Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM | Hacker News Reader

Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM

rome.ro

170 pointsqwertyuiop92479 comments

The book "Masters of Doom" (https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...) covers a lot of the early days of id Software and is a great read, both from historical and motivational angle.

It's a superb book - interesting, well researched, easy to read and, above all, provides a background for understanding how Carmack and Romero each ended up where they are now.

+1 - This book actually rekindled my love for gaming and reminded me of the passion for computers that contributed to me deciding to become a developer in the first place.

Also shatters the popular idea of Carmack as a nerd (he breaks into a high school and steals computers as a youth) an Romero as a bro (he's writing a bunch of games, compression tools and other useful bits and pieces)

I HIGHLY recommend reading this book. I've had it since ~2004, and read it 6 or 7 times. It's such an enjoyable experience, and if you develop software and/or software companies...still very relevant.

Takes a pretty skookum[1] rig to play it, but the new DOOM is surprisingly enjoyable.

Maybe it's that I haven't actually drilled through an FPS since HL2, and I went in with zero expectations, but I've been really craving opportunities to get through the main campaign.

I was refreshed to get through it by reading this[2] HN article and realizing when I had grabbed it in May I had been as impressed with the visuals today as I was back in 2000 or so when the first Quake 3 beta with the metal reflections (early shader effect)[4].

Just really excellent pacing and challenge ramping, and the first DOOM plot actually worth getting through. I thought I would be annoyed by the RPG-like "upgrade" system, but it works and makes grinding worthwhile. The fatality system lifted from the fantastic Brutal Doom[3] works fine, and there is good separation between exploration and battles.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12461896 [3]: http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom [4]: http://toolz.nexuizninjaz.com/shader/

I don't understand your first link. What is a "skookum" and why are you linking to a Youtube channel?

Skookum is a word/phrase that the gentlemen from the linked youtube channel uses often. It's really a great channel and very fun to watch him break down powertools and explain electronics while using 'interesting' language.

And what does "Skookum" mean then?

It's a phrase from the west coast, from Chinook language. Roughly means good/strong/powerful in common (i.e. BC, maybe Washington state?) parlance.

So OP is saying you need a good GPU for this game.

Which brings me to wonder... how does a New Brunswick boy get in the habit of using BC First Nations slang?

It's great, because they've really thought about speed and pacing. As if the designers had read http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74 on the original Doom and consciously decided to replicate that.

My main gripe with the campaign is all the maps are just set pieces in which they spawn waves of enemies. It felt like I was just playing multiplayer against bots.

While I wouldn't call that incorrect, you could argue that the first Doom game was pretty much exactly what you described. In fact, the original Doom analysis linked by another commenter below (http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74) says the first Doom is more like the classic arcade manic shooter Robotron than a first person shooter. So it's going back to its roots.

To think that Q2 is a full 19 years when Doom is 23 is astonishing. The development in those 4 years there was more progress in first person shooters than in the following 19. The games I play today are 99.9% the same as the q2 I played in the late 90's

So much changed between Doom and Quake 2:

Software rendering to hardware accelerated 3D

DOS to Windows as the operating system

Internet vs dial-up for multiplayer

Cable modems and DSL becoming common for multiplayer

Not to mention going from an 486/66 with poor floating point and only 4MB memory to a Pentium II 300MHz with decent floating point, a small handful of SIMD instructions, and 64MB of memory

Ahh diminishing returns. Now it takes 2gb to run a chat client.

That's why I keep my Pentium box. Never forget what 24MB can do.

Spoilers: everything.

Quake 2 came out in 1997, in 1997 56K just came out without being a standard as the X2 and 56Flex and by the end of 1997 only about half the US ISP's supported 56k speeds of either variety (probably the USR X2 being the more common one in the US).

V.90 which was the ITU standardized version of 56k wasn't approved until late 1998, so who the hell had DSL or cable in 1997?

I had megabit cable modem in 1998. It was nice. (:

Lucky! I had dual 28.8kpbs dialup lines (the phone lines themselves were unable to support higher than that where I lived at the time) bonded together until 2001!

Crazy enough, it was to my then home in Bella Vista, Arkansas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Vista,_Arkansas

Carmack had T1 in 1996: He mentions it when he explains his decisions about Quake's netcode (http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm).

Obligatory mention of Michael Abrash and his cult book:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=abrash+book&ia=products

For anyone getting into programming or with a sweet tooth for this era, a nice code thriller.

Free version from 2001: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

Just interested: is there a specific reason you are skipping Q1? Virtually everything that is an obvious improvement over Doom in Q2 is in Q1.

Don't know about OP, but Q1 wasn't well-received among my 133t t33n p33rs when it came out. Q2 was a hit though.

When Quake 1 dropped the gaming press joked about how everything was 50 shades of brown. Now, that's a cutting edge look for games (especially shooters).

Oh, yeah. Q2 was great.

...If you liked having to wait a week to see if your rocket hit.

Obviously Doom->Q1 was a much bigger step. It was just that I saw that the birthdays coincided and were 4 years apart. Also, it's perhaps more significant in this case how small the step was between Q1 and Q2, so that kind of showed that the golden years were over, and since then we have seen 19 years of incremental invention.

Doom was great for LAN parties; Q1 let you log onto Quake World and blow up complete strangers any time of the day or night. I never really got into Quake II, as it didn't seem to offer anything fundamentally new compared to Quake, which had full 3D physics and internet deathmatch.

I still have fond memories of wasted hours rampaging around with a quad damage rocket launcher, hacking away at noobs with the axe, watching people (sometimes myself) electrocute themselves with the lightning gun by mistake, and trying to retrieve good backpacks from the lava in House of Chthon...

Owning all of them, I can say that Q1 and Q3 are more fun than Q2. Q1/Q3 were great, Q2 was... meh at best.

However, of the three, Quake 2 has the most active online community (although Quake has a larger pro scene - yes, it's still going. Q3 is dead, with most of the players having moved to QL, no matter how much they complain about its inferiority).

I fondly remember Q2 as being "much less brown and with a railgun" which was enough for me to consider it worth playing over Q2.

Q3 was better, but 1999 also saw Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike, so I never looked back at Quake.

I don't have UT99, so I can't compare. I've heard it's like UT4, which I didn't really enjoy all that much. So put me on the Quake side of the Quake/UT fight, I guess.

And I could never get into CS.

UT was better than Q3 - wider variety of weapons, more fun game types, better maps.

But Q3:TeamArena was massively overlooked. It added megatexture to Q3, had massive maps, cooler weapons, and a better aesthetic.

I still go back and play Quake 3 Team Arena with bots from time to time. Still one of my favorite bot experiences.

But Q3 had advanced movement, a stronger modding scene, and a grappling hook (sort of).

My favorite was Q2 because of its campaing. I never played them online though.

I remember being super impressed when I saw my roommate playing Q2 because of how the light system used color instead of simply making an area brighter.

Had Q1 support for 3D acceleration on launch ?

I remember playing Q1 CPU only, on a crappy PC and wasn't really blown away by it.

Q2 I believe was bundled with my first graphic card, and it really made a huge difference.

Q1 certainly did support 3D acceleration with the Voodoo 2, although I don't think it was there at launch.

You're right; Quake had a software renderer first and hardware 3D came later. GLQuake is the number one reason I got into graphics and I have it to thank for my career to date.

On launch it didn't. Then it supported a few odd chips. But by the time of Quake 2's launch (actually before that), it supported OpenGL, in the form of GLQuake. This begun id's trend of using OpenGL over DirectX (Which Carmack hated at the time), which continues to this day.

Can't agree more. Quake 2 sure did have cover mechanics, RPG elements, crafting, AI squadmates, QTEs, realistic lighting, vehicles, mounted weapons, set pieces, anything to do other than killing things and fetching things, interesting characters, characters, a branching story, a well-told story, a story...

I smell some sacrasm. When I say "FPS" I mean that as a distinct category from a shooter with RPG elements, cover based shooters, etc.

Ok the Q2 story was perhaps thin, but have you played todays fps'es? (CoD/BF/...)

I guess it depends? When I say "FPS" I mean anything from Doom to System Shock 2 - if it's a first-person view and the primary means of interacting with the world is via weapons, it counts as an FPS by me. I guess I'd call stuff like what you're talking about "pure FPS", but apparently that's the name of a specific dev studio with a very poor reputation, so who knows.

Doom had cover; if you aren't using cover in Doom, you're playing it wrong. Use a door as a chokepoint, equip super shotty. Jump out, get a shot off, kill a couple dudes, jump back into cover as you reload, repeat. Or how about the Cyberdemon fight? It's not just "shoot it until it dies" because you do not want to be wide open in that battle unless you're an expert circlestrafer; you want to use the columns in the level to your advantage.

What Doom and Quake lacked was "press B to kneel behind this waist-height wall". But I don't think that's really an improvement. Getting into and out of cover was janky in every game I played that had that mechanic (Mass Effect, Uncharted, Final Fantasy XV?!). And you were vulnerable unless the game recognized you as being behind cover (until the enemies flanked you that is). Plus there's the effect of "oh boy! Waist height walls! Gee, I wonder if a battle is coming up?"

The point is, the core gameplay of Doom and Quake was nuts, and was never quite replicated in any of the modern shooters (sorry Doom 2016, you were fun though). The game would drop you in a level full of things wanting to murder you and let you figure out how to survive. Many of the things you mentioned are bolt-on extensions to the gameplay that make it seem deeper, but may make it actually shallower because they constrain how you interact with the world; note also how Doom and Quake lack linear, corridor-like levels and "Return to the Combat Area"...

Cover is for the weak, you can circle around slow projectiles and hitscan enemies will not waste shots when you are in cover. And shooting cyberdemon until it dies is the only way to kill it.

I used to enjoy circling around a cyberdemon and only shooting at it with the double-barrelled shotgun from Doom 2. I can't remember how many shots it took to kill it. The shotgun blasts were less effective from the safe range (couldn't get too close to a cyberdemon) but still packed a punch.

Serious Sam did a pretty decent job recreating the experience of Doom.

That's what a lot of people think, and that's what the Doom 2016 developers thought -- but it's not true. Serious Sam and Painkiller are games where you walk to a new wide-open area (way wide in SS) and dudes spawn that you have to kill before leaving the area.

Don't get me wrong, this is fun. But Doom was different even from this.

In Classic Doom, the whole map is available right from the start, and every monster already exists in the level. Enemies can sight and chase you from one end of the map to the other if they're alerted and nothing gets in the way. Plus, the haphazard map layout is confusing and disorienting. You really have to overcome and manage the terrain in order to beat back the demon hordes.

Serious Sam? Don't you mean "Running Backwards While Shooting: The Game"?

My hacking coming of age story involves Doom.

In eleventh grade, we had a classroom with around 20 486 PCs connected in a token ring network. When the teacher wasn't watching, we used to sneak in Doom on floppies, exit Windows out to the dos prompt, and do a manual install.

This was great, but it was a major hassle to do this every time we wanted to play, and to delete the files afterwards.

I came up with the idea of marking the folders as hidden from DOS, and for that extra obfuscation, renaming the folder to start with an extended ASCII character. Sure enough, no one else but my friends could figure out a way in. (We all had Midnight Commander on floppies to run around such problems).

This all went well for a few weeks until the class teacher must have found some way in that we didn't know about. I got dragged up in front of the principal and accused of "hacking the system", since apparently the teacher couldn't figure out a way to remove the files.

I barely escaped a suspension, but that was a great lesson for me in what happens when you usurp your authority figures.

>that was a great lesson for me in what happens when you usurp your authority figures.

...and get caught.

> We all had Midnight Commander on floppies

I'm sure it was Norton Commander at the time ;)

Of course! It was either that or some public domain clone. The commander I remember using was black and white only. I vaguely remember using "dc" to launch it? Google doesn't find much.

I think you meant "dn" - dos navigator[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Navigator

Or maybe the glorious XTREEGOLD :)

In high school, I was an assistant manager at an Egghead in San Jose and got the employee discount on the id Anthology. It was pretty sweet. (Not to mention we borrowed nearly everything good in the store and re-shrinkwrapped it.) When the shop closed up in 1998, we were fireselling inventory to each other at "pick a number out of the ether" prices (Got Borland C/C++ 3.1 and a SCSI Zip Drive, the largest retail software package ever, for a song.)

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Id_Anthology

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/id-anthology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/photos/borland/c/c31afa.jpg

Don't forget the comic book. Rip and tear!

http://www.doomworld.com/10years/doomcomic/comic.php

(You are huge. This means you have huge guts.)

Reminds me of Destroy!!

http://www.scottmccloud.com/2-print/older/destroy/

* RetroAhoy: Doom - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4-SVUHQYI

* The History of id Software (Full) - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv-byZAauAs

Would have been interesting to see their network and development environment back then. You have John Carmack hacking away on a NeXT workstation, John Romero doing levels on another NeXT, the file server running on a PC server with Netware, play testing on some DOS machines, and who knows what the rest of the guys were using for art and other stuff.

For historical accuracy: they also used a Sun Microsystems machine to compute the Binary Space Partitioning tree, leaving it crunching overnight (in my recollection it was the e450, but it couldn't have been).

For Doom? I know later on they ran a 16-way SGI Origin to do Quake (2? 3?) lighting and level processing.

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...

They were using NeXT. id was all next at the time of DOOM.

The best way to track id's tech stack is to look at their level design tools:

-DoomEd (not the one you're thinking of - it never made it beyond id) was for NeXT

-QuakeEd - It was for NeXT: You can grab the code at http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html. If someone has the know-how, they might be able to update it for GNUSTEP or OSX, but it's useless in its current form.

-QE4 (QuakeEd v4) - id's internal Quake 2 editor. It marks the shift from NeXT to WinNT. https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2-Tools

-Q3Radiant - Robert Duffy got sick of the bad parts of QE4, and modified it into QERadiant. It was all GPLed, anyways. Then he got hired (I think) by id - QERadiant formed the base for Quake 3's level editing environment - Q3Radiant.

GTKRadiant - GTKRadiant was (and still is) maintained by Timothee Besset, who was also responsible for the Quake3 linux ports. It was a (soft) fork of Q3Radiant made engine-independent, and was also based on GTK, so it could support Mac and Linux. It was dual-licensed by id (it was an internal project - god knows why) until the rest of Q3 opened up. It's also the only editor on this list still in active development (as is its fork, NetRadiant).

Who knows what they're using internally now: id has closed their doors since the acquisition.

I rember when doom came out we had just had some £4k pc's delivered with 20 inch screens (for Oracle Work) Playing doom in a darkened office was quite spooky

This game was a classic. Used to play with my brothers for hours; cheat codes and all.

Don't know if you are talking about network play or not, but our poor man "multiplayer" in that era was like this:

- Let's play, I walk, you shoot.

One got the arrow keys, the another got the CTRL and spacebar... :)

Heh. I thought I was the only one that did that.

We are getting old!

> We are getting old!

much better than the viable alternative :)

Will Romero ever cease milking DooM for attention?

Once Doom stops being a landmark in gaming history, I'm sure he will ;)

I dunno. I do know when I'll actually start criticizing him for it: when he stops making new content, and providing interesting insights (his return to the DOOM mapping field earlier this year, after much deliberation, was awarded the rare 11th Cacoward - the annual Doom community awards for excellence in Doom mapping).

as soon as you become his bitch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana#/media/File:Daikatan...

Obligatory:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/25/john-romero-ar...

(Holy crap, Penny Arcade is also OLD!)

Wrong strip: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/11/22/funny-all-by-i...

Yes we are, indeed.

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