Numerous contributors to GZDoom, Doom's most popular sourceport and the basis for countless mods and several entire games, have split from the project and revealed plans to build their own version, after long-running tensions with GZDoom's creator came to a head earlier this week.
As reported by Techspot, the schism within GZDoom's community arose through a thread on the project's Github page, beginning with GZDoom contributor the-phinet (real name Marcus Minhorst) listing several issues regarding recent updates posted to the project by its creator, Cristoph "Graf Zahl" Oleckers. Among multiple complaints, Minhorst claimed Oleckers had "pushed untested code" and made "use of an LLM to write your code for you" which Minhorst pointed out likely violated GitHub's licensing agreement.
These grievances arrived on top of other, longer standing complaints from GZDoom contributors regarding other updates to the sourceport, such as its controversial texture-filter that blurs Doom's pixels. The changes highlighted by Minhorst appear to have come as an unpleasant surprise to GZDoom's contributors, with Oleckers having seemingly taken a back seat on the project over the previous year.
"I understand that this is your project, and you can do whatever you like," Minhorst wrote. "Please instead of pushing directly, open PRs and wait for a maintainer to [acknowledge] them. This would set a good example, allowing time for maintainers and other developers to review your work."
Oleckers' issued a short response to Minhorst's post, stating simply that he should "Feel free to fork the project". 'Forking' refers to the creation of a separate code repository from the original, allowing users to make changes independent of the base version. GZDoom is itself a fork of another Doom sourceport, ZDoom.
This, it seems, was the last straw for much of the GZDoom community, prompting several more contributors to accuse Oleckers of poor management and not working in the interests of the sourceport.
"What the hell is your problem, Graf? You disappear for a year, come back to send a bunch of work to the curb, use generative AI bullshit to solve an easily searchable problem, and then tell people to kick rocks when they raise a valid concern for it?" wrote GZDoom contributor Kaelan Evans. Fellow community member Boondorl, meanwhile, pointed out that "so much was getting done on GZDoom that we decided to upgrade to a 5.0, a move you agreed to because so many amazing features had managed to get in. Days after you decided to come back out of no where, the project is now completely bricked and everyone is abandoning ship."
Indeed, it seems the community has taken Oleckers' advice to heart, creating a new fork of ZDoom called UZDoom that they can work on without Oleckers acting as de-facto head of the project. As a sourceport, UZDoom aims to be a straight continuation of the plans made for GZDoom 5.0, which included better netcode and support for ray tracing. "Other than rebranding, nothing has changed roadmap-wise," wrote UZDoom contributor Ricardo Luís Vaz Silva in response to questions regarding UZDoom's plans.
"No drastic changes will be done, the next release will continue as-planned with the netcode update."
The split is already making waves in the Doom modding community. Over on ModDB, upcoming World War 1-themed Doom 2 mod Trench Foot posted an update explaining that its planned release has been affected due to uncertainties surrounding the shift from GZDoom to UZDoom.
"GZDoom is basically dead," wrote developer TrenchWork. "For a while now, we've been using dev builds of GZDoom 5.0, the next version that was supposed to come out. That is still the plan for UZDoom, but with the complete management change, the release window has… just been thrown out the window."
Despite this, the modders are optimistic regarding the future of UZDoom. "We can expect to see tons of great changes in the long run. We're not going to talk about it on behalf of the dev team, but we'll just say that a lot of feature plans that have been shut down before can finally be realized."
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