Whence King Elvis and KDX?

[Martin Howe]

Subject says it all really. The KDX (King Doom Experience) was a WAD launcher / manager that was reasonably good, but is now a bit out-of-date, though it copes with DKotDC, Strife and GZDoom with a bit of config-file nerdness; it was last updated in 2003 to version 4.3.0

Does anybody know why it hasn't been updated since then or who "King Elvis" really is?

[Torn]

I guess he went away, when bongo the fag clown and King Re0l went away. At least I haven't seen him since doomcenter was up and running.

[CodeImp]

I remember having an arguments with him; If I recall, his tool "called home" to send user information while it didn't have any other needs for networking whatsoever. That was a long time ago though, I haven't checked it recently, so it may no longer be an issue if he changed it. He wanted to work with me on something similar as Doom Connector (when it was still Doom Connector 2), but that project never got off the ground; thats when he disappeared. He is (or was) on the Newdoom forums a lot, you might have more luck contacting him over there, or at least find some people who know about his current whereabouts.

[Checkmate]

I use KDX a lot. Any advice on what the best general purpose launcher is at the moment? One that works with all the ports?

[deathbringer]

port.exe -file wad.wad

make the nessicary changes to that, save it in notepad but change the extension to .bat

[Checkmate]

Deathbringer - Heh, that's simple alright. Never considered a lowly batch file before. Thanks

[Lobo]

Checkmate said:

I use KDX a lot. Any advice on what the best general purpose launcher is at the moment? One that works with all the ports?

Mine works with most(all?) ports: check my sig if you're ineterested...

[abysmal]

Checkmate said:

I use KDX a lot. Any advice on what the best general purpose launcher is at the moment? One that works with all the ports?

ZDL. I use it with Chocolate, zDoom, wHeretic and a few other ports should work fine with it. I even set Doom2.exe as a port and it works. Legacy seems to need its own launcher to work.

I set all .wad and .lmp files to open with ZDL. So all I have to do is click a wad or demo to play it.
For demos I click the .lmp file, type in "-playedmo demoname" in extra arguments, then just highlight a port and iwad. ZDL seems to ignore a demo as an external file, But it can be left there to make it easy to retype.
Playing demos this way is much easier than doing the whole command prompt thing. Also keeps demos organized in a folder, no dragging and dropping.

[Martin Howe]

OK, after several weeks of headaches and suffering, I have finally gotten the KDX to compile with VB 2005. This is what I have so far: KDXDotNet; it even works at a basic (sorry!) level. I just wish more of these things had been written in C or C++ to begin with :(

I only did this because KDX didn't support up-to-date source port standards, and there is more work to do; however, this is at least a starting point for development.

If any of you are interested in using this, the best bet is to install a spare KDX installation that you can afford to trash; however, I imagine that only programmers will be interested in this, assuming of course, that anyone is!

[Martin Howe]

The link above still points to the current version, but if anybody cares, that has been updated to at what I consider to be the first actually usable version. It recognises all the standard IWADs, including official shareware, demo and teaser versions, plus HeXen DKotDC. It knows about VOICES.WAD (Strife) and using HEXEN.WAD with DKotDC. It creates default LLT files and default databases, for each IWAD that needs them, on every startup, instead of only checking upon first installation.

Source only for now; just as well really: it isn't debugged enough to be releasable to the general public yet.

Comments? Flames? Suggestions?

[Lobo]

Just like to mention that I've also done a launcher, coded in VB.Net 2005 and I'll be making the source available as soon as I've got out a public release.

If you've seen my old ESL launcher then it's basically a port of that to 2005.

It uses XML for data storage and instead of having databases you have your individual user options stored in xml files.
To add/update Doom ports is as simple as creating a new port config xml file and sticking it in the data directory of the App.

As a matter fo fact, if anyone is interested in beta-testing then let me know!


P.S. Sorry for half hijacking your thread Martin! :)

[Martin Howe]

Lobo said:

P.S. Sorry for half hijacking your thread Martin! :)

No problem; for me, KDX is two things: (1) a good learning experience (until this, I knew ZERO .NET and almost no GUI: command-lines, C/Pascal and GCC/Turbo-Pascal were my bag) and (2) a stop-gap launcher until something better comes along. Of course, whether your launcher will be that something is another matter, but it certainly sounds good.

[Lobo]

Well if you want I can send you the beta to check out. Let me know if you're interested.

[Martin Howe]

Lobo said:

Well if you want I can send you the beta to check out. Let me know if you're interested.

Thanks; I would, but am way too busy right now (in RL as well as Doom) to test something like that thoroughly enough to give the author meaningful feedback on it. I'll certainly have a look at the first public release when it comes out though. Pity id Software didn't include a decent launcher with DOOM all those years ago :(

[SteelPH]

Martin Howe said:

Pity id Software didn't include a decent launcher with DOOM all those years ago :(

Back then, decent launchers were unheard of. :P