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Arno

Game Engine Black Book: Doom

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Since Google kinda fucked up the ebook version of the book, Fabien is now doing a makeshift "Pay what you want" feature at his website. I'll probably indulge in it to hand him a little more money and get a better version.

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The paperback looks great, from a first excited flip-through.

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$ 0.77 profit per physical book copy is really horrible.

 

I wonder if itch.io would have been possible for the PWYW version. It seems that they have a 500 MB limit that can be raised to 2 GB.

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42 minutes ago, Manuel-K said:

$ 0.77 profit per physical book copy is really horrible.

 

I wonder if itch.io would have been possible for the PWYW version. It seems that they have a 500 MB limit that can be raised to 2 GB.

 

Please consider sending that suggestion to Fabien. I was wondering which publishers he had approached. I would have thought "no starch" would have been a good fit. 

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500 MB is fine, he's looking to host a 370MB PDF file. There's a request on his twitter for a better hosting site, so suggest away.

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On 12/12/2018 at 10:23 PM, Jon said:

Please consider sending that suggestion to Fabien. I was wondering which publishers he had approached. I would have thought "no starch" would have been a good fit. 

I sent an email last Wednesday. Still no reply.

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maybe he meant "squashed by a door/platform" -- this is what "gibbing" internally means in the engine.

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1 hour ago, Revenant100 said:

Yes, 'tis a fine and informative black book and- wait a minute!

 

arch_gib.jpg.f94850eb84ab92c8d9ac2c72489b1965.jpg

 

 

 

He probably meant to talk about the pain elemental (when it's crushed).

Monsters like the pain elemental and the lost soul don't have reverse death animations programmed in the engine.

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On 12/13/2018 at 2:44 AM, InsanityBringer said:

Since Google kinda fucked up the ebook version of the book, Fabien is now doing a makeshift "Pay what you want" feature at his website. I'll probably indulge in it to hand him a little more money and get a better version.

I feel ashamed for not having a single dime to pay the man for his hard work. Bless him!

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1 hour ago, axdoomer said:

Monsters like the pain elemental and the lost soul don't have reverse death animations programmed in the engine. 

Lost Souls cannot be revived, but Pain Elementals absolutely can be resurrected by Arch-Viles through their RAISE state.

 

 

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I have been reading the PDF on my phone for a week or so and just placed an order on Amazon, it seems to be half off because I only paid about $25 USD so just a heads up to anyone who wants a deal.

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I finished this yesterday, I found it to be excellent overall.   I'm not a programmer, but enjoyed this immensely.  I highly recommend it to anyone who loves Doom, lived through the 90's era of gaming or dabbles in game design.

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Just got my copy in the post. I'll leave it at my office and read it (slowly) during lunch breaks, heh. Looking forward to it!

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Bought this (and the Wolfenstein book) from Amazon and really enjoyed them. So many things I never knew about the DOOM engine (including all the tricks they used to push the PC hardware and the VGA card to its limits and beyond).

 

Its also neat to read about various console ports and the things that had to be done to make them work (and the things that could have been done better if more time had been available).

 

I wonder if its possible (e.g. by using some of the files that were put into the Heretic and Hexen source releases) to produce an actual functional DOS version of doom (assuming you either stubbed out the calls to the sound code or somehow came up with a compatible/reverse engineered replacement). Specifically bringing back all the tricks used to get the graphics going on the limited VGA card and the ASM bits and stuff.

 

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6 hours ago, jonwil said:

I wonder if its possible (e.g. by using some of the files that were put into the Heretic and Hexen source releases) to produce an actual functional DOS version of doom (assuming you either stubbed out the calls to the sound code or somehow came up with a compatible/reverse engineered replacement). Specifically bringing back all the tricks used to get the graphics going on the limited VGA card and the ASM bits and stuff.

 

The original Linux Doom release got backported to DOS within a matter of months after the source release, so yes, it's entirely possible. 

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3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

The original Linux Doom release got backported to DOS within a matter of months after the source release, so yes, it's entirely possible. 

Looking at the dosdoom source, it isn't doing the ASM and other tricks ID used to draw really fast or the other special stuff ID did to actually make the game work (so it probably wouldn't run if you had a genuine 486 with a genuine graphics card from the period :)

Then again, unless you had the right version of Watcom and the right version of the dos extender they used, getting anything even close to what was actually shipped (ignoring the proprietary sound library) would likely be basically impossible.

 

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Has anybody used the PWYW option? Giving an e-mail address to an dubious download page looks fishy.

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No. I'm not happy about that, either. I'm also not happy about both other options. That's the reason why I haven't bought both books.

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w.r.t. the dos source code, Fabien makes a lot of references to the dos source, also stating that "it can be reconstructed with the heretic/hexen" source, but he goes as far as to mention timing of the source compilation, which is interesting... I wonder if he really just did work off of a reconstructed version of the original source. The sound library problem has been uh, semi solved, not legally, but due to a mistake on someone's part the DMX source code was leaked at one point.

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On 1/27/2019 at 11:05 AM, jonwil said:

Bought this (and the Wolfenstein book) from Amazon and really enjoyed them. So many things I never knew about the DOOM engine (including all the tricks they used to push the PC hardware and the VGA card to its limits and beyond).

 

Its also neat to read about various console ports and the things that had to be done to make them work (and the things that could have been done better if more time had been available).

 

I wonder if its possible (e.g. by using some of the files that were put into the Heretic and Hexen source releases) to produce an actual functional DOS version of doom (assuming you either stubbed out the calls to the sound code or somehow came up with a compatible/reverse engineered replacement). Specifically bringing back all the tricks used to get the graphics going on the limited VGA card and the ASM bits and stuff.

 

 

I think "pcdoom" is basically exactly this, with some of the other missing pieces filled in by reverse engineering the vanilla binary. 

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On 1/27/2019 at 3:48 PM, boris said:

Has anybody used the PWYW option? Giving an e-mail address to an dubious download page looks fishy.

 

On 1/27/2019 at 3:59 PM, Manuel-K said:

No. I'm not happy about that, either. I'm also not happy about both other options. That's the reason why I haven't bought both books.

Yes. I bought both books, plus added $50 PWYW because $0.77 just ain't right.

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