something that came up in discord today is how boom and other mappist formats aren't as interacted with as chippist or grafxicist formats. i tried seeing if there was a thread for this anywhere on the site and didn't find anything so here i am making this. this was initially suggested for clipnote and i think it can apply to these formats as well.

obviously, it would need some time to set up. bandwidth and storage are concerns that would need to be addressed regarding rendering playthroughs for an entry. that's not mentioning what limitations, if any, should be in place for them. with that said, i think that once it's all set up and ready to go, it should be a good way to represent these entries for botbrs without the means to play the entry themselves. people do love watching other people play games, after all _{kaff kaff twitch}

that's my personal take on it, though. i'd love to hear what other people think about this -- dunno if it'd be too much to implement but it would be neat nonetheless

This is a bit "out there", and maybe off-topic since it's technically not really a "render", but I wonder how crazy it'd be to set up an instance of something like webDOOM

(i.e. a Doom source port in a browser) with a copy of Freedoom (phase 2) and wire up a "Play" button to launch Doom/Boom map entries in the browser.

It'd be a lot more bandwidth and space efficient than hosting video, since if you configure caching correctly, each user will only ever have to donload the source port and Freedoom wad data once; everything else happens in the browser, client-side.

I said it before, so I'll say it again:

I'm against video renders of interactive media.
regarding clipnote, an animation+sound format, it makes sense to have video renders.
but interactive media like games shld be downloaded and played by the voter since this is their intended way of consumption

idk, i think a web port of Doom/Boom would be cool. You’d have to embed it yourself though as there’s discrepancies between D1/D2.

One idea would be have a drag/drop mechanic where you must open the iwad file from your computer before you can play the mapwad.

i think what xaser suggested would actually be a _{really good compromise for kleeder} way better solution to the problem over renders. i didn't even realize that was a thing when making this thread but it makes sense that there'd be a webasm port to use to play these wads. let's just do that instead

so a few things

1. it'd have to be a port of boom specifically. this is so we can render boom maps but obviously boom is also backwards compatible with vanilla doom. this would be easier as there aren't any discrepancies with boom running vanilla maps but would also be able to run boom-dependent entries.
2. you'd have to specify what wad is needed when embedding. some entries use doom1, some use doom2, and some that were made using freedoom create weird texture differences when attempting to run using doom. likely you could just create a line in the html/js embed where you just type "doom" "doom2" or "freedoom". if doom or doom2 is specified, though, you can still use freedoom if you want/don't have the actual games. this paragraph is poorly worded but I hope it makes sense.
3. it needs a cool name because most source ports are named really boring things like GZDoom or PRBoom+ or something. i propose the name "Wadster" or "Webwad" but if you all have something else to propose that would be great
4. this thing should be separate from BOTB and usable elsewhere. for instance, itch.io and other sharing sites could benefit from having a web player for doom wads.

also, here's a solid source code

reference for those who need it. We could also just embed DOSBox too, but that's not ideal.

actually, final edit to this post - while searching I've found

an HTML5 PrBoom port using Freedoom. This, alongside this one

, might be our best bets. I'll shut up now, as I don't know how to embed this myself.

these are some good looking prospects as to implementing web play for doom and boom wads on the site! some testing to see if they're hyper compatible might be needed beforehand but it's also up to the admins to really decide whether or not it's worth it to implement it at this point

for the record I love the idea of a feature like this lowering the barrier to play / vote game emtries