How has your Dooming progressed?

Just a thread on how you got into serious Dooming and WADS.

My story: My family first got a PC right when the PC gaming explosion happened. I think it was a Gateway2000 Pentium3. Anyways, my brother was taking cpu classes in college and started bringing home some amazing PC games. He showed me the Doom Shareware and everyone I knew was blown away by it. I played through the shareware and even bought the SNES version of it which I still have.

About 4 years ago, my drummer in my band gave me his copy of Ultimate Doom, so then I had a Doom and Doom2.wad file. I came here and started learning about wads. Alien Vendetta was one of the first ones I started playing and I was totally blown away. I would use saves about every five minutes to progress. I've finally gotten past that after 4 years of playing and now it's all about UV-Max. I watch youtube vids on certain wads to get a strategy. I'm still not ready to challenge world record times, but beating harder wads on UV-Max is all about survival to me and I'm proud to finish a really difficult map.

I'm a keyboard player, so apparently I'm disadvantaged, but I feel I'm one of the better keyboard players out there because I rarely see any youtube UV-Max runs where there are keyboard players.

I think I'm almost ready to challenge some record times, but I'd like to hear from more people and I'm also very curious to how you control your Doom guy.

I played a tiny bit of Doom on the PS1 when I was a wee lad, but I stopped playing it and never went back until a few years ago. I bought Doom 3 maybe 2 years after it came out because I knew the Doom name but didn't know what the games were actually like, so I decided to give it a shot. Needless to say I was quite disappointed and just assumed Doom was a "horror" franchise. A few years after this I was browsing Xbox Live (Yeah, I know, I'm a peasant :P) and saw Doom. I remember getting this great feeling of nostalgia and decided to download the demo. I played E1M1 maybe 6 times that night because I wanted to get a physical copy of Doom 3 BFG from EB Games.

After I finished Doom 1 and 2 I joined the forums, downloaded some maps and only just recently started mapping. Re-discovering Doom has been one of the coolest things that's happened to me in the past few years.

As for how I control Doomguy, I feel like I'm pretty generic. If I'm high on health and fighting zombies-mancubuses I'll kind of charge at em, if I'm fighting a tough/boss enemy (arachnatron-cyberdemon) I'll cirlce strafe. If I'm low on health in any of these situations I'll take cover while trying to find some stimpacks I may have left behind.

Edit: When you mention control if you're referring to how I usually "speedrun" in Doom I'll usually just mash the E button (what I've got activate mapped to) and I'll shoot if I see any enemies. I don't really move the mouse that much when I speedrun.

DOOM 3 was the first game i played in DOOM Series and i enjoyed it somehow and was curious to try the other DOOM Titles before this one, so i bought a copy from steam .
After playing it using DOSBOX It came with i thought nobody is still playing this very old game, but after reading many positive reviews at steam page i googled "Doom Multipkayer" and first thing i saw on results page was Skulltag, i downloaded it and followed all the instructions it gave to me and was amazed of how "Modern" the game became, But i still didn't see any Multiplayer so i went back to my desktop to see something called Doomseeker, i opened it, followed more instruction and Pow ! Many players were online, but because i didn't download any PWad at it's time i had to look for a server that doesn't have many PWads loaded and i came across a server that only runs Classic DOOM 2 with few skins and that was my very first online game and the very first Pwad i ever played .

PlayStation controller
N64 Controller
Keyboard and mouse/Xbox 360 Controller

and very recently I've been playing with original doom controls, because I need that challenge yo.

A few weeks ago i just wanted to play DooM again. All the official stuff on UV, and i looked for "things" that made the graphics at least a little bit prettier.

Found GZDoom and this community. Better resolution and texture filtering are pretty enough for me (for now). And now i am here trying to fit in and playing lots of DooM, and watching tutorials about doombuilder. :)

Heh, I've got a weird sequence of events.

• Played the shareware at age 7 on Christmas day. Mesmerized. Convinced that D_E1M7 was a really fast-paced action track for some reason -- this would later disappoint me when I heard the track again, and I still don't care much for it even to this day.
  
• Borrowed a copy of Ultimate Doom on CD around 9-ish. Played the damned thing for hours on end, taking screenshots with IDDQD and noclip active. I was a totally normal child.
  
• Read Leukart's Doom 2 FAQ repeatedly and formed mental pictures of what all the Doom 2 maps looked like. The hype train accelerated to around 900mph.
  
• Lucked out and found Doom 2 on a burned CD full of games my dad had. Played it, loved it, played it again. Haven't stopped since, apparently.
  
• Discovered PWADs. Would go to the neighbor's house and borrow their dial-up internet connection to download just enough maps to fit on a 3.5-inch floppy disk, then take it home and play.
  
• Downloaded All Hell is Breaking Loose during one venture, was awed by the new content. Much later found Immoral Conduct and decided that new weapons were the best thing since sliced bread.
  
• Downloaded the Hellraiser TC from Doom Wad Station, which came packaged with ZDoom 1.22. This for some reason sparked my modding interest since my DEHACKED tinkering no longer required EXE patching to work. Shenanigans begin.
  
• Made eight zillion weapon modifications. Exactly 0% of them were non-terrible.
  
• Joined the ZDoom forums in 2003, much to the dismay of anyone with a brain.
  
• Made even more weapon mods and started releasing them for whatever reason. I'm pretty sure I had a several-year streak of not playing with Doom's stock weapon set around this time. Shameful.
  
• Zen Dynamics happens. Was originally a two-week one-off project to showcase a reloading system which required ACS and custom maps to work (this was before LOADACS). The mod catches on for some reason and I release several extra versions of it later on.
  
• More ZDoom things occur -- Zharkov, Psychic, Lost Episode, etc, probably a hiatus or two. I've forgotten the specifics of this time period because the Xaserbrain is a thing.
  
• 32in24-6 happens, and I make a map for it and decide that it's somewhat okay. It really wasn't, but it was marginally better than any of the old stuff that happened before. Sown seeds and whatnot, etc.
  
• PRCP happens, and Joshy lets me sneak in a map despite having no real mapping street cred. Made a vanilla map, had a blast doing it, and decided to keep mapping 'cause it's more fun than weapon modding all of a sudden.
  
• Mapping keeps happening, and now I'm part of a zillion community projects and have "Forum Staple" next to my DW forum account. Guess I'm a permanent fixture now, guys. D:

The tl;dr version is I went from wide-eyed child to weapon modder forum troll to DW mapper semi-oldguard over a decade-ish and apparently won't quit. Been mucking about with the game for over two-thirds of my lifespan, so there you go. It's contagious.

Nice fellas....thanks for replying.

I first found Doom mods when I was about 11 or 12 and trying to find ways of making Doom run on Windows properly because Doom95 and DoomGL were starting to suck. I discovered ZDoom and the billions of mods it has available from there on as well as multiplayer Doom with ZDaemon and later on Skulltag, which is what I was actually searching for to begin with. I just so happened to find ZDoom along with ZDaemon.

I got into mapping 2 years ago when I found this here forum and I still suck at it because I rarely do it and have no motivation to get better so I only ever make maps for projects like speedmapping sessions which lower the bar for quality drastically over making my own maps in my own time. I have made one map I am proud of and can confidently say it's a pretty alright map and that is all.

PC - First time I discovered and played Doom
PS1 - 2nd time
N64 - 3rd
XBOX 360 - 4th

And now I just play good ole' PC Doom, with mouse and keyboard of course! :)

First played Doom on PC at age 6 or 7 and was so terrified I didn't wanna play a game like that again but, well, that was a short-lived promise.

In my teens I saw that terrible Doom movie but DVD extras showed some Doom 3 footage so I played that, and I like Doom 3 at the time, enough to play the original again... on Xbox 360.

I always meant to get Doom 1 and 2 on PC but kept procrastinating for some reason until about one or two years ago. And this year I decided to lurk the communities more to find juicy WADs and some neat multiplayer stuff and weird shit I can't even imagine like a WAD based on Friday the 13th on the NES.

Good stuff. <3

I've grown old with the game. First played in 1994, and never really stopped, one way or another. Now I waste my time making stupid mods and mapsets that about 7 other people get to play, because apparently I have nothing constructive or meaningful to do with my life.

Here's my timeline:

2006ish - First time I had any reference of Doom: Found a pink CD of Doom 1's cover. Never seen it since.

2009 - My dad tells me of Doom and downloads the shareware version for me to play.

2010 - I after playing shitty versions of Doom, my dad downloads GZdoom for the old doom games (including TNT and Plutonia) and gets Doom3 as well.

2010 - I find out about doombuilder.

2010-2012 - I find a mod called Towninfection and I play it some time later. It was my first wad/mod for Doom played.

2012 - after messing around with DB2 a little I make my own maps. They all fucking sucked

2013-2014 - I make some somewhat decent maps. I never release any (until 2015 when I released circuitry) and I check out websites to be part of the Doom community.

2015 - I join Doomworld and become an almost full time level designer. Currently working on my own solo project, as well as experimenting with different editors.

2016(?) - I release a full 32 level wad. I'm anticipating this is when it will happen. It may take longer.

Played the SNES and Playstation versions as a kid. I stopped playing for about 14 or 15 years. I honestly never thought I would return to the game, but here I am about a year and 8 months after returning, still playing strong.

I am also strictly a keyboard player (with GZDoom), and have become quite adept with it. I don't know whether I could ever set a record, though I would certainly like to. I'm literally seconds away from getting the UV max record for a certain level, though given the frustration it's getting harder to continue.

I've only played the official id software games, having mastered Doom 1, Doom 2 , then Final Doom. I've toyed with the idea of playing the fan-made wads (aside from Final Doom), but don't know if I want to put that sort of commitment into another one.

From one keyboard player to another, good luck with the record thing.

I've been to rehab 3 times

At first, I started using Doom casually, you know... just on the weekends with a few friends. But I always wanted to play more after they got tired. I was staying up late all night, using Doom. I had to keep playing Doom in order to motivate myself to get out of bed. I was using Doom all the time in private, in the bathrooms of public places, everyone knew I had a problem. My tolerance has gotten so high, I have to play at least half a megawad before turning off the computer. I'm waking up in the middle of the night, having these nightmares that all the door hinges in my house are not lower unpegged, it's madness. Whenever my friends come over to deathmatch, they look at my keyboard and notice that my WASD keys are rough and black, with the etched letters completely worn away. They ask me if I'm alright, if I need a place to stay or something, just to let the Doom get flushed out of my system. But I half-laugh and say I can exit back to the DOS prompt anytime I want to. The thing I know for sure is, my life is so AASHITTY I can't recognize my OUCHFACE in the mirror anymore.

I remember my brother (he always cared more about videogames than me, I can hear him listening to gaming podcasts in the shower every day before work) getting massively excited about this "upcoming game" called Doom. When I saw it, I was excited too. I'd known about Wolfenstein, vaguely (my brother had an awesomely gruesome poster of a zombie Nazi... he must have been like 6), but Doom looked incredible. We devoured magazine articles about it... but only had a Megadrive, so couldn't play it. Our family was poor, and a 32X was an impossible dream, a PC didn't even enter the equation.
Then, one of our friends said he'd got it! I can remember being absolutely awestruck... like the feeling you'd get if one of your ordinary friends suddenly said he had a Ferrari you could borrow, it seemed that incredible. Anyway, it was only the shareware, but his dad was an architect, and had a 486, so we could play it on the jaw-dropping "high" setting. No sound, though - you don't need that to CAD up some houses. When it came down to it, we just kind of blundered around in god mode, massacring everything with the BFG, and getting lost. Me, my brother and our friend had 5-minute bursts of it each, and would often get stuck on walls and scenery, or stumble about in panic when a Spectre attacked us. I must have been about 9, then.
A bit later, we got Zero Tolerance for the Megadrive, and that "had to do", until about 1996, when my brother won a Playstation off a competition in The Dandy (a British comic). Doom was one of the first games we bought, and for years it coloured my perceptions of the game - I just assumed the PC version had the same levels, coloured lighting, creepy music etc. My friend also had it, and used to talk to me about editing - I was already making plans for mods with tons of extra monsters and hundreds of levels (I even bullshitted him that my old friend's "version of doom" had "hundreds of levels". I didn't even know that wasn't possible, at the time). Basically, Ultimate Hell!
Anyway, in 1999 (heh, that 6 year gap felt WAY longer), a rich aunt we barely knew we had died, and we got some money. We got a PC, a 450mhz, 10gig HD, Windows 98 monster! For my next (15th or 16th?) birthday, it had to be Doom! I kept trying to run wads from the Maximum Doom shovelware CD in Doom 95, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. A bit later, I discovered Doomworld, Doom Center and Doomsphere (hurry up, Securitron 3! I want that cool shotgun). This led me to source ports. I got Legacy, because I could use the launcher to play PWads. I also, finally, worked out how the "confusing" archive worked. My other favourite game, at the time, was Total Anniahlation. People making extra maps and units for that would make rudimentary "installers", so you couldn't go wrong. Having to "work" to get Doom Wads running hurt my head.
Shortly after that, I started to get my head around editing, and immediately started a TC called Doom London: 2666 (a reference to GTA London: 1969). Shame I didn't know the basics of editing - like how to make doors. The first 12 levels were just a bunch of rooms thrown together. I think I finished 17 levels, and a bunch of sprites, before I realised I'd screwed up, and merged all my shit into the Iwad (I somehow assumed I was "putting it into Legacy", using tools that predated Legacy!). I started another amazing TC, this time a PWad, but that also failed. I also made a randomly-textured map of my school, shortly before I left it (I wish I had that, too. I have a half-done remake). I'd also learned more about editing and how to run stuff, by now. I had a version of Zdoom with bots, made a DM version of my school, and had hours of fun fighting them in it.
I also started another TC, this one with a consistent theme and plot, called Anarchy Doom, in which you played as a revolutionary, fighting the sinister future government (in 2010), and uncovering an alien conspiracy. It was almost finished, until I fucked up and overwrote the wad with Inkworks (I thought it would put the edited palette INTO the wad, not save a new one). Naturally I had no backups.
After that, I started yet another TC, this one based on my stupid Final Fantasy based webcomic, Insanity Please (which I still continue, on and off). I still have that TC, with it's shitty paint enemies and ripped resources, I might release it one day. Around that time, I discovered that "Dosdoom" was now EDGE, more stable, and allowed you to make totally new monsters! It became my main engine, helped along by the old wad called UAC Resurrection (still one of the 'sanest' projects for EDGE!). I started a wad called Ultimate Hell, a "retold story of doom", with loads of new monsters. I'd almost finished the third level, and was also re-making the second, when I lost almost everything in a crash (actually, my data HAD still been there, but I didn't know, and formatted my HD. Windows XP wasn't all fun and games). I had given my work in progress to some guy only days before, but I couldn't find him again, so was stuck with a much older version, and gave up. I also started re-making my crappy semi-jokewad Bughunt, with much better graphics and tweaked level design. I also wanted to make some things with zombies in them, but my attempt at making a base sprite failed miserably (I did the whole thing, and a load of death sequences, THEN discovered he was way too thin, in game). I lost interest in Doom editing for many years, though I hung around the community a bit longer, just playing stuff, and faffing about with my Insanity Please wad.
Then, a few weeks ago, I suddenly fancied Dooming again. I'm working on some base sprites for a number of projects I've had running around in my head, including:
-A tribute to that Otakon 1996 wad. He said he was "catching the tail end of this Doom thing". What the fuck am I doing, 20 years later?
-Insanity Please, re-made and good
-Bughunt 2, finished up and crapped out
-Anarchy Doom, re-made. Except it will actually just ridicule the way I used to think, in lengthy, strawman-argument filled cutscenes.
-Anarchy Doom, re-made again, but about actual "anarchy", and alien conspiracies... actually, a tie-in with a bunch of comics I'm doing.

Started with the Doom shareware (using Doom95) on a 'Games for Windows 95' CD at age 9. Hexen was my first FPS prior to it though.

Doom opened the way for shareware and demo downloading of other similar games (Heretic, Quake, Duke3D etc.) but what grabbed my attention especially was all the screenshots of Doom II on the internet.

I didn't know about addons for games and that many screens depicted PWADs and custom content on various old fan pages made for Doom II. I ended up mistaking everything I saw as Doom II.

I got Doom II physically as my first registered Doom game, only to be confused by the lack of custom content and cheat warping to a total of 32 levels.

Doom II introduced me to the plasma rifle and BFG in addition to the SSG as well as the registered Doom 1 and Doom II exclusive monsters since I didn't own The Ultimate Doom yet.

Doom II also introduced me to Wolf3D due to the secret levels. You can imagine how puzzled I was wondering why there was rooms full of Nazi imagery everywhere and the little blue guys I'd come to know as SS in the Wolf3D shareware I'd download later on.

As I said earlier, Doom II introduced me to addons for my favorite games, to which would be the 8-level PWAD 'ASDOOM2' from the DoomGate website. From there my adventures of Doom II would never come to an end. I downloaded countless classic 90s megawads.

Doom II, as well as Doom as I'd get registered copies of Ultimate and Final and eventually the Master Levels, revealed more complicated PWADs that I couldn't run on Doom95 (and confusing the hell out of me with the lack of DeHacked support) and I'd discover source ports like Boom, Legacy and ZDoom.

I briefly played Doom online for the first time in 2007 via ZDaemon, mostly co-op. Doom multiplayer took off in late 2008 and all of 2009 when I got Skulltag, the funnest and most productive year for Doom playing, online and off.

Doom is also the first game I've been able to truly mess with thanks to programs like SLADE (I was using XWE prior to that, ew I know) and the easiest code ever DECORATE. Plenty of hours of fun has been had with modifying Doom to my liking.

As of now, I go on and off of Doom, mixing my games up, old and new, anything I like to return to every other blue moon or few years. Sometimes I forget how great Doom really is, even when my rival, Wolf3D, can be my favorite 2.5D shooter with its array of content to pass some time, I'll eventually go back to Doom and be amazed again and wondering 'Why the hell wasn't I playing this sooner?!' and go on a spree with it.

Therefore, the addiction has begun. Again. Even after a year of hiatus. Doom is a game that IMHO has to be played annually.

I remember when I was about 5 seeing my dad go through Doom II and both parts of Final Doom. When I was 10 I started playing FPS games with Wolf3D and then got Doom II when I was 11. It was on the Doom95 port, of course. I played the game with a strategy guide because I really suck at not getting lost a lot. Later I asked my father for Ultimate Doom, which he also had a CD and also was on the Doom95 port. by about my middle school years (around 2008-09) I all of a sudden looked up custom wads on DWS and found a few to play, but wasn't too satisfied until I downloaded ZDoom to play some of the more customized ones. that was also when I stopped using the keyboard as a primary movement and used the mouse. That was also the time I kept my Dooming a complete secret from my entire family. for some delusional reason I try to hide my gaming entirely from my parents.

as of now I'm still playing a load of PWADs just for fun or frustration, and only in 2013 (the year I registered here in fact) did I attempt to make some custom edited maps myself. I just do this WAD stuff at complete random because I have no rhythm or rhyme.

still a casual, never stop being one.

Forgot to mention that I was a complete pussy in the early years when I played Doom and either played with cheats IDDQD and IDKFA or went on the lowest difficulty. But Doom also made me a man with Shitbag's 'Brain Buster' which I went straight to UV on and haven't been the same since, ha.

My Doom experience has progressed so far that I no longer find any excitement in vanilla Doom megawads (those without Dehacked anyway). They're very predictable by now.

I'm considering trying ZDoom level packs (rare as they are) that borrow gameplay from the other Doom-like games (so I have stuff like inventory, dynamism and RPG elements). But I risk encountering heavily scripted linear maps with hyperactive Japanese console game music. Alternatively I might look for innovative Boom/MBF mods, that make clever use of Boom map features and/or advanced Dehacked.

Currently I'm enjoying Heretic wads. The excitement hasn't been consumed, yet, with this game.

printz said:

My Doom experience has progressed so far that I no longer find any excitement in vanilla Doom megawads (those without Dehacked anyway). They're very predictable by now.

I'm considering trying ZDoom level packs (rare as they are) that borrow gameplay from the other Doom-like games (so I have stuff like inventory, dynamism and RPG elements). But I risk encountering heavily scripted linear maps with hyperactive Japanese console game music. Alternatively I might look for innovative Boom/MBF mods, that make clever use of Boom map features and/or advanced Dehacked.

Currently I'm enjoying Heretic wads. The excitement hasn't been consumed, yet, with this game.

Try going through megawads with characters from the Samsara mod or addons to it!

Blaskowitz's little machine gun wrecks faces!

I just did my first glide in MAP16. Suddenly I just thought to try it and it worked. Then I grinned like Doomguy when he picks up a weapon. Doubt I really need the skill though, as I don't want to do any sequence skipping.