Why You Should Be Using the Doomsday Engine

I'm a jDOOM evangelist. I'm a devoted, maniacal nut about it; and yet, I really only know enough about it from the technical end to be dangerous. But I'm learning, and my new level Waters of Lethe will incorporate some jDOOM-specific resources. The following article details some of the Doomsday Engine's major attractive features, and I've cribbed the more salient aspects from the Doomsday Guide as well as Slidespace. Any errors (in text or interpretation) are all mine. There is a major update coming soon, which I'll certainly announce here.

The Doomsday Engine is an enhanced and extended Win32 version of the DOOM engine. It consists of three game DLLs: jDOOM, jHERETIC, and jHEXEN. It is being developed by Jaakko Keränen (hence the j in jDOOM), with an extended family of Doomsday supporters constantly creating new environment, texture, and model jPacks and more.

Doomsday's graphics are the main (but not only) attraction. Here's a list of the graphics features:

• Supports both OpenGL and Direct3D
• Dynamic lights
• Lens flares
• High-resolution textures (PNG, TGA, PCX)
• Particle effects
• Detail textures
• 3D models (Quake II's MD2 format)
• Simple environment mapping for 3D models (shiny effects)
• Simple shadows for objects
• Fog

All you need to play is your original DOOM, Ultimate DOOM, or DOOM II WAD (it also supports shareware and Final DOOM). In addition, you need Windows 98 (or later) with DirectX 8 (or better), a decent video card that supports 3D hardware accel-eration (I've run it just fine with an old Diamond Viper 770 TNT2), and at least a P-166 with 64MB RAM. And of course, you need to download the Doomsday installer.

Doomsday shares many of the other BOOM-compatible port features that make DOOM feel as though you were playing Quake: with freelook you can now look up and down  with your mouse; you can jump; an in-game drop-down console allows command-line options (DOOM's cheats have been simplified to GOD, GIVE, NOCLIP, etc.); and in-game menus cover everything from device setup and control configuration to graphic detail options and sophisticated multiplayer networking.

Kickstart

One of my favorite features of Doomsday is the front end launcher, called Kickstart. It's a small program with a tabbed, intuitive interface, which allows you to configure many of jDOOM's options. It's particularly useful for controlling which model packs or special effects you want to use. Individual model groups can be disabled (for instance, show only the torches and decorations). You can pick which game you want to play (DOOM2, HERETIC, FINAL DOOM, etc.), load your PWADs, choose add-on special effects (blood wall-splatters, rocket smoke), select Graphic, Sound, and other miscellaneous options including command-line arguments. Doomsday will create a shortcut for Kickstart on your desktop.

(Doomsday is chock-full of features, many of which I'll outline next, but I want to stress that you don't need to know anything more than where your DOOM WADs are in order to play jDOOM right out of the box. And Kickstart will even look for that if you're not sure where it's installed.)

3D Models and Environment Packs

A very cool feature of Doomsday is the support of 3D models (based on Quake II's MD2 format) which take the place of DOOM's sprites. The jDOOM Resource Pack (jDRP) by Dani J (who runs The Modelyard) contains excellent 3D reproductions of torches, pickups, weapons, monsters, the HUD - the works. Another set by Cheb, the jDOOM Model Pack, is equally impressive. (And there are more alternate packs in the downloads section of DoomsdayHQ.)

The jDOOM Environment Pack (jDEP) by Slide adds  Quake-like sky boxes and fog to all of the levels. These really increase the 3D dimension of DOOM. In addition, the jDOOM User Interface (jDUI) adds new fonts, titlepics, and menu logos.

DOOMSDAY makes DOOM look just plain gorgeous.  I could never go back to DOOM 95.  I mean, just look! (Click for full pic.)
 

External Resources and WAD Files

Normally, all resources such as new wall textures, menu graphics and fonts, back-ground music and sound effects are loaded from WAD files; but Doomsday has a mechanism that allows replacing these resources with external resource files placed in specific directories. (The files are called external because they are regular files and not part of a WAD file.) This means that you can load cool new textures, flats, patches (sprites, menus, etc.) and anything else you'd normally have to import into a WAD file simply by placing them in their respective directories. For instance, say you've got some new textures you've just created for your level or project and want to see how they look. All you do is place your .PNG, .TGA, or .PCX in the \Doomsday\Data\jDoom
\Textures directory. The high-resolution textures can be of any size. The engine will render them scaled so that they fit the size of the original texture. You can find many texture-related resources at DoomsdayHQ.

Data and Definition Files

Doomsday recognizes the PK3 ZIP format. When a PK3 is loaded, all of the internal files become virtual files that Doomsday can access just like the regular files on your hard drive. The end result is the same as if you had unpacked the PK3 into your Doomsday base directory. If you've created a level or texture WAD with (or without) an accom-panying DED definition file, these could be packed into a PK3 and put in the Data\jDoom\Auto\ directory for easy loading instead of unpacking a ZIP file into all of the respective directories. All you have to make sure of is that your paths are included in the PK3 and that you don't use compression.

Doomsday Engine Definition files - DEDs - are plain text files used to define (or redefine) certain states in the DOOM engine. These can be used to change the default names of maps.  For instance, /Defs/jDoom/Maps.ded lists all of the map numbers, names, and authors in DOOM and DOOM II - MAP04: The Focus Author: id Software - which show up on the screen when a map loads. You could change one of these entries to the name of your map - MAP04: Waters of Lethe Author: Dr Sleep - by creating dante.ded which contains the replacement entry. When you pack dante.wad with dante.ded, make sure you include the proper paths:

/Data/jDoom/Auto/dante.wad
/Defs/jDoom/Auto/dante.ded

More detailed information about DED files can be found in the readme.txt file in the Doomsday/Docs/ directory.

The Doomsday Engine, in short, is a glorious construction that brings true 3D feel to playing DOOM and makes it feel like a totally new game. I certainly look forward to the upcoming release of version 1.8, and I plan on gearing all of my future levels to take advantage of jDOOM's features. (Jaakko has released an alpha version of 1.8 at DoomsdayHQ. Go here for details.)

Many thanks to Jaakko "Skyjake" Keränen, Slide, and Tolwyn who who were kind enough to explain a few things to me about DED files.

(By the way, no disrespect is meant or implied toward any of the other DOOM ports such as ZDOOM, which I play and very much like. I understand work is being done to add OpenGL to ZDOOM. For now, though, jDOOM is (IMHO) the best-looking of the lot.)