Talk:WAD

Copyright concerns

Have you seen the UDS copyright info? Are you sure we can derive from it for the wiki? - Jdowland 11:36, 25 Mar 2005 (EST)

I don't see any text lifted from the UDS. As long as we're just using it for reference purposes and not copying anything, then there is no issue. Bloodshedder 11:48, 25 Mar 2005 (EST)

UNIX 'file' command

Here's the entry the UNIX file command uses to identify WADs:

# Thomas M. Ott (ThMO)
1       string  =WAD            DOOM data,
>0      string  =I              main wad
>0      string  =P              patch wad
>0      byte    x               unknown junk

This could easily be elaborated on if someone wanted to :) - Jdowland 07:46, 7 Apr 2005 (EDT)

WAD as acronym / acrostic

Is WAD officially an acronym of "Where's All the Data", as the article states? And if so, could someone put a reference in the article? I always assumed that WAD was supposed to be the word 'wad', [1] nothing more complex than that.-Ashley Pomeroy 14:31, 10 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Doom Bible, page 67. Fredrik 16:26, 10 Jul 2005 (UTC)

I've put this in the article itself; you should have done that, it would have saved me time.-Ashley Pomeroy 05:18, 12 Jul 2005 (UTC)

If you didn't have time to do it, you could have left it for someone else :P -- Jdowland 08:42, 12 Jul 2005 (UTC)

The wikipedia article mentions the expansion "War Allocation Daemon".  Not sure how that would be verified (although we have no reason to believe it is the official expansion, as that article claims).    Ryan W 17:46, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Tom Hall has also said that the expansion was a backronym, but apparently one created early enough to make it into the Doom Bible.[2]     Ryan W 01:08, May 13, 2010 (UTC)

WAD isn't an acronym; an acronym is a new word created from the initials of a phrase, such as radar or laser, and the word "wad" existed long before id Software. Nor is it a "backronym", because there's no such word; the word for a phrase constructed such that its initials spell an existing word, such as WAD, is "acrostic". -- RobertATfm 13:00, July 3, 2012 (UTC)

I think most people would agree to use the word "acronym" instead of "acrostic." I can't find any dictionary or website that supports the requirement that an acronym must be a new word or that an acrostic must be an existing word. The overwhelming majority of definitions mention that an acrostic is a mnemonic for a poem where each letter represents the first letter of a line. Jordanbtucker (talk) 03:12, December 30, 2015 (UTC)

The above argument just means that the said user hasn't been very diligent in his search of dictionaries. As for "most people use 'acronyn' for such words", that's the Fallacy of Appeal to Popularity; contrary to common belief, any number of people you care to name can be wrong. — evilquoll (talk) 02:26, June 17, 2018 (UTC)

Considering that language is a ever changing thing, Appeal to Popularity is actually very important. Dictionaries change definitions and add new words in order to keep with the language, not the other way around. To be so pedantic as to say 'You must use the word acrostic when the word already exists' or 'Backronym isn't a word' even when it's readily found in dictionaries is to live in the past. --Jordanbtucker (talk) 18:50, June 18, 2018 (UTC)

restriction on lump names

Only the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9, and [ ] - _ should be used in lump names (an exception has to be made for some of the Arch-Vile sprites, which use "\").. Is this true, or badly-phrased? A reference to the limitation in the code would be nice. I thought anything which passed isascii() was OK. -- Jdowland 22:29, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

offset and directories

I was speaking to florian schulze on #doom-tech a while ago, we were talking about the directory and lump offsets. He stated that the directory offset to the entry information table (which contains offset, size and the name) has an unsigned 32bit value. this is the same for the lump offset.

Can anyone confirm this?

They're just declared as "int" in the doom source, which means "signed 32bit little-endian", in the context of a 32bit compiler on x86. -- Jdowland 13:18, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Numlumps crash

An integer specifying the number of lumps in the WAD.   This thread at Doomworld claims that the number of lumps in a WAD can cause overflow problems without being anywhere near 2³¹ - 1.    Ryan W 18:21, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Filename restrictions

Why the restriction of 8 letters for Vanilla WAD names? 86.171.123.218 10:51, August 1, 2012 (UTC)

Because that restriction was imposed by MS-DOS, under which the original Doom ran, and is in turn because the 8.3 limit for filenames was imposed by CP/M, which was the inspiration for MS-DOS. If Doom had been developed for ICL's George 3 operating system, WADs would have filenames like TWELVELETTER[4/WAD] (the number being the version number of this file).

And by the way, if you have a new point to make (as here), you need to put it in a new section, not lazily tag it onto an existing one. -- RobertATfm (talk) 11:21, August 1, 2012 (UTC)