The future of GZDoom, the community-updated engine behind many thousands of brilliant Doom mods, is in doubt following a bust-up over the lead developer’s use of generative AI to create code. The fracas has seen a number of GZDoom developers announce plans to splinter off and maintain their own engine, UZDoom.
New to GZDoom? It’s a fork of Doom source port Zdoom, first released by Christoph Oelckers, aka Graf Zahl, back in 2005. A vast number of Doom modding projects make use of it, including such RPS headliners as literary horror MyHouse.wad, demon-petting add-on Cacofrendo (pictured), and unofficial Wolfenstein 3D sequel Blade Of Agony.
As reported by GamingOnLinux, a moderator recently posted on Discord about strife between Oelckers and various members of the community. “Due to a conflict between GZDoom’s lead developer/maintainer Graf Zahl, a lot of other developers decided to leave GZDoom and work on a new fork of the engine now known as UZDoom,” they write.
The fracas appears to be only partly to do with Oelckers’ usage of ChatGPT. Going by the chat on Discord and elsewhere, the backlash is fuelled by long-term misgivings about his bulldozing leadership style. Aside from replicating all of GZDoom’s features, the Discord moderator post continues, the UZDoom rebels aim to offer “a more stable development structure with healthy collaboration and less power given to individual ‘project leads'”.
Further investigation takes us to this Github page for a GZDoom update that features some code by Oelckers, derived from ChatGPT. It has spawned a comments thread full of people arguing about the generative AI financial bubble and the ethics and utility of coding with genAI. Oelckers has both defended his use of ChatGPT, arguing that a lot of programmers secretly deploy large language learning models for smaller tasks, and offhandedly invited the angry users to fork the engine and work on their own version.
The ire has spilled over into later Github bug reports. There’s also this Reddit thread summarising the situation, which includes further postage from pissed-off GZDoom devs. A few Doom modders have also been airing their grievances on Bluesky.
I can only scratch my head and look worried at a lot of this. I know eff-all about the twists and turns of GZDoom’s long development – I am one of those drive-by Doomlites who downloads a cool wad every blue moon. Still, it all feels rather momentous, given the sheer number of projects that use the engine. More to follow, I’m sure.
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