Hypothetical Question - 1993 Pwads

Hi there, people.

I was thinking (one or two weeks ago), was it really possible to create pwads in December 1993? Like, you think it is/was possible for anyone to create a wad at such an early date? Were the tools evolved/advanced enough to make it possible (I'm not talking about Doom-specific tools, but rather about "PC tools" in general, if you know what I mean)? Do you think a '93 pwad was ever released/made?

I know this is more a guess than a certainty, but I would like to hear what you think.

Discuss.

EDIT: Sorry, title typo.

Doomwiki said:
The first level editors appeared in early 1994

True, ORIGWAD.wad was made using a hex editor, not a level editor.

According to another page on the doomwiki, PWAD support existed in the first releases. In fact, even the shareware version presumably supported PWADs at some point:

Doomwiki said:
v1.4
Released June 28 1994.
PWAD files can no longer be used with the shareware version.

So I guess that they could (?) exist, yet they would be extremely primitive, since there weren't editors accessible for the public. In addition, I can imagine that people were excited about playing the game at that time, first thoughts about modding came a bit later.

It's totally possible that id Software or friends could have made 1993 wads, even pre-release, just to test the -file command-line parameter. I don't know whether any of them got greenlit for any release.

The first playable version was released to the public December 10th. I suppose someone could have been doing some hex editing stuff, in theory, but it's unlikely they had any playable turf until after the new year.

Doomwiki also says another interesting thing: "Although there had been level editing utilities before March 1994, they were incapable of creating new maps entirely from scratch."

There are no further info about those tools but if I had to guess it was DEU4 or something like this (if there even was any DEU beyond 5). So it leaves a room for possibility that there are PWADs that were made before ORIGWAD but were not distributed because they included IWAD resources if understand the whole deal correctly.

Linedefs, sectors, vertexes, things, etc. were all figured out relatively fast. What nobody understood for a long time was how to generate novel BSP trees, and therefore be capable of generating levels with more than 1 node with 2 subsector children.

Raphael Quinet was the first to figure this out completely. I believe he was able to find some hard literature similar to what Carmack used in the first place (college masters thesis papers or SIGGRAPH journal entries, for example) to learn about BSP trees.

The node builder included with DEU 5 was thus the first functional publicly available working node builder and therefore made the editor the first fully functional one that could do more than just change textures on existing lines or fiddle with existing sectors' properties.

id later released their own internal BSP builder, with source, but only after all this work had already been done by the community, and even then they tried to use it to lord over the community via the Data Utility License. A bit despicable really, especially compared to the glowing cleaned up version of the story of Doom editing that seems to get increasingly popular over time.

In this version of the tale, John Romero swoops down on a flying white horse and bestows upon the community full editing specs and fully functional utilities without any adverse licensing terms attached, like Prometheus gifting mortals with the fire of the gods.

Quasar said:

In this version of the tale, John Romero swoops down on a flying white horse and bestows upon the community full editing specs and fully functional utilities without any adverse licensing terms attached, like Prometheus gifting mortals with the fire of the gods.

I thought it was Carmack who claimed to have given out the full editing specs?

Dragonsbrethren said:

I thought it was Carmack who claimed to have given out the full editing specs?

Honestly I wasn't aware of anybody from id having made that claim necessarily, but I've heard it repeated by other sources a lot - "id released specifications to make editing easier."

As far as I know, the first time this actually did occur was Romero sending Quinet specs for the new stuff that would be added in Doom II. That was so long after the community doing all the hard reverse engineering work that it was relatively not that important. A good gesture, just a bit late :P

Don't get me wrong, id was pretty awesome with facilitating and allowing all the editing stuff in the first place. It just irritates me when the major efforts that were required out of the community get buried under a false history where the game was "open spec," because that couldn't be further from the truth.

I wouldn't even know where to start looking, but I'm remembering an interview with Carmack where he claims to have given out specs to the authors of Wolf3D editors, who never ended up doing anything with them.