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shadow1013

Don't you wish we had DoomEd?

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Even though it has been many years since the release of the DOOM source code and we have many map editors, we still lack DoomEd, the original map editor for DOOM. Even though DoomEd was written in Objective-C on a NeXT it would be very interesting to see it come out and be able to port it, then use it, even if it was a GNUstep or Cocoa application. After all, every other iD map editor is opensource, such as TED, QuakeEd and Radiant. Just random ramblings from someone.

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From what I heard, DoomED was a hassle to work with and wasn't user-friendly at all, id likely considered it too much of a chore for the average player to work with and thus allowed us to build our own tools for more ease of use.

It's certainly an interesting and important part of Doom's history that we don't have, but having it for the sake of it may be of more interest for Doom completionists that have it all as opposed to actually trying to map with it.

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I'd like to see the source code, but that's purely curiosity. I doubt I'd do anything with it. And I wouldn't use it to make maps.

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I'd actually want to modify it, port it and whatnot, and from what i heard it was much like doombuilder... in that in order to make sectors you drew lines, and joined them, then set the attributes of each line/sector

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Cyanosis said:

id likely considered it too much of a chore for the average player to work with and thus allowed us to build our own tools for more ease of use.


Actually, id actively contributed exactly zero to the early modding community (pre-source code release) except maybe some informational contributions, and didn't release ANY tools of their own. Understandable, since releasing anything with the "official id seal of approval" beyond Doom itself would be nothing BUT a chore and a colossal PITA, even legally-speaking.

All tools made before 1997 were based on observation, individual reverse engineering and a lot of guesswork. The Unofficial Doom Specs were the main source of data until then (and it mostly is, to this day). I remember reading that id eventually contributed some bits into that (unofficially, of course) but that's where their involvement ended.

Id at most gave their "indulgence" towards such tools, which in itself is certainly commendable (not all developers/publishers are friendly/tolerant towards modding), but they did not release a single line of code until the SC release, which finally confirmed what the internal structs looked like, and even after the SC became available, the individual tools id themselves used only followed up much later. Well, some of them at least.

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Yes, and apparently most of the community didn't even know about it because when I posted them up here about last week, it seemed much a surprise, and even then it's not everything. What I find weird is why release the node builder, which is dependent on a format that the editor produces, without the editor

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shadow1013 said:

I'd actually want to modify it, port it and whatnot, and from what i heard it was much like doombuilder... in that in order to make sectors you drew lines, and joined them, then set the attributes of each line/sector


There was a huge difference between it and Doom Builder: it only had lines and things. That's all, folks! Sidedefs? They're line properties. Sectors? They're line properties.

In Doom Builder, you can split and join sectors; because sectors are their own type of entity. You can make ten thousand sectors with absolutely identical properties, they'll be ten thousand sectors.

In Doom Ed, you can't. Sectors don't exist by themselves. You just select each individual line and tell it "your floor texture is this, your ceiling texture is that, your floor height is so, your ceiling height is thus, and that is your sector effect". If you wanted to edit a sector which is bordered a hundred linedefs, you had a hundred linedefs to edit. Fortunately, there was a "flood fill" function which would copy the sector information to make it identical on all linedefs it found surrounding an area. This avoided a descent into insanity on the part of the level designers. But it was not perfect. See E3M8 for a good example of it failing.

Doom Builder and just about all other community-made editor is a lot saner in this respect.

My personal hypothesis is that DoomEd is actually an evolution of an earlier level editor made for a simpler game engine (maybe Wolfenstein?) where indeed all that mattered were walls and things. The paradigm used to build the level in the game changed (separating sides from lines, for example), but the editor didn't. I'll admit all my evidence for this hypothesis is this piggy-backing of sides and sectors on lines, and the header of DoomEd's map format being "WorldServer version 4", hinting that there were presumably at least three previous versions of WorldServer.

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@Maes most certainly. Prior to Doom (which was made more moddable in the first place than it's predecessor game) Wolf3D was and is still utilizing fan hacked EXEs to do things (minus the few experimental source ports available), it wasn't until that they realized we like modding their games that they'd allow us more freedom. That's one thing I still hold in respect for id, Rage aside (don't throw the topic off-topic dammit), is they give us their games' source codes.

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Well I can promise you DoomEd is most definitely a evolution of the Wolf3d editor, maybe ShadowCaster, as the Wolf3d editor was TED5 and all you did there was place tiles, and was a 16bit DOS app

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I never knew of this operating philosophy before, but it's really intriguing, if anything, for its minimality.

Under one point of view, it makes perfect sense, and would even help reduce the essential elements of a map to just its linedefs (after all, a map IS a bunch of lines, right?), with the actual sectors and other structures being reconstructible from the linedefs themselves.

This makes sense, since you can't have "orphan" sectors but you can have "orphan" linedefs, and you'd still be able to pull all kinds of tricks like self-referencing sectors, and perhaps even more tricks not possible with sector editor.

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If DoomED were actually released to the public then it would be more of an interesting artifact to explore than a usable tool. Doom Builder 2 is the best doom editor that has ever been created.

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I really wish John Romero releases the full Doom 1/2 dev dump, which would include DoomEd.

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Redeemer812 said:

. Doom Builder 2 is the best doom editor that has ever been created.


In your opinion.

I also agree that having DoomEd would be fun, who knows aybe someone could make something of it. Using the original tools for making maps would have a certain appeal.

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hex11 said:

Flood-fill function... is that the "sector inspector" tool that Romero proudly mentioned in the DTWID thread?

Not exactly, but yeah he talks about it in this post.
DoomEd on wiki

The sector inspector was just the panel containing the current sector properties and letting you change them.

I wish there were a higher-resolution version of that screenshot available:

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shadow1013 said:

(...)and we have many map editors,(...)


Hmm, you're talking Windows??
But where is the nice, shiny *nix - editor??
There MUST be something else than yadex!!?!?!

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DoomGater said:

Hmm, you're talking Windows??
But where is the nice, shiny *nix - editor??
There MUST be something else than yadex!!?!?!


If the response to this thread is any indication, there simply isn't enough interest in (and even some hostility against) new tools on non-windows platforms.

A reason for that is that those willing to use *nix are also -for the most part- willing to put up with the pains of compiling from source and consider the existing "cross platform" utilities to be the non-plus-ultra in functionality. In short: as long as they can keep compiling Yadex, DMAUD, MIDI2MUS, DEUTEX, etc. and the ultimate dependency clusterfuck, SLADE3 on their minimalist dev. environment, then they are perfectly happy. Can't argue with that.

With such an attitude, I for one wouldn't bother making e.g. a new WAD editor or level editor from scratch, on any platform.

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DoomGater said:

Hmm, you're talking Windows??
But where is the nice, shiny *nix - editor??
There MUST be something else than yadex!!?!?!


Slade2 has worked for years. Slade3 works now.

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All these tools could use some work. Yadex has a bunch of patches that never made it into the main codebase after years, and it's also missing important stuff like "undo" function (just like DEU 5.21). xwadtools needs to be cleaned up so it can actually compile cleanly in modern environments. There might also be issues with endianness and/or 64-bit systems. The version of deutex included is old and should be updated.

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Catoptromancy said:

Slade2 has worked for years. Slade3 works now.


Speak of the Devil...

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I'd prefer not if it's awkward and user unfriendly as it has been said. Doom Builder (and previously DCK) are good enough for me.

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Well I do use *nix and have no aversion to compiling my own software, but honestly, the mapping software we have here is so ridiculously unfriendly, in Yadex, for example, I'm not even sure how to draw a line, let alone create a whole map. It's a pain in the ass if I have to reboot every time just to create a new map.

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shadow1013 said:

Well I do use *nix and have no aversion to compiling my own software, but honestly, the mapping software we have here is so ridiculously unfriendly


Ignore Slade3 instructions, they are out of date.
Also Slade2 linux binaries.
http://ftpusers.coffeenet.org/~cato/freedoom/tools/slade_beta_20.tar
http://ftpusers.coffeenet.org/~cato/freedoom/tools/slade.README

I uploaded those binaries 2 years ago, so they might be out of date. If they dont work, I can make new ones.

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shadow1013 said:

Well I do use *nix and have no aversion to compiling my own software, but honestly, the mapping software we have here is so ridiculously unfriendly, in Yadex, for example, I'm not even sure how to draw a line, let alone create a whole map. It's a pain in the ass if I have to reboot every time just to create a new map.

I completely agree. I only have Linux and OpenBSD installed and I have no way to edit maps because yadex sucks and I can never coax slade3 into compiling. I keep considering making a simple tool suite of sorts for map editing. Different tools for each lumptype, and the map editor would most likely use Qt4. Or maybe phoenix?(The lightweight GUI "metatoolkit" bsnes uses with multiple backends.. Qt4, GTK2, native windows... pretty much like wxWidgets but tiny)

The map editor would be different than any other though, in that I would integrate DH-dlc into it. Real time "drawing" of the sectors with script, and some way to "decompile" maps into DH-dlc script. You can edit "traditionally" or strictly with DH-dlc(it would practically be an IDE for it) or a combination of the two :P Creating plugins for autogeneration of map features(stair builders etc) would be as simple as writing some "meta-code" that generates the DH-dlc script according to simple parameters.

If I ever did this I would also write an emacs "mode" frontend for all the tools so I could have a full doom editing environment(including ASCII drawing of maps :D) with the tools doing all the "work". Also allowing me to write metacode for DH-dlc in elisp. I doubt anyone else would use the emacs mode though, few people would probably use the tools period.

Man, now I want to do this. Heh. But would anyone actually use it?

EDIT: DH-dlc is like WadC, it builds maps from source. It's written in C++ by DavidPH and is found here http://github.com/DavidPH/DH-dlc

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Catoptromancy said:

Ignore Slade3 instructions, they are out of date.


Mostly, it's not a mapping software yet.

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I imagine it allowed you to do more things to the level (possibly modify the EXE to make boss levels work?) since it was, after all, the actual tool used to work on the original game.

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Marnetmar said:

I imagine it allowed you to do more things to the level (possibly modify the EXE to make boss levels work?) since it was, after all, the actual tool used to work on the original game.

Correction: it was the actual tool used to work on the original levels.

If they wanted to add new linedef types or level hacks like the boss levels, what they used was text editors for the source code and then the C compiler...

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Honestly. I'm probably just a purist I would like to make a cross-platform map editor (Qt is a good idea) that would output the .DWD files that can be compiled with doombsp, but the more important this is the horrifying lack of editors for linux. I can in fact compile Slade3 on my box and use it, but alas no map editor.

Thanks to Catoptromancy for posting the slade2 binaries, but is where may I find the sources? I run 64bit so I always get dependency errors :/

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Yadex is actually very nice once you learn how to use it. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the User's Guide in the source directory yadex-1.7.0/doc/, as it covers most of the editing functions. Older DEU tutorials will also be relevant (there may also be some books on the subject).

The best way to approach it is to make a very simple map, with just a few basic sectors and no fancy constructs. Then test it, and just keep playing around and experimenting with more advanced stuff.

I guess there's some room for a tutorial or something in addition to the Users's Guide. The old DEU 5.21 package includes a tutorial with a full episode (Knee Deep in the DEU) that illustrates how to implement stuff in that editor. That might be a place to start...

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