Talk:Alien Cabal

Nomination for Deletion
'''Delete. '''It pains me to say that since I wrote "Alien Cabal" and I'm proud of it. It was inspired by Doom but uses nothing from it. I wrote the 3D engine myself. The core texture mapper was actually written in highly optimized x86 assembly code. It was fun stuff back in the day. If you have any questions just e-mail me. Greg Taylor, former owner of QASoft and author of "Alien Cabal". [mailto:gregsinbox@yahoo.com gregsinbox@yahoo.com].

Delete. This game barely has anything to do with Doom and generally irrelevant to the Doom Community. The fact that I have never heard about this game before is a good enough reason, well at least for me. Justice ∞ (talk) 06:54, September 28, 2013 (UTC)

Keep. Well, it is not enough for me and personal lack of knowledge is hardly an argument. I made the article because this seems to be a lost Doom engine game, not even just a mod, so I think it is relevant to the scope of the wiki. I have provided a source which states that it is based on a modified version of Doom II and therefore should qualify under similar rules to Hacx (which was not even stand-alone!). Technopeasant (talk) 06:58, September 28, 2013 (UTC)

Just after skimming over the wikipedia article, I can see that this entire article on there is copied over here to the Doom Wiki, which further proves my point as to why this article should be deleted. Justice ∞ (talk) 06:59, September 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * I am improving the article there and here at the same time, so I question the relevance of that remark. Technopeasant (talk) 07:02, September 28, 2013 (UTC)
 * As a further note, my idea was that certain portions of that Wikipedia article are probably beyond the scope or of the wrong tone for that wiki, which is why I was interested in moving it to a specialized wiki more appropriate for it in the first place. Technopeasant (talk) 07:13, September 28, 2013 (UTC)
 * Seriously, this simply shares the term "WAD" and yet it is alright to have an article under this criteria? Technopeasant (talk) 07:14, September 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * Maybe Amulets and Armor does have an article because it actually used the WAD format? Perhaps you are right after all and maybe this should have an article. The fact this this article is generally copied over here from wikipedia is a good enough reason. I am however, interested in what the other admin thinks about this article. If you can somehow improve this article by actually making it different from wikipedia, then perhaps I might actually keep this article. Justice ∞ (talk) 07:31, September 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * (resetting indent) Grammar quibble: you mean "this criterion", since "criteria" is plural. This is is a common mistake.


 * Also, the only "source" given is the Wikipedia article, and open wikis are not valid sources, since anyone can edit them. Furthermore, by giving this as a "source" you are (by your own admission) citing yourself, a mild version of the argumentum ad baculum fallacy.


 * And as the Amulets and Armor article you cited above points out, the fact that this game uses the "wad" extension doesn't prove anything, since Amulets and Armor also uses this extension yet is not based on Doom. I think the sole criterion for Amulets and Armor being here is that its WADs are in Doom format and can be opened by a generic WADfile editor, so although it's a different engine with no id involvement, it qualifies on that basis alone. File extensions don't in themselves mean anything; DOC used to be a text-file format (commonly used by shareware authors to mean "documentation") until Microsoft grabbed it for the Word document format. Likewise, OBJ has at least two meanings, binary (object code, what ICL used to call "semicompiled" code) and text (a 3D model in Wavefront Object format), and DXF (Adobe Drawing eXchange Format) files can be 2D or 3D and can be text or binary. There are even cases where the same content=type can have different extensions; Motion Pictures Expert Group video files usually have the MPG extension, but as part of a DVD they have the VOB extension. A video editor which recognises MPG but not VOB can usually be used to open VOB files by temporarily renaming them as MPG.


 * Have you actually tried opening an Alien Cabal WAD file with a WADfile editor such as DeePsea? If it fails to open, then this is not a WADfile as such; it's just an arbitrary binary file type which happens to use the WAD extension. I have done a web search and can find no information as to what game (if any) Alien Cabal is based on, so this issue is still up in the air. If this is indeed a lost Doom-engine game, it replaces Strife as the last one to be commercially released.


 * RobertATfm (talk) 13:56, September 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * In order to research this matter, I've downloaded and installed Alien Cabal, and it doesn't use WAD files; it uses GOB files. It thus doesn't even have the tangential relation to Doom of having a file format which is merely called the same. This game might be welcome on Encyclopedia Gamia, but not here. Delete. — RobertATfm (talk) 14:19, September 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * First of all, my source is not Wikipedia, as I fully know that is not usable, but the source that is on Wikipedia: http://www.philscomments.com/about/ (which is linked in the article, so I am surprised you had to go to all the trouble of a failed web search). It is a blog post by a game tester who was involved in the project, and while I agree it is not as good as it actually being listed in the developer documentation, it is a least a vaguely inside source on the matter (and perhaps I should try contacting him and ask if he can be more specific). However, I am glad that this has now gone to the actual point of the matter: whether or not the case for Cabal being a Doom engine game is credible enough - which is a case I am more than happy to argue about, rather than subjective ideas of "what is relevant to the Doom community". I did indeed also look for a WAD file and could not find one, and I was never arguing that WAD files are what makes things relevant here. All I was pointing out was that Amulets & Armour is present here on what seems, to me at least, to be a similarly tangential hook (e.g. in legal terms, citing precedence). A WAD file being present would have been nice smoking gun, so to speak, but I have now provided a source that points in the direction of it being a Doom-based game and there are certain other anecdotal factors in its favour (lack of jumping, rather similar menus and text crawls, etc) and admittedly a few that are odd (destructible environments, the ability to look up and down, sloped floors and room over room). So yes, ultimately we will have to decide which of these scenarios is more likely: that it is a self-built engine or some other engine, and that the tester was mistaken, or if it is a highly modified version of Doom II (so much so that the level extension is different, though as RobertATfm pointed out - different is not always so different). Finally, thank your for copying it to Encyclopedia Gamia, as you saved me the trouble of doing so myself. Seriously, thanks for that! Technopeasant (talk) 18:35, September 28, 2013 (UTC)
 * I have posted a comment requesting clarification on the blog I was referring to, but it is still awaiting moderation. I will post whatever reply or not I may eventually get. Technopeasant (talk) 18:14, September 29, 2013 (UTC)

It's been a week and the vote for deletion is two to one. I'm not going to wait for Technopeasant to see if he got a reply from the blog he was referring to. Plus as Robert has pointed out, it doesn't use WAD files and instead uses GOB files as a part of the game. Besides, the article is already on Encyclopedia Gamia which is more appropriate for Alien Cabal. I've deleted the article and associated image that was for some odd reason never used in the article. Justice ∞ (talk) 02:18, October 6, 2013 (UTC)