doom reading material

[40oz]

My iPod battery burned out and I've got a plane flight next week, so I was thinking about using my new Nokia Lumia as an ereader to get by all the waiting. So hopefully I'd like to load up my phone with a backlog of doom stuff. Preferably map making stuff, speed running or deathmatch strategy guides, doom editing tricks, wad reviews, etc. Also preferably mid 90s or early 2000s stuff. Html or txt formats would be ideal.

thanks in advance!

[axdoomer]

Master of Doom in a 239 pages .pdf file. It's a very good book if you haven't read it yet. I've read the first 80 pages (of the real book) while I was sick and it was very good. I stopped only because I didn't have time and I forgot about it with time. It starts at Softdisk in 1989 and it finishes in 2005, so it's really good if you want to learn the stuff that happened at id during Doom's development.

EDIT BY MOD: removed link to copyrighted material

[Zed]

If you haven't read it yet, maybe Tricks of the Doom Gurus. It's some sort of guide to level design, so it may not be what you're looking for, but it's a classic. It's .pdf and you can find it in this shovelware CD.

You could also try the Doom Novels, but I suspect you already thought about that, right?

There's also this one, though I don't know if it can be found in pdf/txt/etc.

[axdoomer]

Zed said:

You could also try the Doom Novels, ...

I you want to read the Doom Novels, do NOT read the last two ones, they suck! The author ran out of ideas and the story becomes very hard to understand at this point. The first one is good though.

[Foxpup]

Zed said:

If you haven't read it yet, maybe Tricks of the Doom Gurus. It's some sort of guide to level design, so it may not be what you're looking for, but it's a classic.

I kind of hate you now. Thanks to your suggestion, I've just started reading it, and what I've read so far is so hilariously inaccurate it makes me wonder if the authors have ever actually played Doom. I want to believe that there's actually useful material in here but the editors decided to pad out the introductory chapters with utter nonsense, but something tells me I'm not going to get through all 900 pages with my sanity intact.

[Zed]

Foxpup said:

I kind of hate you now. Thanks to your suggestion, I've just started reading it, and what I've read so far is so hilariously inaccurate it makes me wonder if the authors have ever actually played Doom. I want to believe that there's actually useful material in here but the editors decided to pad out the introductory chapters with utter nonsense, but something tells me I'm not going to get through all 900 pages with my sanity intact.

Uhm, sorry?

Honestly, I read that book many years ago (in fact, it introduced me to level-making at that time), so I don't know how accurate it is. I don't know much about level design, so it could be just my ignorance speaking in my behalf.

Having said that, I think that's not an issue given that 40oz is asking for some Doom-related reading, regardless of how accurate/relevant it is.

PS: Perhaps you could point out what's wrong in there. I was planning in reading it again (It's my intention to release maybe a couple of maps this year), so if you can give me some advice, that'll be great.

[Foxpup]

Having continued reading, I am pleasantly surprised to discover that the actual editing information is mostly accurate, and that only the introduction is nonsense. In fact, some of the nonsense is directly contradicted by the accurate information later in the book. Perhaps by the time I get to the end, I'll find that all the inaccurate information has been corrected, causing me to wonder why they saw fit to include it in the first place.

Inaccurate information in the introductory chapters includes such gems as:
Killing a pinky demon with 5 or 6 pistol bullets. (p75)
Likewise, 15 to 20 rockets ought to be enough to take down a Cyberdemon. (p76)
Large maps may benefit from having more than 4 co-op starts. (p66)
The IDMYPOS cheat is particularly useful in multiplayer. (p64)
On the subject of cheats, the IDDT cheat makes the Computer Map "obsolete", so why bother placing it in your maps? (p84)
Also, Wolfenstein 3D doesn't have a cheat code to give you all keys like Doom's IDKFA, and that's terrible. (p63)
Multiplayer demos are new feature in Doom 2. (p23)
Don't put too many monsters in a room, or you'll get a HOM. (p74)
You can't have a single sector composed of more than 25 to 30 vertices, that causes problems. (p28)
And many more!

[MajorRawne]

I second Masters of Doom. There is nothing I've ever read that got me so energised to stop dreaming and actually work towards what I want. It's about making dreams come true through hard work, determination and belief that what you are doing is amazing. John Carmack comes across as a complete prick, though. And they fired Tom Hall, then made his game anyway (Doom 3).

[Reisal]

axdoom1 said:

I you want to read the Doom Novels, do NOT read the last two ones, they suck! The author ran out of ideas and the story becomes very hard to understand at this point. The first one is good though.

I have to second this. The first one is great and the second is all right. However the third starts losing the entire Doom theme about a third or halfway in and the fourth book has literally nothing Doom about it. I could not finish it because I was growing bored of the plot.

Tricks of the Doom Gurus is a nice read if you want to read up on the older stuff in regards to learning to edit the game. It's a trip down memory lane.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Foxpup said:

Also, Wolfenstein 3D doesn't have a cheat code to give you all keys like Doom's IDKFA, and that's terrible. (p63)

This was actually true for a period of time, Apogee disabled the debug keys in v1.4, then later reenabled them in "v1.4g".

http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showpost.php?p=372456&postcount=2

Foxpup said:

Multiplayer demos are new feature in Doom 2.

They were introduced in v1.4 beta, which had some Doom 2 support, so it's sort of true! But not really, and v1.666 registered predates Doom 2's release anyway, so they can't even get away with the "but that was a beta" technicality.

[Foxpup]

Dragonsbrethren said:

They were introduced in v1.4 beta, which had some Doom 2 support, so it's sort of true!

I was about to call bullshit on this, but then I decided to actually test it, even though I already know for a fact that multiplayer demos have always worked. Further testing reveals that, although multiplayer demos can indeed be recorded and played back in Doom 1.1, the recording automatically stops when a player dies, making the whole exercise kinda pointless. Also, the deathmatch option isn't stored in old format demos, and can't be set using the command line during playback, so deathmatch demos will desync horribly. Later versions continue recording after death and correctly handle the deathmatch option (among others), making multiplayer demos actually useful.

The feature itself has always been there, it just didn't work quite as intended. It works perfectly if you want to record a co-op game in which nobody dies, though.

[fraggle]

Doubt there is anything in TOTDG that 40oz doesn't already know.

Maybe download the entire Doom wiki and browse through that. There are bound to be done things in there you haven't heard of.

[40oz]

fraggle said:

Maybe download the entire Doom wiki and browse through that. There are bound to be done things in there you haven't heard of.

That sounds cool, how does one go about that?

Read Masters of Doom (very good, but not interested in reading again)
I think I've browsed lightly through TOTDG, I might have another look but i don't expect to kill much time with it.
I've read the Unnofficial Wad Designer's handbook
I have the Doom Novels, haven't read em yet but I'm not too into fan-fiction. I might give it a shot if I have nothing else to turn to but I like more informational stuff.

[spicyjack]

40oz said:

That sounds cool, how does one go about that?

There are tools to dump wikis. A quick Google got me:

https://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/

When I helped migrate the Doom Wiki from Wikia to manc's server, the tool that someone said worked was MediaWikiDumper, so that's what I got to work. I was able to get a dump of all of the pages and the images from Wikia into a database for the pages, and into a directory structure for images. At the time I did the dump, it was about 400M of stuff. MediaWikiDumper has morphed into http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Grabbers, if you wanted to go that route.

[kmxexii]

If I knew an easy way to export my blog and make it look good for handheld reading, I would. The hodgepodge I ended up with looked pretty awful, though

[IMX]

Not sure about how does one go into downloading articles from this site, but this is a very, very good Doom fanfic

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9622356/1/Encyclopedia-Daemonica

There's a PDF somewhere, and while it is outdated slightly (check the above link for further info.) it serves its purpose too

[Vermil]

Dragonsbrethren said:

This was actually true for a period of time, Apogee disabled the debug keys in v1.4, then later reenabled them in "v1.4g".

http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showpost.php?p=372456&postcount=2

But what about the MLI cheat?

That mimics Doom's IDKFA cheat.