samboy

One thing I love about FreeDoom is that it allows me to legally make and distribute modified versions of it. This is something I have been doing for a while; starting in 2008. To save you a click: I originally just took FreeDoom and replaced its maps with Oblige-generated ones; that version understandably did not get a good reception. Not being discouraged, I have continuing working on this project on and off for the last 12 years and have moved far beyond just replacing the levels with Oblige-generated random ones. The current version of this project now only has one random level. The focus has changed. Doomsday 1.8.6 While newer releases of Doomsday have been made, there’s a lot to be said for Doomsday 1.8.6. It allows Doom to play like a modern First Person Shooter, with "WASD" controls and mouse look. It has—for 1990s Doom games—very attractive graphics, including glowing lava and bonuses. It has a playable frame rate, even on an Intel Core Dual from 2007 or an Intel Atom N455 netbook, and fits in a little over two megabytes of space. One problem with Doomsday 1.8.6 is that it crashes with versions of FreeDoom higher than 0.7. ObHack FreeDoom This is why I continue to develop and maintain my fork of FreeDoom: This is now a bugfix port of FreeDoom 0.7 for Doomsday 1.8.6. I have updated the low level sprites by using the improved zombie, shooter, and imp from newer FreeDoom releases. The FreeDoom wad has MAP01 and MAP02 from an older release of FreeDoom; since MAP03 causes Doomsday 1.8.6 to crash, I have replaced all the maps up to MAP12 with instant-exit placeholder levels. MAP12 is a random map. MAP13-MAP29 are placeholders (as are the two secret levels). MAP30 is a Deathmatch level contributed right here in this forum which I do not think ever made it in to FreeDM. I have fixed a number of bugs: There were some bugs in the older version of Oblige/ObHack I use with this which I fixed [1]. A lot of the music was buggy, with long periods of silence. I have either edited the music to longer longer have a lot of silence (MAP09’s music now has a drum solo; MAP21’s music now has a drum and bass solo), replaced the music by music from FreeDoom 0.12, or, in one case, replaced the music with the music from another level. Saving space This is a space optimized version of FreeDoom designed for my “put as much stuff on a 50 megabyte CD-R” project. This is the main reason why most of the levels are placeholder levels: It saves space to have the main wad be as small as possible, and use an older, small version of ObHack (Oblige) to make the levels. I have even hacked ObHack to, by default, make a particular set of levels which is the “official” megawad (it’s possible to change the seed and a lot of other settings as desired; it’s only the defaults which are changed). Code to procedurally generate levels takes up less room than hand-drawn levels. [2] Getting this I do not think this fork of FreeDoom will have much appeal beyond my personal use. However, people are free to look at it: https://github.com/samboy/ObHack I spent the last two weeks falling in to the rabbit hole of fixing all the bugs in my ObHack FreeDoom fork of FreeDoom. I am (for now) done with that project. [1] If Andrew Apted is looking at this, there was a bug where a block (remember: Oblige 0.97 divides levels in to cells, cells in to blocks, and sometimes blocks in to fragments) would once in a while be next to “the void” without a texture. I fixed this by looking for blocks next to the void, and having Oblige/ObHack remake the map if any blocks were 1) Next to the void 2) Did not have a “solid” texture and 3) Were not “sky border” blocks [2] I agree that hand-made levels are better, which is why I have three hand-made levels in the wad, despite the extreme space constraints I am working under.

The point of Doomsday 1.8.6 (or the corresponding version of JDoom) is that this is a “looks nice and runs on anything” version of the Doom engine. GZDoom is pretty close if we want something which is maintained today (not quite as nice looking as Doomsday; but it runs demos nicely unlike Doomsday 1.8.6, which, as far as I can tell, has no demo support), but Doomsday 1.8.6 has the advantage that I know it runs really well on a really old 2010 Intel N455 Netbook which I used to use; that’s the “lowest common denominator” I target. Maintaining Doomsday 1.8.6 is probably more work than it’s worth; if one wants to play online, use GZDoom instead. Doomsday 1.8.6 is still playable for network games when one is on a home LAN firewalled from the Internet. I know, that’s not a thing these days, but I have very pleasant memories of playing my buddies deathmatch when I brought my computer to their house and we did a bunch of 1-on-1 deathmatch levels. I miss those days; to recreate that experience, I play the old Nexuiz against the bots, but it’s not the same as the real-time banter that comes when the guy’s on the other side of the room from you.

Somewhat unrelated, but I have been working on my own fork of an old version of Oblige. That code has the ability to output wads as a text file instead of as a binary .wad; I use this ability to run tests against the code. I run tests like: If I remove this code, are all of the megawads made with a given seed and parameters the same as before? If I change this code to affect deathmatch play, and remove all of the multiplayer-only items, are the maps the same? If I change the number of monsters in a map, are all of the non-things (lifedefs, sectors, etc.) the same? Thinking out loud, since Andrew has mentioned UDMF format, and since UDMF is a text format, it should not be too hard to add UDMF support to this old version of Oblige; I just have to change how the text looks and update the tests to test against a UDMF map. This way, the text wad support can be useful for more than just running automated tests.

Necrothread update: I have made a mirror of this sometimes very useful utility at https://github.com/samboy/ObHack in the folder “midi3mus”. Doomsday 1.8.6 has issues playing some MIDI files, but no issues playing the same files after they have been converted to .MUS files.

Is it possible. Of course. Given enough thrust, it’s possible to make pigs fly. It is feasible and practical? Not from where I am sitting. This is where I give my open source economics lecture, because if I don’t give out this lecture, I put myself in a position where I can burn out like Andrew did—there’s a reason Andrew no longer makes new releases of Oblige and locked the entire Oblige forum. Open source economics is this: When people aren’t getting paid for their work, the expectations one has in a customer-supplier relationship are not there. The reason why Oblige has not implemented every single random feature someone on the Internet asked for, the reason why ObHack has not implemented every single random feature someone has asked for, and the reason why any popular open source project has not implemented every single random feature asked for is because the developers are not being paid to implement random features nor are the developers being paid to provide support. With open source economics, there are a lot more people out there asking for features than there are developers implementing the features. So, yeah, ask for a feature: But if it’s not a feature I’m interested in developing, and if it’s not a feature anyone else is interested in developing, it will not get implemented. Sure, if Mike Bloomberg came up to me and gave me a $100,000 contract to make a “ObHack-rogue” variant, combining the Doomsday code and the Oblige/ObHack code in to a single binary, I would do it. But as long as I am not getting paid, there’s little motivation for me to implement this feature.

I’m not sure making FreeDoom proper Doomsday 1.8.6 compatible is important. As long as FreeDoom works in Chocolate Doom (it does), and as long as it works with a 1990s version of DOS Doom (is this being tested?), if it crashes in an older version of Doomsday, that’s a bug on Doomsday’s side, not FreeDoom’s side—and it’s a bug the Doomsday team has already fixed. It would be more important to work with the Doomsday team to make FreeDoom a fully vetted IWAD for playing Doom-like games with—but I am not sure the Doomsday and FreeDoom team have the resources to engage in that kind of cooperation. Getting FreeDoom to work with Doomsday 1.8.6 is important to me, and that’s why I still maintain a fork of FreeDoom 0.7 which is fairly deeply frozen (only updating a few sprites, and updating the music since there was a bug with long periods of silence with a number of the sound tracks).

Let me clarify here, since there appears to be some confusion. The entire package has three parts: ObHack, the random map generator. This is a standalone application which generates a PWAD containing the randomly generated maps. FreeDoom, which is not an engine. FreeDoom is a set of music, levels, sprites, graphics, sounds, etc. It makes up an entire IWAD which, in the case of ObHack FreeDoom, acts like the DOOM2 IWAD file. It’s under an open content license allowing me (or anyone else) to distribute modified versions of it as long as we also include a copy of the license. Doomsday 1.8.6, which is an engine which combines the ObHack FreeDoom IWAD with an ObHack-generated PWAD to have a 32-level megawad of small levels (in can be completed in a couple of hours; it’s also possible to tell ObHack to make larger levels if a longer game is preferred). So, that in mind, one gets ObHack, its version of FreeDoom, as well as Doomsday from GitHub. Extract this Zipfile, then do the following if running Windows: Run deng-1.8.6/deng-inst-1.8.6.exe to install Doomsday ObHack does not have an installer. It has a directory, ObHack-engine-697/. In that directory is a file called “ObHack.exe”; run this file to generate the PWAD, putting the resulting .wad file in C:\Doomsday (the default location deng-inst-1.8.6.exe puts files) Note that ObHack.exe is not standalone; it needs the contents of the scripts/ and data/ folders to run (scripts/ has all of the Lua scripts which ObHack.exe runs to make the levels) In the folder FreeDoom is a file called “DOOM2.WAD”. This is an IWAD file which is an open source replacement for ID software’s DOOM2, using new music, sprites, textures, sounds, and graphics. Put this in a place where Doomsday can find it, such as C:\Doomsday Run in C:\Doomsday the “Kicks.exe” file. For “Games”, select “Doom II: Hell on Earth”. For graphics, have 32-bit graphics at the native resolution of your monitor. For “misc”, uncheck the box that GLbsp needs to be run (For people paying attention to this thread, I have pointed out that ObHack comes with GlBSP), and increase the memory to 128 megabytes or higher (with only 32 megabytes, Doomsday 1.8.6 can crash when playing MAP31 or MAP32 in deathmatch mode with respawning monsters). Maximize the screen. In the lower right hand corner, there is a long very short button which can barely be seen; carefully aim for and click this button to start the Doomsday engine. Doomsday/Kicks will search for and find DOOM2.WAD. Click “yes” that this is the wad to use. To load a PWAD, reopen Kicks.exe, click on “Games” then “WADs”, and use the “Add” button to load up the PWAD generated by ObHack above. To make ObHack’s annoying Oblige level markers look less obnoxious, also add the “Watermarks.wad” file (in the FreeDoom/ folder) as a PWAD after the ObHack-generated megawad. For people who want a modern WASD FPS interface, open up Doomsday, then hit “ESC” to bring up the menu. In Options → Gameplay, “Always run” should be “Yes”. “Jumping” should be disabled; it’s cheating with ObHack generated levels. In “Hud”, it’s desirable to set up a cross-hair to help with aiming In Options → Control, go to “Forward”, hit “enter” to choose the option, then hit the “w” key Likewise, “Backward” is “s”, “Strafe left” is “a”, “Strafe right” is “d”, and “use” is “mouse button 2” (right click on the mouse to choose this option) In Options → Mouse, turn on “Mouse look” At this point, it’s possible to start playing a megawad in ObHack FreeDoom. Some other points: The music is optimized for Microsoft’s (actually Roland’s) built in 3-megabyte sound font for converting .MIDI and .MUS files in to playable music. ObHack FreeDoom can sound nice with an open source (and, yes, larger) sound font, but there are issues, such as the guitar in MAP09 sounding off, and the organ in some maps distorting with other sound fonts. The DOOM2.WAD works nicely with other source ports. It’s best to play in a graphics accelerated source port, such as prboom-plus-2.5.1.4, but it can work even in Chocolate Doom (albeit as a degraded experience). I have had issues with newer versions of Doomsday not cooperating with FreeDoom. I haven’t tested with Doomsday since 2015. There is a built in short demo. This is only here so that ObHack FreeDoom doesn’t crash in Chocolate Dooom. Linux users and Macintosh users have the entire source code, and can port and compile programs as needed to run ObHack and a FreeDoom-compatible Doom source port. There is even a script which compiles ObHack in CentOS 7 in the Git tree, and compile instructions at the bottom of README.md. If someone purchased for me a Mac Mini with a 6-core i7, 64 gigabytes of memory, and 2 terabytes of storage, I would port all this stuff to a Mac.

There are several things in the GitHub package: ObHack, a fork of Oblige 2 Doomsday 1.8.6, whose source code I host in order to maintain GPL compliance midi3mus, a package which converts MIDI files in to MUS files. I used this to fix some problems Doomsday 1.8.6 had with FreeDoom’s newer MIDI files; the MIDIs would not always start until I converted them in to MUS files. A fork of wad2pdf which is there so I can make PDFs of the files, only showing items which show up when playing single player maps at Ultra Violence difficulty. FLTK, GlBSP, and Zlib, which are needed to compile the ObHack GUI ObHack itself, which has both the C++ source code and the LUA scripts to randomly make levels “tests” which I run to ensure ObHack is correctly making levels and correctly generating pseudo-random numbers Win32-binary, which has a special debug version of ObHack FreeDoom, which has “ObHack FreeDoom”, my fork of FreeDoom I have extensively documented the changes to FreeDoom here: https://github.com/samboy/ObHack/blob/master/FreeDoom/README.md I have made no changes to Doomsday. I used the original mid-2000s binary of Doomsday 1.8.6, which works just fine in Windows 10 (there’s an issue that the “Play now” button is now hard to find, but everything still works). ObHack FreeDoom is a direct update to my changes to FreeDoom, starting in 2008. There is only one branch for my changes to FreeDoom, which is ObHack FreeDoom. It includes a forked version of ObHack since 2009; this year, I have made that fork of ObHack the only maintained fork. There are two forks of Oblige which I host: ObHack 008, which has a lot of improvements Fritz and myself did in the 2010s to ObHack, and ObHack FreeDoom, which is a bugfix-only update to a 2009 version of ObHack. Most people will probably want the ObHack-008 branch (monster traps, more prefabs, boss arenas, and other features not in ObHack FreeDoom) if making random maps. Slump is an update to the old random map generator Slige which I have not updated since 2006 or 2007. It’s an update to FreeDoom which runs on Doomsday 1.8.6. It has, compared to FreeDoom 0.7 (the last version not to crash deng-1.8.6), updated sprites, updated music, and only has levels which do not crash Doomsday 1.8.6. The included version of ObHack has two bugfixes (bad textures in the sky bug fixed; also, I fixed one prefab was being put in rooms which could not fit it without cutting off the heads of monsters) and a few minor improvements (lots of weapons and ammo in deathmatch mode when making single player non-coop maps; a “carnage” mode with less health, more ammo, and more monsters) and removals (no more CTF mode, which was broken in this ObHack branch; no more Doom1 or Heretic support, which I can not test and which take up space I would like to save). The reason why I have a couple of hand crafted levels is so I can either use random levels or play a couple hand made levels while using the same compact package.

1) Make the song a .mid (not .mus; the FreeDoom source no longer uses old school Doom-specific .mus files) 2) Post the .mid in a follow-up to this board (put the .mid in a zip file and post it here) 3) Be sure that the music is a completely original composition using no elements from other music. We have had issues with plagarized music in the past, let’s not make that mistake again! 4) Please let us know the .mid is available under the FreeDoom license: --- Copyright © 2001-2018 Contributors to the Freedoom project. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. Neither the name of the Freedoom project nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. For a list of contributors to the Freedoom project, see the file CREDITS. --- Once you do this, I will open up an issue and pull request over at the FreeDoom GitHub page. . We also have a guide for submitting changes to the Git repo.

I have now added a couple monsters and co op starts to keep the map interesting when played as single player. xdm01-monsters.zip

And here’s a version with an exit (not to mention a single player start). xdm01-exit.zip

It’s a nice fun small 1-on-1 deathmatch map. I had to add a single player start to make it possible to test the map (some ports puke if there isn’t a non-DM start). Note that the level doesn’t have an exit (should it have one?) — Sam xdm01-fixed.zip

To me, Raymoohawk’s improvements to the low level monsters was the difference between FreeDoom looking like like amateur fan-made art and looking like a 1990s professional video game. The zombieman and shotgun guy looked bad enough to distract from the immersion when playing with an OpenGL port of Doom; the Imp looked OK but the sprite was much bigger than the actual monster. Raymoohawk thankfully fixed all that in 2014-2015. I’m saying this as someone who has played FreeDoom since 2005 (anyone else remember the pink “puppy dog” demon before it became a worm?) While I liked his improvements to other monsters, I always felt the old Caco was good enough; the other high level monsters were not distractingly bad (not having death frames for the lost souls was annoying).

Here are two pictures. In the first one, one can see the old zombies; observe that the shotgun guy (right) looks almost the same as the pistol zombieman (left). In the second one, we can see how Raymoohawk really improved how they looked. The shotgun guy is fully dressed in black, while the pistol guy (zombieman) is only wearing pants. They still walk like zombies, but I actually prefer that look over how they look in the original ID Doom games.

As an aside, the “Sultan hat” Caco (as you called it in the video; I like the name) was originally posted here: I think it’s an improvement over the older “Jellyfish” Caco, but I think both are perfectly usable when playing FreeDoom. It was the old “kid drawing” zombie/shotgun guy who really needed an overhaul (read the above linked thread); and I also prefer the snake-like Imps over the older “Cobraman” imps. EDIT: I just realized something. I actually prefer Raymoohawk’s artwork over the original ID Games artwork; I find the old ID artwork plain in comparison to the textured detail in Raymoohawk’s work.

Obviously, whether or not a given graphic looks good is a subjective opinion, but I just can not agree with someone who thinks Raymoohawk is a, to paraphrase the video, a “child who can not draw.” This looks like the reaction of someone who expects an open-source Doom clone to look exactly like Doom. For example, the video criticizes the pink demons as “looking like plants”, but the consensus among the community here is that those worms look great and don’t need to be updated. Raymoohawk’s work is really great; sure, they look like zombies and not living people, but FreeDoom is not an exact Doom clone. For long time players of FreeDoom, when Raymoohawk’s sprites for the zombie, shotgun guy, and imp came out in late 2014 to mid 2015, we finally had professional looking graphics for the low level monsters. It was, to me, something that made FreeDoom vastly more fun to play. If you’re looking for graphics so bad they can be mocked (read: Not the current FreeDoom sprites), FreeDoom actually looked bad five years ago. There were and are issues in FreeDoom; the levels still need a lot of work, although even here we’re a lot better off than we were a decade ago: Map01 is nice, albeit for someone with previous Doom experience (and the secret with the armor power ups is too hard to find); Map02 is good, although the puzzles can be a bit annoying; Map03 is good, except it’s final part should probably be replaced with a simple exit, since there is no point showing the player an entire part of the map they can never access without using the IDCLIP cheat. Levels are not as important to me; one can always just use Oblige to play random maps. I am saying that as someone who has been openly critical of FreeDoom’s weaknesses. FreeDoom has been there, in terms of being a finished project with a full set of attractive textures, monsters, sounds, and music for about three years; the only thing it really needs now is for the levels to be polished up and finished.

Here is a MP3 of the track; if anyone recognizes it from a 1990s Doom or Duke Nukem mod, or any other copyrighted source from 2004 or sooner, let me know. https://samiam.org/slump/d_theda2.mp3 The full wad with this one track from Metabolist is now in .zip format: https://samiam.org/slump/ObHack-FreeDoom-0.7.7.zip I have done some more research on this issue (which is well known among the Doom community). Metabolist has a webpage right here at Doomworld: https://www.doomworld.com/metabolist/ He mentions plagiarism on that page: “you know how the original Doom music has lots of near-plagiarism” The issue was mentioned in a wad review as recently as April of 2018: https://onemandoom.blogspot.com/2018/04/mortiser-4-chemical-plant-swmort4wad.html#more “Woodsy's greatest lasting legacy will almost certainly be Plutonia 2 [...] After that, probably the Freedoom soundtrack debacle, which seems less surprising now since I've read the liner notes for Omega Facility.” Here are the linear notes from that wad: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/s-u/swomega “Thanks for the music must go to Michael himself, for making it back in 1996, and also to Nick Baker and Marc Pullen; Marc found some old MIDIs and sent them to Nick, who asked me to extend some of them to a more respectable length (a few were like 30 seconds), and one of them was a piece by Walthius (FYI, "The Gates of Doom") and his homepage and address were in the file. I visited his homepage and got about 45 songs off there, totalling [sic] over 4 hours.”

Necrothread resurrection: I have just made a megawad (size optimized; has only six unique maps; three Freedoom maps and three Oblige maps; works with Deng 1.8.6) that has the old version of the MAP12 theme (and no other music from Metabolist, but I’m attached to that theme). While there were concerns about copyright violation with the MAP28 and MAP21 themes, there has been no evidence shown that the themes in the first batch (MAP09, MAP11, MAP12, MAP13, MAP14, and MAP15) were plagiarized. For people who want to hear the old MAP12 in this megawad, the download is here: https://samiam.org/slump/ObHack-FreeDoom-0.7.7.7z If this MAP12 theme has a non-free copyright, please post the MIDI that the MAP12 theme was copied from; be sure the theme is from 2008 or sooner.