Open Source GZDoom Community Splinters After Creator Inserts AI-Generated Code

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you've even idly checked in on the robust world of Doom fan development in recent years, you've probably encountered one of the hundreds of gameplay mods, WAD files, or entire commercial games based on GZDoom. The open source Doom port -- which can trace its lineage back to the original launch of ZDoom back in 1998 -- adds modern graphics rendering, quality-of-life additions, and incredibly deep modding features to the original Doom source code that John Carmack released in 1997. Now, though, the community behind GZDoom is publicly fracturing, with a large contingent of developers uniting behind a new fork called UZDoom. The move is in apparent protest of the leadership of GZDoom creator and maintainer Cristoph Oelckers (aka Graf Zahl), who recently admitted to inserting untested AI-generated code into the GZDoom codebase.

'Due to some disagreements -- some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades -- with how collaboration should work, we've decided that the best course of action was to fork the project,' developer Nash Muhandes wrote on the DoomWorld forums Wednesday. 'I don't want to see the GZDoom legacy die, as do most all of us, hence why I think the best thing to do is to continue development through a fork, while introducing a different development model that highly favors transparent collaboration between multiple people.' Zahl defended the use of AI-generated snippets for 'boilerplate code' that isn't key to underlying game features. 'I surely have my reservations about using AI for project specific code,' he wrote, 'but this here is just superficial checks of system configuration settings that can be found on various websites -- just with 10x the effort required.'

But others in the community were adamant that there's no place for AI tools in the workflow of an open source project like this. 'If using code slop generated from ChatGPT or any other GenAI/AI chatbots is the future of this project, I'm sorry to say but I'm out,' GitHub user Cacodemon345 wrote, summarizing the feelings of many other developers. In a GitHub bug report posted Tuesday, user the-phinet laid out the disagreements over AI-generated code alongside other alleged issues with Zahl's top-down approach to pushing out GZDoom updates.

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