Lee Killough Appreciation Thread

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Lee recently rejoined the community, to inform everyone about Jim Flynn's passing. I was never able to thank him and the rest of the team for the profound impact of their contributions to the community.

 

Before the release of the Doom source, Lee was investigating the many quirks of the Doom engine, with a special interest in visplane overflows. Through tireless experimentation, Lee developed heuristics that he incorporated into BSP, that would reduce the possibility of encountering visplane overflows.

 

When the Doom source was released, Lee and the rest of TeamTNT set out to build one of the most stable, efficient, clean source ports out there, Boom. The improvements brought by Boom are too numerous to list here. The programmer in me causes me to take a particular interest in Lee's contributions. Lee's code serves to stabilize various Doom functions, remove static limits, improve performance, and fix many bugs. Boom also achieves the impossible: Using new source code to play old vanilla demos in sync. Lee was instrumental in making that a success.

 

After Boom, Lee went on to produce MBF, which brings even more stability, and new features. It is important to note that nearly every modern source port designed for modding incorporates Boom and MBF code, as the definitive standard first step - it's practically a requirement.

 

Personally, I appreciate everyone that has contributed to Doom. But I cannot think of a programmer, outside of John Carmack, that has done more for Doom than Lee Killough, and though I am sorry for the reason he decided to log on, I am very glad to have the opportunity to highlight his still-relevant achievements. So, I would like to say "Thank you, Lee! You are appreciated."