Init DOOM refresh Daemon.....

[Captain Red]

Can somebody explain the 'Init DOOM refresh Daemon.....' line that appears when you start dos doom? What dose it mean? It always sticks in my memory…

[Naked Snake]

It is a play on the term refresh domain.

[fraggle]

I have no idea what it is supposed to mean. It is displayed when the R_Init function in Doom is called to initialise the rendering subsystem (the part that does the actual 3d rendering).

[myk]

Well, it's the name they gave that function then. Daemon isn't a pun (well maybe a bit in this case, they may have chosen the term carefully), since it means a routine or program that does something beyond the users' access (e.g. mail daemon.)

[Quasar]

As to why it calls R_Init a "refresh daemon," I honestly do not know, because R_Init doesn't do any screen refreshing, and its not a daemon -- daemons are background processes that are always running, and typically involve some constant operation such as running a web server -- hence HTTPD -- HTTP Daemon.

What R_Init DOES do is load tons of graphics, builds the texture data cache and constructs composite texture images from the patch lists, looks for sprites and checks that all rotations are present, loads the palette, colormaps, identifies the sky flat, and in BOOM, builds the tranmap.

This is why it takes so damn long sometimes ;) Its got a lot to do, but by doing it all at once at the start of execution, it makes the game run a lot faster later on.

[myk]

Maybe they just felt like stretching the definition of "daemon" because of the nature of the game or else the definition in relation to computers is actually a bit broader than that or was so in '93. There is another daemon for memory allocation loaded before the WADs are read.

[Fredrik]

I'm pretty sure that "daemon" was picked as a generic term for a subroutine of the program, technical inaccuracy in that nomenclature is irrelevant.

[Ultraviolet]

I hope they make it so that starting up with something like -dev on the command line makes the old start-up text display. :P Might be a cute easter egg (like with pink bunnies and flowers).

[timmie]

Quasar said:

As to why it calls R_Init a "refresh daemon," I honestly do not know, because R_Init doesn't do any screen refreshing, and its not a daemon -- daemons are background processes that are always running, and typically involve some constant operation such as running a web server -- hence HTTPD -- HTTP Daemon.

What R_Init DOES do is load tons of graphics, builds the texture data cache and constructs composite texture images from the patch lists, looks for sprites and checks that all rotations are present, loads the palette, colormaps, identifies the sky flat, and in BOOM, builds the tranmap.

This is why it takes so damn long sometimes ;) Its got a lot to do, but by doing it all at once at the start of execution, it makes the game run a lot faster later on.

It does initialize the refresh subsystem though, and "daemon" fits better with the Doom theme than "subsystem" :) Stretched meaning or not, it sounds cool...

[Lobo]

The term is entirely correct because a Daemon is defined as "a process that runs in the background and performs a specified operation at predefined times or in response to certain events"

[Quasar]

timmie said:

It does initialize the refresh subsystem though, and "daemon" fits better with the Doom theme than "subsystem" :) Stretched meaning or not, it sounds cool...

Oh, I agree ;) I would never think of changing what it says in Eternity (although you only see it in Eternity if you select textmode startup).

[Quasar]

Lobo said:

The term is entirely correct because a Daemon is defined as "a process that runs in the background and performs a specified operation at predefined times or in response to certain events"

Well R_Init doesn't run in the background for one thing, and it doesn't perform an operation at any scheduled time other than at startup.

If R_Init is a daemon, then so is every single other function in DOOM or in any other C program, because there's no appreciable distinction :)

[Lobo]

Quasar said:

Well R_Init doesn't run in the background for one thing, and it doesn't perform an operation at any scheduled time other than at startup.

If R_Init is a daemon, then so is every single other function in DOOM or in any other C program, because there's no appreciable distinction :)

Hey don't complain to me, man! I didn't invent the definition of daemon! If it's anyones fault it's Id's for not using the term correctly ;)

[timmie]

Oh, also it says "Init Doom refresh daemon", not "Start Doom refresh daemon". Initializing the data for a process is different than starting a process (in this case the process is the main loop)... Semantics, I know :)