order to fix it, you would probably break binary compatibility, and even though there is the mantra that

Linux has no binary compatibility, there's enough people that care that breaking it is pretty much off the table. And, yeah, like, the one difference between, like, Linux and Windows, like, on Windows, when you're passing memory between a DOL file and the executable, you need to pass the memory back to free it. Whereas on Linux, you can just sort of, like, do whatever, because everything's in the same group. and there was a project called a web capsule that was supposed to

like solve loading the GPU drivers into a separate namespace and that was abandoned or turned into app image I'm not entirely sure of what the relationship between those are and yeah so ultimately my understanding is it

didn't really work out because the GPU drivers would depend on X-11 at the time. And so then you would end up with memory being passed between the various instances of X-11 libraries and that would cause issues. And, yeah, so I imagine one of the things where it mostly worked, but not really a perfect solution. And the only way to fix it is to systemically go through everything

and changed the way things are programmed, and that's never going to happen unless there's actually an initiative put forth. And as long as people will continue to believe that Winix has no binary compatibility, there's never going to be any effort in that direction. Right, okay. Let's see. I mean, most of my notes, I think we're just like general technical things, but probably a little bit beyond what you were hoping to scope this kind of conversation too.

No, if there's something there that you wanted to touch on. I feel like it would be a little too in the weeds. But maybe when I'm watching this back, I'll be like, oh, man, I really should have. Yeah, totally fine. If you don't want to get into it, it's all good. Yeah, nothing else. I think that pretty much covers it. We didn't really talk too much about the UZDeme split.

Oh, yeah, sorry, we didn't know. We can get in. Yeah, so we can definitely talk some of that. What's going on with that? Is the project healthy now? Like, what's actually... Yeah. Yeah, so one of the counterintuitive things is I think the split had actually

indication that the project was in a super healthy state. So I had mentioned that in about 2016, we were about six official developers. And then you mentioned there was that drama that went on about the WIF-Lulik mod. Now, I think that drama is one of those where nobody really knew to hold. truth. Right. Okay. So as an outsider, you're going to see like, oh, he disappeared and he probably just rage quit. Because he has had a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, has done that in the past. And I think it was 2010, uh, he, uh, did a rage quit and actually deleted the entire GZ Doom website. Uh, and, uh, fortunately, we, we, uh, fortunately, we, uh, we, uh, we, uh, we, uh, we,

We had backups that we were able to recover all that, and then he came back to the project. So, yeah, there was definitely some concern even internally that something similar was going on where he just decided to quit. But it actually turned out that he just basically went on a small vacation. And a lot of people find that statement kind of weird because it's like, wouldn't he, as a project reader, tell everybody else that, oh, I'm going on vacation. but if we refer back to the part where I was like, oh yeah, there really wasn't a whole lot of coordination going on. Like, why would you tell you?

You've never had to mention this before. Yeah, and then considering that like, you know, like you were saying that, and then also the fact that he seemed like the kind of person who kind of just did stuff and didn't really want to tell people what was going on, even with like development of a project. So if it's something in his own life, I could see him be even like less interesting.

interested to tell anyone? Yeah. So, like, yeah, there's a kernel of truth that went on around that. I mean, he definitely was salty about that, but I think everybody on the Zedium team was a little bit salty about that particular pick. Just from a general standpoint of, like I mentioned,

ZDium tries to maintain mod backwards compatibility, and while there's a certain faction of people that kind of refused to believe that for some reason. and so when you have this mod it's like delivery exploiting bugs it's like I'll just sort of kind of goes against the notion that like yeah you should be able to take

a mod from any previous version of ZDium and run it on the latest one and yeah so personally I was a little disappointed in that pick just from like the so yeah

the community does that award ceremony every year on James birthday which is December 10th and they picked the top 10 mods of the year and Wilf is

a well-liked mod so I mean in that sense I can see why it was picked but on the other hand I kind of feel like it was a bad pick just from a, if somebody's new to the community, they're going to come in and go, like,

what's the top mods that I should try out? And, well, here's the list. And now you got this one that only runs on this one specific engine. It's kind of unfortunate, in my view. But that's neither here nor there. I mean, pretty much every year, there's a little, I mean, like any award ceremony where you have to pick the best of,

there's always going to be someone that's like right right right right. I mean, yeah, graph was a bit more animated and probably should have been but I don't really necessarily see him being salty about it necessarily unusual in any sense. But yeah, the fact that he did

disappear right after that when people were egging him on and all that, yeah. I said we did sort of run through the scenario, like what if he doesn't come back. And so like I said, there was six of us. If he left, that would be down five. One of them was myself. And at that point, I was pretty much shifting focus to ECWolf and didn't have as much time as I used to.

So, I mean, I could have taken over the project, I suppose, but we wouldn't have been ideal. The other main developer, DP Judas, I don't remember, is a real name off the top of my head. Probably would have been the best pick. The problem was, I believe, and I'm sorry if I got my memory wrong, but I believe he said that he wasn't interested. So that kind of rules that out. And then the remaining three members were, two of them were, focused on

specific areas of the engine and all of them. Oh, you good? Just trying to think, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. The remaining two members revise that. One of them

focused specifically on the Mac OS port. And then the other one was a general list. However, she has had issues with being in leadership positions in the past. So I think anybody in the community would understand what I'm saying when I was like, yeah, probably not the ideal outcome. So it's one of those where it's like people say that like, oh, this split should have happened earlier, but it was one of those things where it really only within the last couple years that the project had got strong enough where there were people that were covering enough of the code base had enough time and yeah just a general sense of where to take the project

that I don't think it really could have happened too much earlier like maybe a couple years at best and that's when graph was pretty much absent from the project anyways and they were leading it so in that sense it's pretty much a clean handover. So far, I have not seen a graph surface since the split, and the product has been dormant since then. He hasn't made any official announcement that it's dead, but I imagine it's going to be, again, like the skull tag in Xandronom situation,

where it was basically a clean turnover. We just have to use a different name because the one person who essentially owns the name said that they want to keep it right right so it's effectively like they whilst graph was gone the project was being built up and they were effectively running it anyway so I guess when something came along whoever's involved in running it kind of was just like we

like this is as good a time to do so as any like I'm sure if you've talked about a number of issues I'm sure other people who've worked with them probably had issues

and it was kind of like we wanted to do so at some point but we just couldn't and now is basically we have the ability to do so so let's go and do it

it's more of a straw that broke the camel back uh situation As I was saying on the public perception versus internally, nobody internally like hates Scraff. Sure, sure, sure. He's a very talented programmer.

Like I said, the fact that the project has been able to grow, which as many contributors as has, means that obviously he's very open. It's just there's certain behaviors that over time that is add up as being kind of grating. and that one got to the point where

the project sort of moved in one direction and then Rapp was still treating it as if it was going down the direction he knows kind of like this big team built up around it but he was still treating it like his own personal project

yeah and yeah at that point it's like yeah either the reader can recognize like Randy did and go like, yeah, obviously this is no longer my project and move on. Or you can tell them to get a new name and fork the project, which is what he ultimately chose. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, on one hand, it's like easy to look at the drama and go, oh, man, the project works unhealthy. but it's like, yeah, the only reason it could happen is because the project is healthier than it's ever been.

Right, right, okay. I don't know if you, I don't know if you pay any attention to like the Minecraft community, but there was a similar sort of split like a few years back when, what was it, what did it fork off of? When the prism launcher stuff happened. What was the project it forked off of? Sorry, I'm forgetting the name now.

was multi-mc or is it they've renamed since then either way there was a situation a similar sort of situation where like one person involved was like okay we want to go down this route

and then it was a lot that was a lot more aggressive like that person ended up like kicking people out of the project like banning people from the repo and ultimately that project is just kind of dead but the point I'm sort of getting at there is sometimes there's just a split in direction and it's just best to sort of go and do your own thing rather than trying to force it into this

into this thing that the project leader doesn't want it to be right and I mean yeah as you mentioned this isn't like a totally unique I mean look at like to you open off office.org, Rebery office. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. And then GCC had one area in its wife that got merged back. And then I think something happened with FFMPG, I think. I'm not sure about that one. X-OG did happen with.

XOg spawned off of X-3D6. Yeah. So, I mean, this isn't necessarily unusual. It's kind of unfortunate when you have the naming discontinuities. but it is it is funny watching some of the commentary around it because it's like yeah the announcement i mean you have to treat it as a fork because you don't know if the original project is going to continue or not so it's like oh there's there's going to be two projects and then like people can't grasp the idea that the only thing that changed about the project is the g turn to a you and nothing else right yeah

like basically every I'm not entirely sure but I assume most people followed over to Uzi Doom Yeah As far as I can tell There's a clean cut Over to UZ Doom

Like I said The only question mark is Grapp And he seemingly disappeared at this point So Whether he continues to practice or not I don't know I kind of suspect that He kind of had been stretched too thin problems before.

So if I were to guess, I feel like he's going to see this as easy out to just fade into the background. There is Rays, which is a Duke Nukem 3D port that did the same thing as EC Wolf, where it takes the front end code from ZDum. integrates that into the build engine. At this point, I think that product is kind of on a hiatus just due to lack of anybody having time to maintain it. But when that project picks up again, it will be interesting to see what comes of that.

I know there's at least one other person on that project. Even if Graf decides that he's done for good, I'm sure that product will end up being picked up again. So even though there's been like a lot of mess over the history of Z Doom, it's kind of, it served as a baseline to improve a lot of other ecosystems around it. It created, it was a baseline for what you did with ECWolf. It was something that happened with Duke Nukem. And it's, even ZDome itself has now spawned off into these other projects. They're still being well maintained and are keeping these older games alive.

Yep. I think that's pretty much all to say on that. I think we did start talking about the Skull-Teg-Zandron split and then got on it to a tangent and never finished. Do you want to go back to that? Yeah, if you want a brief to go back to that, we can do that. All right, so I think where we left off on that, I mentioned that we got a new development team after the original developer quit.

and then the original developer started coming back for a while and then he decided to start his own game called Wreck and so he went off and did that for I don't remember how long at this point I mean the split was in 2013 so that's what 13 years ago now and so yeah he was working on his game came back I don't remember what he had a problem with but there was some direction that we were going down that he didn't like and so yeah we basically gave him the ultimatum that we would fork unless he just let us continue the way we were going and yeah we decided to fork and then skull tag shut down

pretty much immediately after when she realized that everybody moved with us So, yeah, it was another one of those words. Like, yeah, we made the announcement. We have to act like Skull Tag still alive, even though it really wasn't. And in that case, we actually did take the rebranding as an opportunity to sort of refocus the direction of the project. So Scull Tag was both a source port that did client server multiplayer as well as a mod that basically, I would describe it as Quake 3 Arena for Doom. So what we found was that some of the changes that Carnival made for that Mod was conflicting with some of the stuff that was being made for Z Doom.

So there were some subtle incompatibilities between the two projects. And so we decided that with the split, especially since Carnival was like, claiming that Skull Tag is like his property. We would sever that included mod. And while we still had compatibility for it, you just had to load it manually. There were a lot of people that were confused. And probably even still to the day for some reason,

don't realize that Xandronom has full compatibility with Skull Tag mods. You just have to load the Shem in between. So there's, I'm sure that you can, talk even more about what's been happening throughout the history of these projects it seems like there's been

a lot even if it's not drama there's just been a lot that's happened to get to where we are yeah yeah absolutely yeah

I kind of hate dredging up drama but at the same time I feel like a lot of the tellings of it end up being one side because you just see the public side of it

whereas like, I mean, internally there's other stuff going on and usually it's not as bad as sometimes it appears to be, like I said, when a project forks, it's not necessarily that the project's unhealthy. Oftentimes it's because the project's healthier than ever. That's fair. That's fair.

Well, we're closing in on the two-hour mark, so I think that's as good a spot to end it as any, as any. I can't speak. So I guess if people want to check out ECWolf and check out the work you do, where's the best place to go? That would probably be my website

and it's Maniac's Vault.com. Unfortunately, it's one of those where I picked the name when I was 11. And just stuck with it? Yeah. And even worse, the origin of the name is my brother's screen name is Maniac,

and it was supposed to be a website for hosting his mods. But I never was able to really come up with a name for my website, so after he stopped making stuff, it's like, well, I have those domains. St. St. St. St. C-Dronom.com is forever. so Maniacfault.net obviously we're talking about ZDome and that's at ZDome.org

and And Andronum.com is that project Is that that project? Great and great I often have a weird way of words

on that I think that's pretty much covers it. Yeah, I don't really do social media. I do have a Twitter account, but I mean, pretty much don't use it. You don't even have a link from the Sea Wolf website. Yeah.

Technically have a YouTube channel, which is also BLSL3, but yeah, it's mostly just videos that talking about something with a friend, and it's like, oh, YouTube doesn't have a video on this, so I guess I'll put one up.

seven years ago the sound of a cheaper motherboard okay yeah yeah uh motherboard is like putting memory in it

and it's making this weird creaking sound and it's a little amused some amused my friends so uh I hope ordered that video but yeah I have a

let's play of uh of the game uh hacks which was a uh pseudo uh

so a semi license of the Doom engine uh with one of the developers. Basically, we were doing a play through with it, and I was just recording it in the background in case anything interesting happened. And it's like, yeah, it was interesting enough, got permission to upload it. And, yeah, so that was not really intended to be one, but I figured, hey, upload it anyways. Also, you can buy Super 3D Noah's Ark.

Yeah, I guess that's a good reminder. Super 3D Noah's Ark. I would probably, prefer people to buy it on itch.io because the funds go to me. For Steam, there's a kind of a revenue sharing thing. I think my website might be slightly out of date on exactly how that revenue sharing works if I specify. But I need to actually get around to updating it because the publisher reached out to me a couple months ago and it's a game to get the 1.4 update out for that, so hopefully. Okay. Yeah.

I guess that's pretty much everything then. It has been a pleasure to meet you, pleasure to have you on, and yeah, I have learned about a part of the gaming space I did not really have much knowledge of, but I'm sure people are going to, find interesting. So thank you for coming on. Thanks for having. Okay. Um, nothing else you want to mention. No other links. That's it. Okay. I'll do a mantra and then we'll sign off. Sweet. Okay, my main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week.

Sometimes I stream as well. I've got the gaming channel, Brodyon Games. Right now I'm playing through Devil My Cry 5 and also Shenmu. and if you want to find the video version of this, it is on YouTube at Tech Over T. We have Spotify video as well. And the audio version is on basically every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed as well. And yeah, you'll find it where you find podcasts. How do you want to sign us off? What do you want to say?

I love when this happens. You got nothing? I got nothing. You know what? That's a first. We'll take it.