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The Doom Movement Bible (doomworld.com)
190 points by rinesh on April 15, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 47 comments


As a DOOM modder a couple of notable things:

1. DOOM had wall running (by accident):

> So in other words, when the player is moving northwards or eastwards with a XTAP / YTAP greater than 15, and has the initial movement check blocked by something, the engine has the potential to perform two full movements in a single tic! Note that this doesn’t actually change the TAP or anything - it’s just as if the player moves two tics’ worth of movement in a single tic.

2. DOOM also had deliberate rocket falls - like a rocket jump except you'd do it against a cliff and fall further away from the cliff as a result. This was used to clear a wall needed to get to the Episode 3 secret mission.

I hope, somewhere in DOOM 2016 single player, I turn a corner and see an up to date but recognisable E1M1.


This is just amazing. And what is more suprising is that Doom 1 and 2 are still thriving after >20 years. If you download zandronum you will learn that there are still people playing it online. of course those are some mods, but still very much resembling the original atmosphere and graphics of doom 1 and 2.

Edit: of course this probably would be different if the doom source code wasn't released at some point of time...


> still very much resembling the original atmosphere and graphics of doom 1 and 2.

If you haven't already, you should check out Brutal Doom[0]. It improves upon the graphics and gameplay a lot -- but still manages to keep much of the original atmosphere

[0]: http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom


don't forget the soundtrack.


Of course I know it. The soudtrack is simply amazing. What I dodn't know until now is that there is quite a lot of doom covers on youtube!


Ah, I never could get that to work with zandronum :/


Yet for some reason extremely few games have followed id's example. Besides Duke 3d, what other games ever saw source release?




That's really cool. Kotaku ran an article <a year ago about the licensing issues around No One Lives Forever and how it would probably never make it to Steam; I'm surprised they never mentioned that the source code has been available for 4 years, buildable by anyone.


The only one off the top of my head is Serious Sam: https://github.com/Croteam-official/Serious-Engine


Marathon: http://infinitysource.bungie.org/

SoftDorothy: https://github.com/softdorothy

I wish there were more.

Edit:

Abuse: http://abuse.zoy.org/

It was so rare back in the day that I vividly remember games that did actually go open source.


Oh, Abuse. I loved this game. It was also my first encounter with Lisp, many years before I learned how it's called and what it is.


I guess part of the problem is that most producers don't want to open-source a game until it's stopped making significant money, and most games are largely forgotten by that time, so there's less incentive to bother in the first place, and (perhaps more importantly) no press when it does happen. (That Wikipedia article is surprisingly long, but I haven't heard of most of the entries.)


FreeSpace 2 -- http://scp.indiegames.us/. It got seriously remastered thanks to that.


id software followed up with lots. quake and enemy territory were amazing.

we played hours and hours every week of enemy territory in the office in 2007-2009

... on Linux (and the occasional Windows and Mac in the same server) no less!


If you are interested what was pinnacle and end result of this, take a look at CPMA/PQL movement in quake

Thats basically strafe jumping with air control:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_DwN4z5UMo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lANjZ0NO8XI

and some examples with fights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHo4l-qmGHI

This was by far the most hard to master, and most rewarding skill, once you can do laps around the maps you lost track of time, and find your self doing this for hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T6IAHWMd2I


Wow, really fascinating and excellently explained! I can't help but wonder, how many of these were found solely through play and how many were found as a result of code diving? The conditions to trigger some of the, such as void skip, seem so intricate as to be unlikely to be found by chance.


Doom has been played for probably thousands of man-centuries at this point so all of them had been found through normal play. However, a lot of them had no real documentation explaining why they happened, since speedrunners tend to view bugs from a "how can this help me?" mindset rather than "why does this occur?" The elastic collisions bug in particular was considered a mystery before I researched it, but the rest were more or less understood.


More or less off topic, but what is the best way to play DOOM on a modern Mac or PC? I have the CD of The Ultimate DOOM.

The same could be asked for Quake 1 & 2 :)


You might want to start with this guide: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/How_to_download_and_run_Doom

If you insist on using your CD rather than using a GOG or Steam copy, you'll want to be able to get at a "doom.wad" file. Depending on the CD you have, it'll either be available as a regular file, or compressed as an LHA archive. In the latter case, you'll find either one file such as "RESOURCE.1" which you can extract directly with lhasa, or several files like "DOOM_SE.1", "DOOM_SE.2", etc, in which you'll want to cat them all together into a new "DOOM_SE.lha" file and then extract that.


For Quake 2, the most commonly used clients are R1Q2 and Q2PRO. I recommend starting with R1Q2 because it keeps the same look and feel of the original game but offers major behind-the-scenes improvements. You can get texture packs to make the game look more modern, but I don't like to use them.

A list of all active multiplayer servers can be found at http://q2servers.com/. You can usually find people playing action, ctf, deathmatch, and jump mods.

(Source: I still actively play Q2)


just realized r1q2 was the same person/group as the totally awesome gloom mod


I'd say look into two different source ports: namely, ZDoom and GZDoom.

ZDoom is one of the most popular source ports capable of running all WADs and it's still being maintained. GZDoom is the OpenGL supported version of ZDoom with new scripting capabilities and GL lights.

For Quake 1 there's the DarkPlaces source port, and for Quake 2 there's Yamagi or Q2PRO.


(G)Zdoom can play all wads made for other ports but it's not backwards compatible with wads made for older version of zdoom. And that's a pity besides you have to change many default options to play "doom" like it was. In original doom monsters have infinite height, so you can't walk on monsters,pass under flying monsters. Looking up/down, jumping and making the bfg more powerfull are other changes. Great mods, wads and even indie games have been made with g/zdoom but the topic is the original doom movement. In that context people use mostly prboom + or chocolate doom.


>ZDoom and GZDoom

and then there's Zandronum, which is built on GZDoom and adds modern multiplayer features (servers, in-game joining, etc).


Doomsday/jDoom was what I used the last time I tried to play it about five years ago. It modernizes the engine a bit so you can have modern niceties such as WASD movement and mouselook.

It even had an option to replace the sprites with 3D models, but I found I much preferred the sprites.


100% agreed. use the Doom high res texture pack for higher resolution walls and floors, but keep the sprite monsters - the 3D ones have a different art style.


High res textures really fall into the uncanny valley for me. The original low resolution textures let your brain fill in the gaps, and it's pretty good at that.


Heh, funny this should come up as just last weekend I discovered Doom Retro (doomretro.com).

It has a few odd non-retro options enabled by default (screen shake on impact and translucent firey projectiles being the main ones that annoyed me, but they're easy enough to disable) but other than this is probably the closest to a "pure" DOOM experience I've had on a modern OS - not counting DOSBOX of course.

It's also Open Source: https://github.com/bradharding/doomretro


Doomretro is lovely, but if you really want a close-to-pure-as-possible experience, look at the (parent) project Chocolate Doom.


There are a ton of quake clients, some that are very minimal (and just try to fix bugs and support new machines), and some that add or enhance new features or engine effects. There are also some that are built with competitive multiplayer in mind. My two favorite are Fitzquake and Fisheye Quake.

Also you might want to check out http://celephais.net/board/news.php which has a ton of very high quality user content for additional chapters, like mini expansion packs. Some really great level designers and artist who are making still making stuff for this game.


There are lots of alternative engines for the games as well. I have to re-research them every time I get an urge to play, so I, too, would be interested in anyone with an opinion one way or another to chime in with their preferred approach.


For ultra purity, there's basically only Chocolate Doom (or DOSbox and the original game). For modern features (but losing the Doom "feel"), (G)Zdoom or Doomsday; for stuff in the middle, Doomretro, Crispy Doom, Prboom+, Eternity.

I'd say Crispy Doom (or Doomretro on Windows) are good balances.


Excellent, thanks a bunch!


Prboom+ (the plus is important!) and DOOM.WAD or DOOM2.WAD. Enjoy!


If you want multiplayer with the ability to join the game at any time check out Zandronum (zandronum.com)

As for Quake 2, Yamagi Quake II is the best (yamagi.org/quake2)


There is a version of the original Doom on Steam.


PrBoom+ or Crispy Doom.

For Quake 1, tyrquake. I can't remember what I have for Q2.


I tried the item-grab-through-a-solid-linedef trick in Zandronum on E4M1 (the same one as in the video on the post), but couldn't get it to work. Tried fudging around with the compatibility options (including "Doom" and "Doom (strict)") but still no dice.

Strafe-running definitely works though, and it's a trick I've used for some time, even in multiplayer.

(Also, if you're curious that Doom is still around, I highly recommend Zandronum[1]. An excellent port. And there are still mods coming out that are incredibly playable, which blows my mind.)

[1]: https://zandronum.com/


this hit me right in the feels, shame that doom4 feels like a console port


I found the multiplayer of the new DOOM to be full of strange design decisions.

It clearly wants to be an arena shooter, but it couldn't let go of loadouts from Call of Duty, nor the "modern" Halo roots the team had previously worked on. (see: Call of Duty)

The result is an amalgamation of everything wrong with modern multiplayer shooters, distilled through a DOOM filter and collected in a toilet. It wants rocket launchers, but it kills in two shots instead of one because you can just spawn with one.

It's a damn shame. Instead, I decided to go play the Unreal Tournament alpha.


Doom4 loadout system is really sad. The powerup mechanic is cool but minimally useful, the Revenant is just extremely unbalanced: He can fly, kill instantly and has 3x more HP than a normal player. If you get to play Doom4 multiplayer s with friends, all you need to do is camp the spawn (which is easy because its spawn is announced way ahead of time)

Unreal Tournament alpha is not much better, the netcode is weird, the new movements are extremely buggy and the weapons are unbalanced. The only good thing about UTalpha is that they stick to the original vision: Fast paced, aim-skill game, with very little novelty (other than movements and like one weapon's behaviour has changed)

I am looking forward to overwatch, although its not a real FPS, at least I feel like Blizzard cares about the game they push out and are not blindly following trends.

I been playing UT since early 2000s when i was just a kid and I feel sad that so little importance has been given to this title. I wasn't expecting Doom to be another QuakeLive, but at the same time not another "CoD12: Future Ops from Hell - Mom get the camera edition"


> This sort of discrete movement is probably universal in games

if only... :P

i've certainly lost a lot of time to resolving collisions by considering the inbetween steps, using lines, fat lines and all sorts...


I haven't been a regular around Doomworld in a long time, but it amazes me how this site just keeps on going.

Seriously one of the best online communities ever.


I am so happy to see that even the creations of the genius Carmack are full to the brim with 'ugly' hacks, workarounds and tweaks.


Carmack wasn't the only one working on the code. But yeah, once the bugs are highlighted here, they're pretty glaring. Hindsight and all that... ;)




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