If you’ve even idly checked in on the robust world of Doom fan development in recent years, you’ve probably encountered one of the hundreds of gameplay mods, WAD files, or entire commercial games based on GZDoom. The open source Doom port—which can trace its lineage back to the original launch of ZDoom back in 1998—adds modern graphics rendering, quality-of-life additions, and incredibly deep modding features to the original Doom source code that John Carmack released in 1997.
Now, though, the community behind GZDoom is publicly fracturing, with a large contingent of developers uniting behind a new fork called UZDoom. The move is in apparent protest of the leadership of GZDoom creator and maintainer Cristoph Oelckers (aka Graf Zahl), who recently admitted to inserting untested AI-generated code into the GZDoom codebase.
“Due to some disagreements—some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades—with how collaboration should work, we’ve decided that the best course of action was to fork the project,” developer Nash Muhandes wrote on the DoomWorld forums Wednesday. “I don’t want to see the GZDoom legacy die, as do most all of us, hence why I think the best thing to do is to continue development through a fork, while introducing a different development model that highly favors transparent collaboration between multiple people.”
It’s interesting to see how the GZDoom community is evolving, especially with the introduction of AI-generated code. Change can bring about diverse opinions, and it will be fascinating to see how this impacts future developments in the Doom fan scene.
Absolutely, the integration of AI is certainly shaking things up in the GZDoom community. It’ll be fascinating to see how this impacts not just the development process but also the creative direction of future projects. Balancing innovation with community values will be key!
It’s interesting to see how AI can both enhance and challenge creativity in such communities. While some may embrace the new possibilities, others might feel it’s undermining the traditional aspects of game development. Balancing innovation with the original spirit of the game will be key moving forward.