Doom (typeset as DOOM in official documents) is a landmark 1993 first-person shooter video game by id Software. It is widely recognized for having popularized the first person shooter genre, pioneering immersive 3D graphics, networked multiplayer gaming, and support for customized additions and modifications via packaged files in a data archive known as "WADs". Its graphic and interactive violence, as well as its Satanic imagery, also made it the subject of considerable controversy. In Doom, players assume the role of a space marine who must fight his way through a military base on Mars' moon, Phobos, and he must kill the demons from Hell.
With a third of the game (9 levels) distributed as shareware, Doom was played by an estimated 10 million people within two years of its release, popularizing the mode of gameplay and spawning a gaming subculture; as a sign of its effect on the industry, games from the mid-1990s boom of first-person shooters are often known simply as "Doom clones". According to GameSpy, Doom was voted by industry insiders to be the greatest game of all time in 2004. The game was made available on Steam on August 3, 2007.
The Doom franchise was continued with the follow-up Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994) and numerous expansion packs, including The Ultimate Doom (1995), Master Levels for Doom II (1995), and Final Doom (1996). Originally released for PC/DOS, these games have later been ported to many other platforms, including nine different game consoles, Rockbox firmware, and even PDAs and the Flash Player virtual machine. The series lost mainstream appeal as the technology of the Doom game engine was surpassed in the mid-1990s, although fans have continued making WADs, speedruns, and modifications to the source code released in 1997.
The franchise again received popular attention in 2004 with the release of Doom 3, a retelling of the original game using new technology, and an associated 2005 Doom motion picture. On May 7, 2008, following speculation by John Carmack at QuakeCon on August 3, 2007, Doom 4 was announced as in production. The game is neither a sequel to Doom 3 nor a new beginning of the franchise and it will use the company's new id Tech 5 engine. On June 26, 2009, John Carmack released Doom Resurrection, a new game developed by Escalation Studios for iOS and published by id Software. The setting for Doom Resurrection takes place parallel to Doom 3, and it uses the characters and art from the previously developed game.
Source Ports:
Doom 3D
Doom3D is a Windows DirectX port of the original Linux Doom source by Paul Brook. Some of the main features are Quake-style console binds, console, a primitive implementation of sprite merging in PWADs, hardware acceleration using GL nodes, MD2 model support and is also one of the few ports that supports co-op splitscreen and WAD lump compression.
Much of the 3D hardware rendering code is incomplete such as seg clipping for faster performance. Some other features are also incomplete such as mouselook. Most of the code is ported directly from Linux Doom, which means that all of the original bugs from Doom are present. There were plans to switch over to DX8 but the author of the project suddenly left the Doom community. The website of Doom3D is still up and hosted by Doomworld.
DoomGL
DoomGL is an OpenGL source port of Doom by Michaël Ryssen (Kokak), based on GLHeretic by the same author, who also created GLHexen and the first version of ZDoomGL as well as WinHeretic and WinHexen and many other ports.
The first released version was 0.8, on 27th of April 1999. The last was DoomGL 1.0, released on September 9, 1999. The last update was an installer for the same version, released on November 15, 1999.
Doom Legacy
Doom Legacy is a source port available for DOS, Win32, Linux, OS/2 and MacOS, originally written by Boris Pereira and Denis "faB" Fabris, now maintained by Thierry "Hurdler" Van Elsuwé, with a supporting cast of 40 contributors.
Legacy was originally written as a fork of an early DOSDoom version introducing mouse-look, jumping, a console, 32 player deathmatch, skins and a native win32 mode. The console in its entirety was taken from Quake 1.01, a leaked version of Quake about one to two years before it was GPLed. Fabris developed a glide front-end, one of the first hardware-accelerated renderers. Hurdler was originally introduced to develop GL support, however as time went by, Hurdler increasingly maintained the project. Fabris has now moved on to pastures new, with Boris making an occasional appearance.
Boom compatibility was introduced later by Stephen "SoM" McGranahan, who also introduced Heretic support by merging in code from Heretic/Hexen; and FraggleScript from the port SMMU. SoM also developed some novel modifications, including several varieties of 3D floors and deep water before settling on the current implementation.
Since 2003, the Legacy code-base is being re-written in C++. This is designed to improve the tolerance of the code base to new features.
Doomsday
The Doomsday Engine is a source port with support for Doom, Heretic, and Hexen. It runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and is presently developed by Jaakko Keränen (skyjake) and Daniel Swanson (DaniJ). Former developers include Jamie Jones (Yagisan).
Doomsday itself is a multi-game supporting engine and developed along with it are numerous plugins; e.g. game plugins which are necessary to actually play a game using it. Four official plugins are being developed by the core deng team alongside the engine: jDoom, jHeretic, jHexen and recently, jDoom64.
GZDoom
GZDoom is a ZDoom-based port which is maintained by Christoph Oelckers (Graf Zahl). It was first released on the 30th August 2005 and runs in Linux and Windows. Its development was halted on April 14, 2010, except for updates to keep its codebase in sync with ZDoom.
PrBoom
PrBoom, originally short for "Proff Boom", is a source port for Windows, Linux/POSIX, OpenVMS and Mac OS X based initially on Boom, but later merged with LxDoom and LsdlDoom. As a result of this merger, PrBoom is compatible with both Boom and MBF. It includes OpenGL features for the renderer (as GLBoom) as well as some enhancements over the engines it is based on, such as being able to handle levels with twice as many segs, vertices and sidedefs than usual. In addition to the code from its predecessors, it incorporates bits of code from the Eternity Engine, and PrBoom+.
PrBoom is currently maintained by Florian Schulze (Proff) and Rob Young (RjY), with contributions from Andrey Budko. Colin Phipps (cph), who accompanied Proff for the first few years after the merge with LxDoom, has retired from the PrBoom development team.
Unlike other source ports that concentrate on offering many new game features or changes, such as ZDoom, EDGE and the Eternity Engine, PrBoom aims to act as a stable port of the more established or traditional engines.
PrBoom uses the SDL library to abstract away operating system or platform specifics. As a result it supports a very large variety of platforms In addition to the PC, it has been compiled for the GP2X and various Mac models, among others. The source port, packaged with Freedoom, is included in the Fedora RPM software repository.
WinDoom
WinDoom is a Windows source port created by Bruce A. Lewis, who later abandoned the project to work on glDoom. Dean Wiley then continued development up to version 2.001.
ZDoomGL
ZDoomGL is an OpenGL port of ZDoom, maintained by Tim "Timmie" Stump. Originally it was developed by Michaël "Kokak" Ryssen, but once he got a job working at Ubisoft, development on the port slowed considerably (and eventually stopped). In 2003, Timmie picked up development, and rewrote the port from scratch to be up to date with what was, at the time, the latest version of ZDoom. The latest official release, 0.81, was released on August 7, 2005.
On Feb 13th, 2006, Timmie announced ZDoomGL v2, another rewrite of the engine. However, development stalled again and the project was ultimately abandoned, and no version of ZDoomGL v2 was released. Timmie later confirmed that he was no longer working on it.
ZDoom
ZDoom is a source port, originally based on ATB Doom and NTDOOM. It has since added full support for all commonly-used Boom additions, Heretic, Hexen, Strife and Chex Quest. It has added many additional features, including slopes, uncapped framerate, and z-clipping. The source code is maintained by Randy Heit and Graf Zahl. The most recent official version is 2.5.0, but many in the community use the development versions. The large number of features supported by ZDoom made it the port of choice for several independent game projects, notably Foreverhood, Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl, Chex Quest 3 and Harmony.
This article incorporates text from the open-content Wikipedia online encyclopedia article Doom (video game).
