I finally got around to dusting off the source code for this, completing the move away from sourceforge, and making a new release. This is just a maintenance release, fixing some compilation problems on 64 bit and big-endian systems. No new binary for Windows released, as there are no changes, and I can't be bothered to dig out a Windows compiler. Get it here.

Noticed yesterday on the most-active-projects on CIA:

Not bad for a 13 year old game.

Just some google food for anyone having trouble with the music in PrBoom on amd64 systems. There is a bug in SDL_mixer 1.2.6 (and earlier), which causes this problem; this is the version of SDL_mixer in Ubuntu Hoary and Dapper, and in Debian at the moment. It is this patch:

--- ./timidity/config.h	2006-08-12 11:59:44.492723500 +0100
+++ ../sdl-mixer1.2-1.2.6-cph1/timidity/config.h	2006-08-12 11:30:06.988427250 +0100
@@ -185,14 +185,8 @@ typedef double FLOAT_T;
 #define LITTLE_ENDIAN
 #endif
 
-/* DEC MMS has 64 bit long words */
-#ifdef DEC
 typedef unsigned int uint32;
-typedef int int32; 
-#else
-typedef unsigned long uint32;
-typedef long int32; 
-#endif
+typedef int int32;
 typedef unsigned short uint16;
 typedef short int16;
 typedef unsigned char uint8;

to the timidity code that fixes the problem. You can download a fixed libsdl-mixer1.2 and libsdl-mixer1.2-dev if you don't want to rebuild the packages yourself.

I have spent half the weekend putting together and testing PrBoom 2.4.0. This finally brings 2.2.6 up-to-date. Thanks in particular to Andrey Budko, who has been tracking down a lot of bugs over the last year, and who kindly supplied us with patches for many of them.

Proff was asking about the demos that I use to test PrBoom releases, so I have compiled a list; it may be of interest to some people.

Jon has been mailing people to try and prod us into progressing with Freedoom. Apparently I signed up to make the HELP2 graphic. This is good news to me, as I distinctly remember signing up to make a level some years back, so it is a relief to discover that I'm not being held to that.

I had to go away and look up what HELP2 was, as it must be 10 years since I have seen it. It is the final screen that you see after pressing past the end text of E1M8 ("Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base you're supposed to win, aren't you?" etc) — but only in the shareware version (in the retail version, you get the credits). It is the screen with id's phone number, please-pay-us-money hype, and some grainy screenshots of episode 2 and 3. And I mean grainy — think 320x200 screenshots, scaled down and cropped to 70x90, then inset back into a 320x200 splash screen). Would you buy a game on the strength of this?

Now, I know screens were smaller then, but even allowing for that, it's a crummy screenshot. Good for them that Doom sold on the strength of the Knee-Deep, and not by their grainy advertising screenshots.

Next I took a look at Freedoom's existing HELP and HELP1, which are fairly lame, so I reckon I can match those. A few minutes later I realised why — I made Freedoom's HELP and HELP1. Oh well.

Well, as usual I am right up with the times :-). I finally got Doom 3 set up on a Windows machine at home here over the summer, and have been playing it on-and-off since then. I would write a full review, but I came accross the "Director's Cut" review at GameSpy and largely agreed with it, so instead I will focus on the areas that interested me in particular, or where I disagreed with their view.

Firstly, the environment. The graphics are, of course, amazing, and the amount of detail in the level design is superb. But this is mere time and technology — what makes it work is the amount of thought that has gone into what the different levels and rooms are for. Unlike Doom 1 and 2, the rendering power now available to games is now enough to allow realistic looking machinery, so there is no longer the problem of having a level supposed to be a power station which instead consists of a chain of rooms with nothing more notable than a computer console. (In my own levels I did make one level which was a better approximation to a nuclear plant (PHOBOS3 MAP03), based on the real Sizewell A power station in Suffolk — but without the moving machinery, atmospheric noises, and no room-over-room, the industrial realism just can't be done.) Doom 3 also manages all the features that a real industial site should have: ladders, safety railings, and control panels.

Much more than the industrial architecture, what impresses me is the depth of the corporate enviroment. The offices, corporate lobbies, tannoy safety annoucements and company videos all give a real sense of a being on the inside of a big company. I see this as a great homage to all those office levels which got made for Doom 1 and 2 — except that by combining that office style with the Shores of Hell like bloodstains, corpses and other hellish touches, id has made the first office shoot-em-up levels that I have played which were worth playing. The corporate videos are good for a laugh, particularly when imps attack you while the safety video is running. And the plot, characters and PDA emails and logs create just as much atmosphere as the bloodstained walls, giving the player another reason to wonder what is going on.

Other level design innovations that are very welcome (and I mean innovations relative to Doom 2 — I have hardly played any other shoot-em-up since, so probably id didn't invent them) are the first aid points and storage cabinets. I know several level designers for Doom 2 commented that they disliked scattering health and loot around the floor — only geek computer game coders could take 10 years to come up with the idea of cupboards. (Although the gap between the realism of the physics, and the laughable biology — how do those health stations work? — is a bit of an anomaly.) And while many levels for Doom 2 solved this by putting ammunition into side rooms, there was then a problem that people could go the wrong way and having to go back and search for ammo. Solution: name the room a store room and put it in big letters on the door.

Gameplay. Well, the plot is good. The fights can be tough. Clearly the gameplay is a long way from Doom 2. The key here is that Doom 3 is a game of skill, whereas Doom 2 was tactical. In a game where the shotgun could kill most monsters with one shot, and half of the weapons aimed for you, the fighting was tactical: monsters came in large groups, and the trick was to use the speed of the Doom 2 marine to run circles around the monsters, avoid being cornered by a group of them, or take cover while reducing their numbers. In Doom 3, there are rarely large groups, but there is no automatic aiming for your cells and rockets, and not only do you have to do your own vertical aiming, but the monsters use ducking and pouncing to make things harder — and the marine is much less speedy. So it's a game of aiming skill. Personally, I am not an enthusiast for skill games — tactical games give much more varied scenarios.

The flashlight seems to have drawn a lot of criticism from some people. Personally I thought it a stroke of genius. There would be little point making a superbly detailed game if you wanted an oppressive, horrifying atmosphere — because the latter requires darkness, and darkness hides the detail. Therefore, you give the player a flashlight, which lets them see the detail, but only when they aren't cautiously creeping ahead behind the barrel of their shotgun. I found flipping back and forth to the flashlight fine, and having the flashlight lets one appreciate the superbly detailed environment. It also allows a new level of monster, the unarmed zombie, who would be useless in a well-lit world, but who is a real threat when looming out of the dark. Plus it creates great atmosphere: entering a room, to see only the lights of the computers on the far wall, and then switching to the flashlight, to reveal the bloodstains and bodies on the floor.

And that's what it is about: atmosphere. Doom 3 is seriously scary, and the atmospheric noises, supernatural phenomena, gore, and sinister plotline keep the player immersed. It's really an interactive horror movie, but with a whole level of detail and immersion that a movie could never have. The actual fights are the least interesting part, and with so little tactics and such linear level design, id have made no real effort to mask this; it's the environment that makes it worth playing.

I had not seen this before — Linspire apparently offering a bundle of PrBoom and Freedoom as a "Click-N-Run" package. They don't mention either up front, but the specifications page makes it clear that it is PrBoom, and it is in the package name (plus the status bar is definitely Boom-like). It looks like they are shipping the GL version.

It seems a bit dodgy the way they use the Doom trademark, and one of id's promotional images for Doom 2, and even list id as the vendor. Okay, the source code is half from id, but it doesn't contain any of id's design or artwork, so using id's trademark for it looks very suspect.

I just spotted that Linux Format included an article about PrBoom in their February issue (LXF63). No online version I'm afraid. They talk about it in the context of client-server network games, and it has a little column to itself in amount their "Network Everything" series of articles.

…We'll examine PrBoom, a modern version of the classic shooter. Linux and Windows versions of this are available…

Like many other network games, PrBoom is separated into client and server parts… the server is started first and the client's machines log in to the server to play.…

It's particularly nice for me, because the network code is the one bit of PrBoom I can claim is all my own — since I rewrote it years ago, and am responsible for the current client-server design. They liked the wget-retrieval of WAD files to clients, although it is years since I wrote that — I'm surprised that it still works.