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Maes

The first PWADs

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OK, other than the legendary ORIGWAD, is there some trace/memory of which was the second PWAD to be released? How about the first one made with an editor (and which was the first public editor, btw), and the first PWAD for Doom 2.

I have some recollection of the first Doom 2 PWAD being described as being a "hacked" and "hex edited" Doom level (a pretty large one too).

How about the first PWAD with modified graphics/sounds/music etc. ?

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Michael Kelsey was one of the first people to release maps. He made one of the maps in the "Knee-Deep in the DEU" package (found in the DEU 5.21 release Grazza linked to, dated April 27th, 1994), and this map of his, STONES.WAD, is probably one of the earliest "proper" PWAD creations (dated March 26th, 1994, i.e. 19 days after ORIGWAD was made, and according to the author made using DEU 5.0(!)). It is, however, highly unlikely that it is the very earliest, or even Michael's earliest, given the commentary in the .txt: "Yet another WAD file designed completely from scratch". It is surprisingly good for a map of that age. BTW, later in 1994, he made Return to Phobos, which is an excellent mapset -- one of the very best made that year.

EDIT: Two other zips featuring very old maps are DMPITS (dated April 3rd, 1994, but not a "proper" PWAD, just a heavily re-worked E1M6), and wadpak1a, a collection of some early maps. The original .txt files for the maps included in that compilation have been preserved and the the two oldest maps there are dated March 27th, 1994 (for TNCROSS.WAD) and April 2nd, 1994 (for BEHOLDER.WAD). I'm not counting the text file for MELANGE.WAD, dated January 20th, 1994, since that has to be a mistake.

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I think I've played all of those (about a dozen years ago). KDITDEU brings back memories. Sucky pwads... those were the days.

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GGG said:

I think I've played all of those (about a dozen years ago). KDITDEU brings back memories. Sucky pwads... those were the days.

Well, I remember picking up 2-3 random PWADS daily in the 486 days: smallish/medium if I wanted a quicky, or I sorted by size to pick potential megawads (I had/have a shareware CD-ROM laden with "oldskool" levels.

Every level I played, even the most crappy one, was something new that gave more bang for the buck to Doom/Doom2. Megawads/TCs were like a new game....so there, none complained about crappy levels, unless they had obvious flaws like unclosed sectors or HOM.

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I remember when i finally got a PC in 1999 one of the first games i got was Doom, Doom 2, Master levels and Maximum doom. After faffing about with the barely-working Doom 95 a friend suggested Legacy, as i didnt even know how to create an exe.exe -file wad.wad batch file the launcher helped me a lot, plus i loved the blood splatters on walls and the fact you could make it stay laying on the ground (though in those days it would hover in the air if it landed on a lift that then went down). I was really excited when i finally got Maximum Doom wads working in Legacy, finally i could see some of the "50,000 sites with levels on" my friend had told me existed for doom. Ok so they where crap but i was experiencing new worlds created in peoples imaginations... it was awe-inspiring.

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I don't buy that STONES.WAD is the very first PWAD made with a level editor. I believe that the date was modified at some point to make it appear more significant than it is. Out of all of the PWADs dated before March 31st 1994 that were made with DEU, 23CASTLE.wad is the only one I believe.

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Well, it's all guesswork, I even said about STONES.WAD: "It is, however, highly unlikely that it is the very earliest, or even Michael's earliest". In wadpak1a, another of Michael's maps, CORTYR_B is included, along with its textfile, dated April 11th, 1994. Michael signs the file: "Michael Kelsey (author of STONES)" which would strongly indicate that STONES was indeed an early map.

What is clear, though, is that there are only a handful of WADs preserved that are dated March, 1994. Also, about 23castle being the oldest... what about TNCROSS? according to the preserved .txt in wadpak1a it is dated March 27th, 1994 -- the date is explicitly written down, even. Just as 23castle, according to the .txt it was made with DEU5 beta4, and it is most likely about a day older than 23castle. :-P

EDIT:
Not that I'm implying that TNCROSS is the oldest. Its textfile even mentions another map as inspiration, "Alastair Brown's simple CROSS.WAD".

It's just too far back to be anything but guesswork, but I guess it could be an interesting (though laborious) task to try to assemble a group of maps which would most likely be among the first, say 100, maps to have been made.

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I probably shouldn't have said "very first", but this is a thread about the earliest PWADs. =P

Kristian Ronge said:

It's just too far back to be anything but guesswork, but I guess it could be an interesting (though laborious) task to try to assemble a group of maps which would most likely be among the first, say 100, maps to have been made.

I'd go with 10 PWADs, not including edits of ID maps. I have to admit that Argh!_1.wad is a very, very creative and interesting edit of E2M1, given the constraints of being unable to (re)build nodes.

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I checked my "DOOMANIA" CD-ROM from the golden days, and I saw it had several files dated before 29/3/1994 (That would be 23castle's date). A few of them are dated January or even February, but those are likely falsified.

Some other candidates:

DEADLY21.WAD 28/3/1994
EW_E1L1.WAD 28/3/1994
E1M7BCE.WAD 27/3/1994
LITHE2M1.WAD 27/3/1994
BRIAL3L1.WAD 27/3/1994
STONES.WAD 27/3/1994
E1M5_DJS 26/3/1994 (modified E1M5)
DARKNESS.WAD 26/3/1994
JEFF_1_2 24/3/1994
DYLAN1.WAD 24/3/1994
E1L1AR.WAD, E1M1_C.WAD 24/3/1994 (Just E1M1 modifications)
DIAMOND2.WAD 23/3/1994
(...several more edited original levels...)
PILLARS.WAD 18/2/1994 (has matching .TXT, claims to be made with DEU 5.0)

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all this talk of old pwads is making me want to play the "lost episodes of doom" again (jupiter v40).
there are a couple levels in that set that i still think of fondly to this day...especially that draining pool level.

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Maes said:
Some other candidates:
[...]
DIAMOND2.WAD 23/3/1994

Yes, I remember that one now, I have played it, it's in the /idgames archive (with two incarnations of the same map, both DIAMOND1 and DIAMOND2).

I suddenly remembered playing this (e2m1ed.wad), also dated March 23rd, 1994, and made using deu5 beta4 (the author makes a big fuss about the map being NEW and not a hack, which would indicate that it is indeed very old).

PILLARS.WAD 18/2/1994

Also found in the archive, but that date has to be incorrect (for one thing, the author uses the WAD authoring template, which I'm fairly sure didn't come about until some time in April, 1994).

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Kristian Ronge said:

Also found in the archive, but that date has to be incorrect (for one thing, the author uses the WAD authoring template, which I'm fairly sure didn't come about until some time in April, 1994).

Perhaps he made the wad on 2/18 and then made the template in April.

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Kristian Ronge said:

Also found in the archive, but that date has to be incorrect (for one thing, the author uses the WAD authoring template, which I'm fairly sure didn't come about until some time in April, 1994).


Which leads to the question: when was the "template" defined and which was the first WAD to adopt it? :-p Also, still no answer about Doom II first WAD....I must still find that WAD that claimed to be a "hacked Doom I WAD using Doom II linedefs"

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Kristian Ronge said:

Can't see how, as both the WAD file *and* the text file in the .zip are dated February. :-P

He could have been referring to that he created a text about the wad in February, and then he converted it to that format when it was available, but the contents were from February.
Or maybe he just labeled them both for when the wad was made, even if the text was done later.

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Some other candidates:
Other than Orig.wad, I have a few old ones on my system, like:
Darkness.wad dtd 3/26/94
Barrel.wad dtd 3/28/94
deamon2.wad dtd 4/4/94 (Ver. 2)
temple11.wad dtd 4/5/94
Cortyr_b.wad dtd 4/10/94
11bones.wad dtd 4/11/94 I am sure a bunch of people have this one.

I have At least another 10 or so dated April 94 and then a boatload dated May 94 and newer.

edit:
I have no clue how many of the above wads might have "faked" dated dates but some of them must be real.

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GGG said:
He could have been referring to that he created a text about the wad in February, and then he converted it to that format when it was available, but the contents were from February.
Or maybe he just labeled them both for when the wad was made, even if the text was done later.

You clearly don't understand; there's no labelling, the *creation date* of the files themselves is February 18th. It's an obvious case of a faulty (or incorrectly set) system clock somewhere in the process. ORIGWAD was created March 7th and even by that time there were no editors capable of nodesbuilding available (that's why its author Jeff Bird had to build the nodes by hand).

EDIT: Hmm... It would be helpful to know exactly when the first nodesbuilder was publicly released.

EDIT #2: After some snooping about the newsgroups archives, I found this. Raphael Quinet (the author of DEU) mentions in a newspost to alt.games.doom on March, 22nd, 1994, that he's "spent a few days writing a nodes builder" but that he still had "some problems with it". He also mentions that DEU 5 is in beta testing. This gives us a pretty good time-frame. It is unlikely that many maps would have been made well before the time of his post, because as we know Raphael Quinet was the one who came up with the original algorithm for the BSP nodes builder. Now, he may have shared his ideas and output with some people who may have tried it out (hence the "beta testing"), and those maps would then be the first original maps (apart from ORIGWAD).

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In the text file for "Daemon Version 2", Daemon2.wad dated 4/4/94 Cameron Newham mentions he used "BSP 1.0 and DEU 5.0 (Non-Beta)" to build it.

Cameron Newham was using the text template when he released BarreL2.wad.
(ver. 2) The wad and text are dated 4/30/94.

Maybe that will help with the time line.

Edit:
With the release of DEU 5.21, in May 94, the author included the text file template. There were also a number of tutor wads in the zip dated March 27, 94. Also in that zip, there was a mapset called KneeDeep as part of the release as well.

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OK, I did a little more digging around.

The ReadMe.1st file that came out with DEU 5.21 Shows:

(version) "5.00 30 Mar 94 Automatic Nodes builder!."

This is the first mention of a nodes builder in his text file. It also shows a list of other features. That read first file also shows a change log as far back as:

(version) "2.00 26 Jan 94, First release."

And says version 1.0 was never released.

So there may be some other maps dated around Feb. 94 that are real, but apparently no way to build the nodes until mid to late March 94, if you were "in the loop" with access to the newly written, or even beta, nodes builder.

So, Jeff Bird, at the time of Orig.wad release, Mar. 7, 94 was not apparently aware of the release of DEU in Jan. 94 and was not in the loop in mid to late March 94 when the nodes builder was written then released. Jeff Bird had his eyes on releasing his own editor. I cannot recall if he ever did another map or actually did release that editor. A search in the archives for "Bird" brings up no additional maps by him.

This info more or less verifies the info posted above by Kristian.

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GGG said:

Perhaps he made the wad on 2/18 and then made the template in April.


The Pillars text file shows he used DEU 5.0 for the wad. 5.0 was released March 30, 1994, and the text template is also a question mark. The text template was however included in the DEU 5.2 package. I am not sure if it was in the 5.0 package or not. I don't have that one yet, but would like to. I'll do a search.

Most likely a bad system time on that time stamp.

This is quite interesting:
http://www.johnromero.com/lee_killough/history/edhist.shtml

Edit: Typo

Edit 2:
Found deu 5.0 and some old maps here: For those collectors among us.
http://files.chatnfiles.com/Software%20Vault%20Ruby/CDR14/files.htm

There is no text file template in that 5.0 package. it is dated 3/30/94

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Searcher said:
This is quite interesting:
http://www.johnromero.com/lee_killough/history/edhist.shtml

Thanks, Gene! There we have it, from the man himself. Raphael says:

During March, I worked on a NODES builder for DEU. Alistair Brown posted
some info about Doom using BSP trees, so I looked for some papers about
computer graphics and BSP trees. I eventually figured out how to create
these objects (with the help of other people on the net) and I added a
Nodes builder to DEU. On the 30th of March, DEU 5.0 was the first Doom
editor able to create new levels. Even if it wasn't perfect, the Nodes
builder was a major breaktrhough.


This confirms what we both assumed: that Raphael Quinet made the first nodes builder (his newspost on March, 22nd implies he wasn't still entirely finished with it) and most likely supplied it with the beta versions of his DEU 5.0. And then, on March 30th, DEU 5.0 non-beta was released along with the first "fully functional" nodesbuilder. We still don't know when Raphael began distributing the betas (with the first, rough, incarnations of his nodesbuilder) though.

BTW, it's nice to find out who that Alistair Brown was. I found a newspost by him made on March 10th, 1994, thread entitled "So you want to make a new level?" with quite detailed analysis of BSP trees. This might be the post mentioned by Raphael above, which would mean he started working on making his nodesbuilder on March 10th, or thereabouts. The time-frame for the second PWAD generated from scratch would then be sometime between March 10th, 1994 (Alistair Brown posts info about BSP trees, and Raphael soon after starts doing some studying) and March 30th, 1994 (DEU 5.0 is released with a functional nodesbuilder).

Incidentally, another newspost by Alistair Brown on March 9th, 1994, announces Jeff Bird's ORIGWAD achievement. A certain David M. Simpson replied to that post on March 11th, claiming to have built a map from scratch, by hand, more than a month earlier.
Quote: "seriously doubt it is the first since I had a new level created for DOOM over a month ago, but four walls, several monsters and weapons isn't much to boast about ans since I did it by hand it only required knowledge of how the WAD file works. However, it is still an achievment, I just didn't think it was too interesting to other people (just the tiny level)."

There's no way to confirm that statement, of course, so it might be BS but it's an interesting post nonetheless.


EDIT: Thanks for the DEU detective work, too, Gene! I did find some info about older versions (pre-5.0) of DEU, none of them allowed users to build nodes from what I've gathered, they just allowed for re-arrangements of items, monsters, etc., retexturing and changing of tags, that sort of stuff.

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The detective work on that was fun, I really enjoyed it. The DEU 5.21 readme shows all those changes, and when the first nodes were "public build" (3/30/94)

So some of the very early wads are the ones we have already talked about above. I am not sure if the/any wad itself would show if the nodes have been built or not. Perhaps someone else knows if there might be a lump in the wad, or some other indication, that would show that or not.

So, these would still have to be contenders for the earliest Playable wads:
Darkness.wad dtd 3/26/94
Barrel.wad dtd 3/28/94
deamon2.wad dtd 4/4/94 (Ver. 2) I have no clue where ver. 1 might be.
temple11.wad dtd 4/5/94

The several tutor wads in the DEU 5.21 package are dated 3/28/94 surely had their nodes built, but are they considered playable?

Some of the others from the above posts could be contenders as well.

I was glad to find that quote above from Raphael. I am sure happy Lee Killough saved all that.

I just love a solvable mystery. :) Other than the obvious does anyone know of any earlier wads than these?

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