
The Making of Doom: Id's shooter masterpiece - pykello
http://www.pcgamesn.com/article/making-doom-ids-shooter-masterpiece
======
chops
If you have not yet read "Masters of Doom", I strongly advise any aspiring
hackerpreneur to read it. It's an enthralling and easy read and details the
early day of id, including the releases of their breakout hits "Commander
Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", and "Quake", as well as the fall of Romero,
following his departure from id, particularly with the "Daikatana" flop.

[http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Cultu...](http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Culture/dp/0812972155)

I read it when it was new 8 years ago, and I think I'm probably due for
another reading, myself.

~~~
pestaa
One of my favorite books. Almost makes me wish I was born at a different time
and place.

Even the Super Mario Warner Bros 4 rewrite Carmack made is two days older than
me.

~~~
incision
>Almost makes me wish I was born at a different time and place.

I've often found myself feeling the same way.

Thing is, we're in no danger of running out of things to invent or advance.
There's effectively just as much uncharted territory for us as there was for
anyone else. We even have the benefit of standing on their shoulders to
achieve perspectives they couldn't realize.

~~~
pestaa
This is true, hence my use of "almost".

On the other hand, there is a lot magic to eating pizzas and sipping diet
cokes in the house by the lake only to play and make games.

I just no longer see myself being able to be blessed by that privilege.

~~~
mgkimsal
what's stopping you? there's people doing that even today in 2012.

------
randomdrake
Reading about Doom in a historical sense, I always find that there is a bigger
absence of emphasis on the ability to modify the game than there should be.
Doom not only revolutionized gaming and the FPS genre, it tore open the doors
for game modifications. Projects like DeHackEd[1] allowed us meddling kids to
start to see the possibilities of modifying our games at very fundamental
levels. Sure, you could open a hex editor and edit Ultima VII to make your own
maps, but Doom, DeHackEd and WAD editors meant you could, relatively easily,
modify and share your creations.

Aliens TC[2]. The Energizer Bunny[3] mod. These were the beginnings of what
would later become some of the most popular games that have ever come out for
the PC. Being able modify a game and engine allowed for things like Counter-
Strike[4] and Team Fortress[5]. Anyone else remember QTF or Beta 5.3? These
humble beginnings of shared modifications grew into entire empires and created
celebrities in the game development world. The gamers needed new heroes that
weren't all caught up in ridiculously silly enterprises like Daikatana[6].
They needed cliffe[7] and goose[8]; independent developers working on
something incredible for everyone to enjoy. From small teams to huge mega
corporations and back again, game modification has had a lasting and
incredible impact on the PC game market and will continue to for a long time.

We have Doom to thank for this. Now, where are my serial cables? I wanna do
some multiplayer fragging.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeHackEd>

[2] <http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Aliens_TC>

[3] <http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=68>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike>

[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress>

[6] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana>

[7] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Cliffe>

[8] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minh_Le>

~~~
talmand
Not just the mods, consider the tools as well. As far as I can recall id
Software rarely released their own tools for content creation in the early
days. Often because their tools were made to run on expensive industrial
strength computers, especially in the Quake days. They only just described in
various ways how to create content for their engines and/or released source
code to their tools.

If the tools people didn't step up to create these things then the mod scene
may not have turned out the way it did. This tool creation "scene" led to some
interesting creations that the industry benefits from today. For example, we
had Worldcraft until Valve hired the creator and made it into Hammer; which is
still in use today.

This type of thing doesn't really exist as much today simply because most of
the common engines are supplied with content creation tools out of the box.
Part of me longs for the days of exploring new crazy ideas that was done back
then. I knew a guy that designed his first few levels in Quake with notepad
(three dimensional BSP node coordinates by hand!), graph paper, and the
compile tools until editors starting showing up. To pat myself on the back I
built the first Quake2 "unit" of levels (AFAIK) to be released and I did that
by opening the compiled id BSP files in notepad and followed the trail of
entities through the plain text. Those were fun days.

------
marknutter
Doom defined my childhood. I was lucky enough to have an older brother who was
really into computers and knew how to get Doom multiplayer working over serial
cables. I can remember being blown away by the first multiplayer FPS
experience I'd ever had. Some of my best memories were spent fragging our
friends while Rush or Dream Theater played in the background. The mods were
amazing too. We would mess with the firing rate of the different weapons to
create an entirely new experience. We found user created levels to play, too.
Our favorite was a map entitled butt.wad (wow, I only just now got that joke)
which had the Marriage of Figaro playing in the background. I even got into
modding myself, creating maps and re-skinning characters in the game. Man
those were good times.

~~~
MikeCapone
I could have written that comment (except for the brother part -- I was the
one who introduced my friends to DOOM). So many good memories doing 4-player
LANs... Wish I had a time-machine sometimes..

------
dfxm12
_John Carmack said no. “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he
said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.”_

I love this quote. I think many of today's AAA game designers need to take
heed.

~~~
pdog
Maybe for some games, but for others it's nice to see some elements of great
story-telling.

Of course, you still want to have good game mechanics, interactivity, graphics
and fun, but the medium has evolved to the point where you can tell a good
story.

~~~
objclxt
I think it's very much a quote of its time - I agree with you that the problem
is primarily one of medium, and at that time the medium wasn't able to
adequately tell complex, compelling stories.

The market has definitely evolved now - there's still a demand for great
action games where story takes a back-seat to the sheer enjoyment of playing,
but there's also demand for games with compelling stories (just look at the
backlash Mass Effect 3 had, rightly or wrongly). It's like films, or TV -
sometimes you just want to watch big things blow up, other times you want
things that make you think.

------
sehugg
Another notable thing about DOOM was that it was unabashedly written in 99.9%
C, with only a few
([http://code.metager.de/source/xref/idsoftware/doom/README.as...](http://code.metager.de/source/xref/idsoftware/doom/README.asm))
exceptions for rendering inner loops. The myth that a performant game required
copious assembly code was on the ropes at this point, but DOOM completely
killed it (as did having faster/better compilers and CPUs).

~~~
pfedor
Even Quake optionally used some assembly code. According to
<https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/readme.txt> the plain C
version was running at half the speed of the one compiled with the assembly
code, when not relying on hardware graphics acceleration.

------
doesnt_know
What a coincidence, I've been playing Doom 2 for the first time over the last
couple of days. I've also recently replayed the first, but I had actually
played that back when I was in primary school (behind my parents back of
course).

I'm surprised just how much fun it still is and if you use something like
ZDoom [1] (which I have been) you can literally just run the binary with no
setup and it runs flawlessly on a modern system.

One thing that really stuck out to me as I've been playing it is that there
really isn't anything from modern shooters I miss. I'm not trying to diminish
the work that has been put into AI, Physics, Graphical fidelity etc, but what
does it say about the genre when you can remove all the innovations over the
last 20 years and it's not any less "fun"?

[1] <http://zdoom.org/>

~~~
aw3c2
Jumping, mouselook, crosshairs? That does not sound like Doom to me. Give
<http://www.chocolate-doom.org/> a try, that engine is faithful.

~~~
doesnt_know
I'm not playing with any of those things so they must be off by default. I'm
just using it as a way to be able to easily run it on a modern system without
having to mess around.

------
archangel_one
"Players can play the entire game from the map mode. Zoom in close enough and
you can even see individual bullets flying around the levels."

I don't remember that from the original Doom? I didn't think you could see any
other 'things' on the map, let alone that the bullet weapons are hitscan so
don't have any projectiles flying about.

Am I misunderstanding what they mean here? Or is my memory just failing me?

~~~
5hoom
I can't recall if it required a cheat or not (secret stuff didn't show up on
the map by default), but you could absolutely see every entity in the level
from the map screen.

This included enemies, projectiles, powerups, bullet sparks and assorted
decorations. Many of them were shown as little arrows indicating which
direction they were facing.

------
alanbyrne
If you've not read Masters of Doom, do so now. It is an amazing read.

------
gadders
Oh man that was an awesome game. I used to stay until 11pm at night playing
colleagues over the Lotus network. And then once we found out how to download
wad files from some US university over FTP...

Mind you, walking out through a darkened office with lights turning on and off
used to give you a few flashbacks...

------
codequickly
Doom was the reason for building my first PC. Anyway, many years later, I read
and studied doom source code, mostly to see how the game engine worked. I had
it printed out on paper and read it line by line and found it to be very
readable, and even entertaining.

------
meatsock
edit: Hall, humiliated, quit midway through 1983, should read 1993

------
orange123
A little violent game

~~~
yolesaber
I know this is an utter troll, but I think it is worth broadcasting to any HN
member that DOOM is a notable feat of software engineering: not only did
Carmack invent and perfect a wide variety of technologies, they also included
what was the first seriously adopted modding kit that lead to a lot of people
being introduced to game modification and programming.

~~~
fdej
Doom did not include a modding kit. All utilities were made by fans. Modding
was easy in part because the engine had been designed to load all game content
from separate, easily modified .wad files. (The rampant popularity of the game
itself also helped pave the way for a modding community, of course.)

~~~
eco
That's not actually true. Carmack uploaded the source for the level editor and
utilities for modders to use. The modding community just made much better and
easier to use tools. .wad files were also created specifically to encourage
modding and make it non-destructive.

Excerpt from Masters of Doom:

> Though Carmack and Romero were intrigued and inspired by these actions, they
> were concerned over the destructive quality of the mods. Players had to
> erase the original Wolfenstein code and replace it with their own images;
> once a Nazi was changed into Barney, there was no way to bring the Nazi back
> quickly. For Doom, Carmack organized the data so players could replace sound
> and graphics in a nondestructive manner. He created a subsystem that
> separated the media data, called WADs (an acronym suggested by Tom Hall, it
> stood for Where’s All the Data?), from the main program. Every time someone
> booted up the game, the program would look for the WAD file of sounds and
> images to load in. This way, someone could simply point the main program to
> a different WAD without damaging the original contents. Carmack would also
> upload the source code for the Doom level-editing and utilities program so
> that the hackers could have the proper tools with which to create new stuff
> for the game.

