New Doom Engine written in Mozilla's Rust Language

[Ladna]

Someone has begun a new Doom Source Port engine using Mozilla's in-progress Rust programming language The code is on GitHub. It's just a renderer for now, but it looks like the author plans to at least implement player physics.

To me, the main points that stand out are that he's using Rust and modern OpenGL, and that he used information from the Doom Wiki and the Unofficial Doom Specs.

Thoughts?

[Sandstormer]

That looks really good. I wonder what the new source port will be called and what it's capabilities will be.

[Linguica]

It's not a source port and will never be a source port. The guy specifically states that he's not building off the Doom source in any way. This is closer to DUMB, which was a Doom-esque engine built from scratch.

More saliently, I would be shocked if he actually attempts to implement any sort of actual gameplay, as opposed to being a level viewer / proof of concept sort of thing.

[Maes]

And I who thought that tearing not-actually-source-ports "Doom source ports" apart was my thing.

[Sandstormer]

I humbly stand corrected.

[Ladna]

Linguica said:

It's not a source port and will never be a source port.

Oh yeah, good point. So edited.

Maes said:

And I who thought that tearing not-actually-source-ports "Doom source ports" apart was my thing.

Wellllll... we'll see. It may end up being a cheap Doom clone, but given that he's already loading Doom resource files, I think he's over the threshold of just being a maze shooter.

[Maes]

Ladna said:

Wellllll... we'll see. It may end up being a cheap Doom clone, but given that he's already loading Doom resource files, I think he's over the threshold of just being a maze shooter.

Then that would put it closer in concept to the STARK engine, an early attempt at making a scripting/VM port of Doom (in Java), or RUIN. Both these projects did load Doom resources to some extent, but internally they used completely different representation and logic.

Also, there was a "Doom recreation" written in .NET, which was able to use Doom resources but the engine/logic was deliberatly rewritten from scratch (don't remember the name though, sorry).

[cristicbz]

Author here, just wanted to chip in on the goals of it. I was planning to load and render sprites and have basic player physics and enemy AI (i.e. stand/run in circles and shoot at you).

In fact the trickier bits are all the linedef triggers: doors, lifts buttons etc. They're not difficult to implement individually, but since the game didn't have a scripting language there's a lot of different possibilities hard-coded in and they'd have to be replicated.

All of this is moot however since I started a new job a month ago or so (you can see the dip in commits) which, at least for now, is eating all of my time :(