Introducing H.A/R.M - The Historic Wiki Project

[Redneckerz]

 

 

The DOOM history tree of hell is constant in motion and activity.  New ports come and go along with new wads and the discovery of new hacks. But every new port and every new release of an existing port or feature has a history of its own. People who worked on them towards the new build. At the same time we have developers establish new (Source) ports, either for the PC platform or for a whole new platform.

 

The DOOM Wiki and ZDoom wiki are lacking in these histories and meta-histories. This is where this little project comes in. After having researched and documented the ZDuke port and the GrbZDoom port together with members of the community, along with smaller things, i figured i should make this my Magnum Opus project for the community. An on-going effort to document that which is now sorely missing. And a little ''giving back'' to a community that has given a lot in its years of existence.

 

Welcome to: 

 

 

It is a documenting and archiving supplement project for the Doom and ZDoom wiki communities. Its purpose is to document all the missing source port links currently existing on the DOOM Wiki and other related Doom obscurities to establish a more complete timeline of DOOM. These may include the documenting of experimental source ports, testbeds and so on. These may or may not have been surpassed by newer ports, but they are part of a port's history and are therefore important or interesting to document. Delivering supplemental historical data for existing ports is also part of the portfolio, aswell as highlighting users that as of now go unrecognized, but deserve to be observed for their contributions even when they are not as visible as others are.

 

Other members of the ongoing community can review my changes at the wiki's for the moment (Because i have too few edits.. hah!) but eventually i hope i can speed up this process.

 

In short, The goals of the project are:

• Delivering historical data for all the ''red links'' regarding source ports on the Doom Wiki, aswell as creating completely new entries
• Supplying supplemental data for existing ports and related entries, both on Doom Wiki and ZDoom Wiki
• Highlighting essential authors of the community that currently have no recognition at present, yet their contributions have proven to be useful for the community

 

Note: This is a project of the long haul. I do not have the naivety to think this is a project done in a week or a month - This will be an ongoing effort. Nor can you consider something like this truly ''finished''. I am also well aware that the DOOM Community wants results first and maintains a ''do-it-yourself'' viewpoint regarding projects. After years of lurking and watching by this brilliant little community, now is the time to come out of the woodwork, undertaking something that is understandably less appealing, but will provide a lasting source of information for all DOOM citizens to come. The earlier ZDuke, WinMBF and GrbZDoom suggestions were a test to see if stuff like this was to be accepted and appreciated, and so they were.

 

The collective DOOM history is long and varied. So let's document it!

 

Credits to gifimage for the introduction gif.

[Xeriphas1994]

I wanted to reply with smart advice for a new doomwiki.org contributor, but then realized I don't have any, or I would be following it myself. So I'll just sphere your post and wish you success and satisfaction. You're already doing two very important things: paying attention to small details, and noticing what other users do. :>

 

Many, many historical technical contributions remain to be documented and those workers certainly deserve recognition (especially since most leave the community without writing long memoirs first), so it's an important project!

[Redneckerz]

20 hours ago, Xeriphas1994 said:

I wanted to reply with smart advice for a new doomwiki.org contributor, but then realized I don't have any, or I would be following it myself. So I'll just sphere your post and wish you success and satisfaction. You're already doing two very important things: paying attention to small details, and noticing what other users do. :>

 

Many, many historical technical contributions remain to be documented and those workers certainly deserve recognition (especially since most leave the community without writing long memoirs first), so it's an important project!

Well, if you have any smart advice, ill be all ears. Thank you :)

 

And thank you aswell for the compliments :) I have been working since on getting certain wiki pages up to steam and adding information to them, mostly around source releases and what not. At the same time i have contacted several authors on their work and to have it featured, and when that happens, ill make sure it gets a thread.

 

I am glad that both these authors and community members appreciate the effort. This solidifies for me that fulfilling this community project is the right way to go at it, leading ultimately to a DoomWiki where even the most obscure port or feature is documented in some way, shape or form.

 

Special thanks so far to @fraggle and @Quasar for lending a hand on their pages and doing the ever so small fixes. Thank you both.

[Redneckerz]

Ive decided this thread will play as an index of entries i will be making on Doomworld during this project highlighting unusual histories, ports, other tidbits and so on and so forth.

 

For an up to date ''repository'' of contributions, see my user page at the DoomWiki.

 

Entries so far:

• WinMBF goes 64-bit
• The story of Linux Heretic (and, uh, ggiDoom)
• MBF: A DOS Oddity (SIGIL/Nerve/Master Levels support, 386 build, etc)
• How QuickBASIC got Doomed: The story of IDKFA and the ATTE series

Edited April 7, 2020 by Redneckerz

[ReaperAA]

Since this is a project about documenting various obscure source ports or forks and their links, I would like to mention DUMB. It is a 3D game engine written in the pre source port days that could read .wad files and thus run doom, doom 2 and even Heretic maps.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot find anything else about this port right now (it doesn't help that it is named DUMB and google searching just brings dumb things).

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, ReaperAA said:

Since this is a project about documenting various obscure source ports or forks and their links, I would like to mention DUMB. It is a 3D game engine written in the pre source port days that could read .wad files and thus run doom, doom 2 and even Heretic maps.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot find anything else about this port right now (it doesn't help that it is named DUMB and google searching just brings dumb things).

You probably hate me for this but i already have that in my rather insane documentation file. When i say giving back to the community, i mean going all the way.

 

Its not a port, rather an engine that very closely mirrors Doom, as in it supports WAD files, has new lumps, but it isn't Doom.

 

So here is some more info:

Also has a port to the GGI window system on Linux: Here

DUMB Bugs historic archive

DUMB Readme

 

That readme is incidentially on the same host as you linked and contains a nice history of things:

 

 

''2. What is DUMB?

DUMB is a 3D game engine, reminiscent of id software's Doom. In fact it is gamefile (.WAD) compatible with Doom, and the related games Doom II and Heretic. The internal workings of DUMB are quite different to those of Doom, though.

Specifically:

 

a) DUMB does not use a BSP (binary space partitioning) algorithm to order wall textures. Instead it insertion-sorts the walls on the fly (a feature inherited from wt). This has the advantage that map vertices can move during the game without a costly BSP tree reconstruction.

b) DUMB adds several new lumps to game wads to control texture animation and object behaviour. The Doom engine requires these to be compiled into the game. A single binary of DUMB can thus play a variety of different games.

c) DUMB is more generalised in several miscellaneous ways. For example, it can render into large framebuffers at 8, 16 or 32 bits per pixel. Panning the camera up and down is possible (though this just moves the horizon around on the screen, it doesn't change the perspective that walls and objects are seen at). Textures can be displayed at various resolutions. Very tall (>128 pixels) textures are possible. Textures can be vertically tiled at any power-of-two height between 4 and 1024, and horizontally tiled at any width. And there's more....

DUMB is reasonably fast given this: an important goal for me has been to keep it running reasonably well on an i486-based Linux box (since that's what I've got).

DUMB is also VERY VERY VERY much a work in progress. It is not complete. I'm only releasing it because I thought that if I didn't now, I might never.

2.1 History of DUMB:

Some time in 1995, I was playing around with Chris Laurel's wt. I thought I would experiment by tuning it up to preview Doom WADFiles. And thus DUMB was born. I hacked about the renderer to use Doomish data formats internally, and eventually pulled it out of the rest of wt, rewrote bits, fixed bugs and generally hacked it around. For a couple of years, this process continued at a slow pace. DUMB gradually ceased to be a 2-hour hack, and became some kind of coherent whole. I ported it to MS-DOS, hacked the DOS version some, and ported it back to Linux again. It collected a X-based level editor, and various tools to generate other necessary bits of wadfiles.

In July 1997, I decided that it was going too slowly, and that I'd release it out into the world to see if anyone else was interested in helping, or even just commenting on it.''
 

 

Edited January 13, 2020 by Redneckerz

[Redneckerz]

Breathing new life in this topic for the moment to denote that several new entries have been added since, namely:

• MBF: A DOS Oddity (SIGIL/Nerve/Master Levels support, 386 build, etc)
• How QuickBASIC got Doomed: The story of IDKFA and the ATTE series

Find these at this post.