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Romero

More goodies from Romero (DoomEd source, maps, graphics)

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I guess it's too late to ask for something like the NeXT source for DOOM... I did a half assed quake port a long while back, but I've always wanted to see how DOOM did it's magic on NeXT, as my Quake stuff 'runs' but you really need a P3 to get some performance out of it.

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Randy87 said:

Map testing can be done in NextStep if you install NeXTDoom. (but it sucks)

Indeed it does. Doesn't seem to save the configuration. Savegames work, though. Mouse input seems unsupported. And "new game" in the system menu gives you no difficulty options but always seem to start a nightmare game, and fails completely while the demo is running. Low detail is broken.
Would the Nextstep gui actually support full screen apps?

Since it is based on v1.8 (although playing the v1.9 demos), I don't suppose, that id actually used it. They sure must have had better means to playtest during designing the maps.

I wonder how it is actually supposed to work when you click "Launch & Save" in the "TOOLS" menu of DoomEd (besides building the nodes when I click in the map). Did they have a running Doom engine on Nextstep back then? Or did they have a way to quickly transfer the map to a DOS PC?

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esselfortium said:

I believe it was once mentioned that they kept the maps on a network drive.

That makes sense. Now I understand the reason behind the entry "BSPhost:" in the project.dpr files.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

I wonder how it is actually supposed to work when you click "Launch & Save" in the "TOOLS" menu of DoomEd (besides building the nodes when I click in the map). Did they have a running Doom engine on Nextstep back then? Or did they have a way to quickly transfer the map to a DOS PC?


It may never have actually worked, given that the code for it is incomplete in the source we received. At the moment, it only moves the player start to where you click, saves, then reverts the player start.

There is also an official NeXT Doom, but it is Doom v1.2

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Randy87 said:

It may never have actually worked, given that the code for it is incomplete in the source we received. At the moment, it only moves the player start to where you click, saves, then reverts the player start.

There is also an official NeXT Doom, but it is Doom v1.2

That's a neat feature, even as you described it. It probably was used along with the -devparm functionality that allowed them to reload a map from disk just by idclev'ing to it, rather than needing to relaunch the entire game. With those two features together, it was almost like having a 3D preview mode in the editor.

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esselfortium said:

It probably was used along with the -devparm functionality that allowed them to reload a map from disk just by idclev'ing to it, rather than needing to relaunch the entire game. With those two features together, it was almost like having a 3D preview mode in the editor.

I didn't know that it was possible to change the file while Doom is running. Never tried that. Considering Doom used to load for 30-60 second (as mentioned in the press beta), that saves quite some time indeed.
Does Doom also reload pnames and textures, as it tries to load them from individual files when using -comdev etc? That would makes sense, considering that they could have been edited anytime in DoomEd as well.

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I just tried recreating the -comdev -wart setup in DOSBox and was able to modify the map during runtime and see changes with idclev, but texture modifications did not appear.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

Romero should give permission to upload his stuff to idgames/historic as well.

Is he in the position to give such permission though? He didn't make all these graphics, you know.

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Randy87 said:

I just tried recreating the -comdev -wart setup in DOSBox and was able to modify the map during runtime and see changes with idclev, but texture modifications did not appear.

The coding of the -wart parameter is only such that it works with maps; other WAD resources like sprites and textures are static after R_Init has finished and have been cached in memory.

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the beta maps are awesome! aside from that obviously different from the beginning other maps have many many differeces. maany of them uses doom1 and retail-unused textures which I personally like more. did anyone tried to fix all missing textures?

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what exactly will be done with the goodies. i mean in praxis.

DoomEd.zip = some features will go into doom builder?
doom-maps.zip = what can be done with it?

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hey, Ling, how about adding to the archive previous data dumps of this year? it'll be awesome to have all the assets in one place

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esselfortium said:

That's a neat feature, even as you described it. It probably was used along with the -devparm functionality that allowed them to reload a map from disk just by idclev'ing to it, rather than needing to relaunch the entire game.

That wasn't -devparm; -devparm enables other features like the FPS ticker and the ability to take a screenshot by pressing F1.

What you're referring to is the reload hack (you can see references to it here in the LinuxDoom source). Basically when using -file, if you prefixed the filename with ~, the WAD would be reloaded at the start of each level.

So presumably the development setup was that you had a desk with a NeXTStation running DoomEd, side-by-side with a PC running doom.exe. You wander around the level, find some stuff that doesn't look quite right, switch over to the NeXTStation and tweak some things in DoomEd. Then fire off the BSP builder that writes the new WAD file. The PC is mapping the same WAD file over a network drive, so an IDCLEV11 reopens the new WAD file and you're immediately on the new level.

It makes a lot of sense - I have vivid memories of playing Doom on the '90s on my 486 and must have spent hours staring at the "Init Doom refresh daemon..." startup. Depending on your hardware, loading all those textures could easily take over 30 seconds or so. There's a lot to be said for having a rapid turnaround between making a change and seeing it in action.

In a way I'm kind of surprised that the reload hack wasn't discovered and exploited by mappers early on, especially considering that after just a couple of years plenty of people were running Doom under Windows 95, and the same trick could have been pulled off by making use of its multitasking - a quick alt-tab to switch between the editor and doom.exe. Hell, you could probably have done the same thing under DOS with a sufficiently advanced editor that was able to set itself up as a TSR program.

EDIT: Never actually tried out the reload hack myself, so I gave it a try and recorded a video.

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Whoaaa! That's awesome! It's like editing the map you're playing in real time! Can't wait till that shit hits newer editor

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Chocolate Doom actually doesn't support the reload hack because I stripped out all the code that supports it (I didn't really understand what it did at the time). Now I should probably add it back in again I guess.

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Wow, treasure trove of Doom History delivered by none other than JR.

Looks like Doom was supposed to have more powerups / artifacts or they scrapped a bunch:



These look on par with Commander keen alien gibberish. Some look a bit Sumerian with a dash of gibber.


Were they to be runes like in Quake? Early puzzle keys? Powerups?

Let's randomly leave these in here to mess with nerds two decades later ;)

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SYS said:

Looks like Doom was supposed to have more powerups / artifacts or they scrapped a bunch:

Were they to be runes like in Quake? Early puzzle keys? Powerups?

You'll find some of these in the press release beta of Doom. Doom was originally supposed to have a score and limited lives (like Wolf3D). The demonic dagger etc. were powerups that just gave you points, kind of like the Wolf3D treasure items that served no other purpose.

Not sure what the rune urn things were supposed to be for.

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Regarding the map reloading: I suppose in hindsight it's surprising that I never thought to use ZDoom's similar feature. For those who don't know, you can load a map from the hard drive in ZDoom with "map file:filename.wad". Works just like a map in a pk3 (the feature was added at the same time I think), so it must be the first thing in the wad.

But yeah, knowledge of that feature probably would have helped out mapping a lot in the pre-3D mode days.

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Hello, Mr. Romero! Finished reading MASTERS OF DOOM a few weeks ago and loved it. You came off as a very stand up, likable guy when I was worried you might be a dickhead with wings because you co-created the two greatest PC games of all-time (DOOM 1 & 2). Thank you for what you're doing for the community, and welcome to the forum!

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Dragonsbrethren said:

door12a, door12b and door14, door14b look to be front and back frames for a sliding midbar door.

And doorkc looks like doors that slide open by splitting in the middle, both horizontally and vertically!

If they were intended to be 64x128 single-doors that only slide one at a time, they wouldn't have butted the textures up against each other in the graphic. I think they were meant to move together, like elevator doors.

Is there code in the source for that? Was that ever worked on?

Edit: Kept looking. doorkc2, kc3 and kc4 all look like doors that split in the middle. That would have been so cool. I guess nobody could get the code to work until Hexen.

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hmm, I used to thought that doom was only for dos at a time it was developed but that picture shows opposite https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxkb29td2lraW5vdGVzfGd4OjE3NDViMDhmYTdiOTg2ZmU

edit: http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/doom-textures/door02.html this UAC door looks like it has to be sliding (to the left) to me, never thought of it before

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EffinghamHuffnagel said:

Is there code in the source for that? Was that ever worked on?

Edit: Kept looking. doorkc2, kc3 and kc4 all look like doors that split in the middle. That would have been so cool. I guess nobody could get the code to work until Hexen.

The code in the source (and in the 1.4/1.5 betas) only animates the textures on a line through four frames. You could do a double door with those frames just as easily as one that slides in one direction. The patches I linked seem to correspond to those textures, and would even make sense with how projectiles can pass through sliding doors. I assumed the sliding door code was intended for the Wolfenstein levels, and I know others did too, but those frames seem to fit too much for it to be coincidence.

The ones you linked and the others definitely look like they were intended to slide horizontally too, but they're not divided into frames that would work with the code. In fact, with the way the door jams are included, it looks like those textures were designed with something 3D like Hexen's polyobjects in mind. Definitely interesting. I know the alpha versions of Containment Area's crusher hall is designed in a way that makes it look like the crushers were originally supposed to slide out of the walls, rather than down from the ceiling.

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fraggle said:

Not sure what the rune urn things were supposed to be for.

Early powerups, most likely. The sprites are called POW*A0 in the alpha versions, one similar sprite is called SOULA0.

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Da Werecat said:

Early powerups, most likely. The sprites are called POW*A0 in the alpha versions, one similar sprite is called SOULA0.


Yeah I think they were placeholders and never intended to remain nearly-identical brown things in the final version.

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Look at the sprite names they're given, for the picture where they are given names: SOUL, SHI1, POW2, POW3. Soulsphere, shield, and two power-ups. Different items.

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EffinghamHuffnagel said:

And doorkc looks like doors that slide open by splitting in the middle, both horizontally and vertically! ... Is there code in the source for that? Was that ever worked on?

I'm going to hazard a guess of probably not. In Romero's ZIP archive, all those LBMs are dated May 13, 1993. This means they're not much older than the May 22 "0.5" alpha, when the engine was still in flux. You can find similar patches in that alpha's WAD, but they're not used anywhere or even incorporated into any textures! So I'm guessing the decision had already been made NOT to have horizontally sliding sectors or lines. Too bad!

Some observations:
- I assumed FWATER* and SWATER* were short for "FreshWATER" and "SaltWATER" respectively. Nope! Apparently they were short for "Fast WATER" and "Spashing (sic) WATER"!
- NUKAGE* was a four-frame animation! Also, it and SWATER* are different-colored versions of each other.
- BLOOD* was a four-frame animation too! See the work stages and final version.
- I think the urn-like powerups are supposed to be jars made of human torsos (see the belly button?). It's understandable why they were ditched in favor of the spheres, too: they all look the freaking same! The spheres' colors are arbitrary (blue? red? green? tan? whatever!) but makes them easier to tell apart at a glance.
- Here's something I found rummaging around in Romero's ZIP archive that's not on Linguica's site: early version of the Cacodemon-eye switch on a marble wall (also includes work stages of the framed skull switch). Compare to work stages and final.

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