Reflections on DOOM's Development
rome.ro
rome.ro
> The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio.
It wasn't as if multi player games did not exist before; however, they fairly exclusively were single screen affairs.
Being first person and having your own screen on your own machine was truly revolutionary.
I fondly remember fragging my family members and learning about IPX (it wasn't always TCP everywhere).
I can't seem to find any information on the net regarding this, but I know that we managed to get it working somehow. There was some dirty TSR hack that intercepted IPX calls and sent them via serial.
One of the PCs (with 2 serial ports) had to act as the "gateway" and run the game first, then the "edge" PCs could connect.
Fortunately my best friend had 2 serial ports and a seperate PS2 port for his mouse (although whenever he rage quit both of our PCs hardlocked for some reason).
If I recall correctly it only worked with a particular version of the DOOM exe - so we could only play the shareware version (despite having access to the full game). 6 months later we pooled some cash and got NE2000 cards so that we could play properly without dicking around with crazy hacks - I do recall my friend being disappointed that he could no longer crash our PCs and end the game when he lost anymore :)
On the client side you ran SIRDOOM, which then shelled out to Doom once the connection was setup.
Best part: it was all free.
I never got the background on why they did it, and why they never charged a dime. Maybe they had aspirations to be the next DWANGO?
Who knows... but I spent many a night fragging till I dropped.
I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!
Dwango! :-) There are still modern doom servers online using the Dwango wads. I spent so many hours deathmatching on those maps. Good times.
There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it... after a fashion.
> MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the concept of deathmatch combat.[1]
[snip]
> Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port.
Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack.
On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy:
> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed]
Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.
That's amazing!
Thanks for sharing.
Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero, Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.)
Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it was head-to-head ... those cables weren't very long.
Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook 3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo Software.
Faceball 2000 is, to me, a hidden gem of the Game Boy, a platform with many well-known gems already, and it helped me pass many pleasurable hours.
(Seriously. The Game Boy had amazing battery life, as long as you were playing it in a well-lit environment.)
Even playing it alone was fun, and I still remember the music as some of the best of that era of console gaming.
(And, yes, I sank many hours into DOOM and DOOM II as well.)
We were pretty proud of Faceball 2000. James Yee, the non-technical founder behind MIDI Maze and Faceball 2000, was a visionary guy. Keeping the aesthetic abstract (smiley faces, minimal texturing or "realism", etc.) was way easier to code but it also won us some parental advisory awards in the industry because we avoided gratuitous violence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm glad you remember the music. The GB and GG music were composed by David Whittaker. Very talented. When you unavoidably listen to your game's music over and over and over and over, it's nice when it's actually well composed and sonically interesting. The SNES music is also great, composed by George Sanger, and the SNES had better audio hardware by a long shot but I actually prefer the tunes and instrumentation of the GB/GG intros, outros, level music, etc.
Nice chat. And as the game says, when you get whacked by a smiley face, "HAVE A NICE DAY."
I wish Modem Wars was rebooted, in many ways, it was the first "Starcraft 2" game for modem play, and was incredibly fun.
I'm not sure if any of the engine ports (zDoom etc.) still support this though.
I never really thought about this. Deathmatch is just what generic multiplayer without teams or goals is called, and has always been called. Someone had to come up with the name Deathmatch. I was around for DOOM's release, and this term has always just felt ubiquitous. Cool!
They did it again with Quake, but then it was the end of a small team being able to beat the AAA development houses. I was in awe that it was created by a few guys, no huge budgets or huge team.
Quake has some of the most amazing maps/episodes and utterly terrifying aesthetic of any FPS, despite how disparate levels were at times.
I can think of few older FPS that hold up as well as Quake 1's single player campaign to this day, and the mapping community is still running amazingly too.
Quake certainly took its toll on ID, and was when Romero was ousted. It may not have been the original game they planned, but I don't think the game turned out any bit less amazing of a campaign than OG Doom IMO.
> and boldly stated in a press release in January 1993, that DOOM would be a major source of productivity loss around the world. We truly believed it, and worked hard that year to make it happen.
I remember trading DOOM WADs on SyQuest drives.
Kind of literally. Before the term FPS they were called "DOOM clones".
(obligatory old-man-shouts-at-cloud post) pfft, nobody who hadn't already played Ultima Underworld II, released in Jan 1993, maybe
but seriously, great game (both of them!), and always interesting to read about
Both are fantastic games, but Doom's speed was a marvel for how good it looked.
Michael Abrash.
In 1991, I owned a Commodore Amiga, which was generally regarded as one of the best computers for audio-video work at the time. Abrash had stumbled across something amazing at the time:
He figured out that you could just 'invent' your own displays on the IBM PC.
So he took the IBM PC, which was really optimized for high resolution work like spreadsheets, and he hacked the display modes so that you could have LOW resolution and HIGH refresh rates.
It was completely brilliant. When I first saw what Abrash was doing, it was a revelation. If it wasn't for Abrash, gaming would be very very different today.
At the time, there were high performance video cards for the PC. The thing that was brilliant about Abrash's work was that it worked on any ol' PC. He was just taking the existing video modes and changing them. For instance, instead of having a video mode of 640x400 with 16 colors, Abrash figured out that you could have a video mode of 320x200 with 256 colors and most importantly, a buffer. It was that buffer that was absolutely critical; it changed the game completely. It allowed programmers to draw a screen, flip a bit, and change the entire screen in a millisecond. Until Abrash came along, IBM PC graphics were sloooooow. The key to all of this is that the amount of memory did not change, the only thing that changed was the resolution and the number of colors.
If you're a Linux dude and you're over 40, you may recall hacking video modes to get the UI to work. A lot of that was based on Abrash's work also.
Abrash continued to work alongside Carmack for his entire career, and is currently at Oculus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X https://web.archive.org/web/20160425075841/http://www.gamepr...
To be more specific: 320x200x8 was a standard documented VGA video mode (13h), but it lacked the ability to page flip. There were other video modes that did allow page flipping - the idea itself dates back to some of the earliest text-only modes - but none of them were 8-bit color.
Mode X (which Abrash discovered) allowed page flipping while retaining all 256 colors.
Page flipping is different from double buffering, though. Double buffering is when you render to an offscreen buffer, and then bulk copy the resulting pixels into video RAM (usually with vsync to avoid visible tearing). This could be done just as well with regular mode 13h, and it was pretty common for games to do exactly that. Page flipping made things much faster by avoiding the need to copy anything - everything is in video RAM, you just switch which parts of it are currently visible on screen.
I know that the xBox is named after DirectX.
If DirectX is named after Mode X, then the Xbox owes it's name to Abrash.
"Since multimedia on Windows had a bad reputation back then, we were adamant not to have our stuff associated with “multimedia” and so we called the first beta the “Game SDK”. We got the idea to name it DirectX because some reporter made of fun of how we had DirectDraw, DirectSound, and DirectPlay – Direct “X” they wrote. We took it and ran with it, and so every set of functionality became DirectSomethingOrOther (Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectSound3D all followed)."
And "direct", of course, was in a sense of direct access to the hardware (more direct than GDI, anyway).
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-b...
Both Doom and UW2 were essentially still a 2d map but in UW2 I remember going down a descending corridor and swimming under a bridge I'd previously walked over and being amazed. There's another level full of aerial paths which cross over each other too, and a level where you flick a switch and flood the map and open up some walkways above the flooded area iirc. I don't know how it represented these over-under areas internally but even if no more 2d than Doom (though you could look up and down a bit) it was a nice trick.
Then again, Doom has similar tricks - teleports set up to act like lifts, where the top of the tower looks out apparently over where you've already been (actually a facsimile to get round the 2d addressing).
But yes, Doom did win out for speed and sheer frantic joy/terror. I couldn't convert any friends to Ultima but Doom won everyone who saw it over instantly...
The view could only ever be at 90 degrees for example (no looking up or down) and the environments couldn't have more than one floor and one ceiling at any given location.
I think the limitations made the genre even more successful because it forced people to "evolve" into 3D by going from Wolf3D > Doom > Quake. Step by step. True immersive 3D was actually a jarring (but undoubtedly fun) experience for the first time. Anyone here remember Descent?
I would also add Duke Nukem 3D to your step-by-step list. Reason being, firstly, it had sloped floors. But also, as I recall, it was the first 3D action game to have what was then called "room over room", even though the engine was fundamentally limited in the same manner as Doom - it achieved that by utilizing portals. So actual architecture was still one-level, but portals transparently connected it in a way that simulated multiple levels.
There were also some really crazy hacks to achieve something like that in Doom. Like, bridges that you could walk over or under. The way it was done is by having an invisible platform that was lowered and raised as the player approached the "bridge" from the corresponding direction, combined with a fake middle texture that wasn't actually solid.
For some reason the internet paints them as rivals, or that Carmack was the one who succeeded (continuing with ID and now at FB) and Romero faded away and was never really technical (and works at a gas station).
I don't know if they've reconciled in recent years and I've never heard about Romero working at a gas station. Any source for that?
https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...
There's no basis for the claim he's working at a gas station. He runs a game development company in Ireland.
Carmack isn't constantly humping the successes of his distant past trying to use them to generate hype and interest in himself, even though he's been largely responsible for them.
Romero just seems like a slacker, riding on the coattails of those early shared successes, milking the association dry.
Look I enjoy a good Daikatana joke like any other, but while Carmack was the technical wizard, Romero was every bit as important in regards to getting those games to pop with the character and attention to detail -- maybe more than any other person at ID at the time.
He deserves his props too, and I think its awesome he's still so engaged with these games and helping keeping them going after all these years.
That's a misconception. In fact Romero made a lot of games entirely by himself and has been coding throughout his career.
Check out his programming credits: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,8...
Q: Are you in touch with the original DOOM® team?
A: Yes, we talk from time to time. I see Adrian a fair bit since he has a place here in Ireland (The Heritage in Killenard). I also talk with Tom (Hall) and American (McGee) every once in a while. I’m in contact with John where there’s something specific that we both have interest in.
Reading between the lines: no, they're not friends.
They are different types of people, and they both are probably adults at this point, at least sufficiently to acknowledge that their common ground is having a beer and discussing cool new stuff once in a while rather than the style of friendship which would involve being willing to take a bullet for one another. If their interests intersect then they can talk and be excited but those points are too fewer to call it a deep friendship. It is mutual appreciation of technology and cool stuff.
I would not read into it that they are unfriendly though, just that the type of friendship is bounded by interests and passions and I doubt either one has hard feelings about the past.
I know that NeXT workstations were pivotal to id's work at the time, but I still love seeing some casual ObjC praise included.
Doom's rendering trick wasn't dependent on CPU power as much as it was cache manipulation, memory access speed, and VGA card speed. Everything was already pre-computed, so the rendering engine only needed to look up a binary tree and spit out to the screen exactly what it was told. Even the game logic reused some of the renderer's LUTs when the code could get away with it, which was a lot.
I feel like if I were to try to write Doom's engine that I would struggle to reach 60 fps on my i7 CPU, even rendering in Doom's original 320x200 resolution.
Anyway, Doom used a special version of Mode X dubbed "Mode Y", which is Abrash's ModeX with fewer pixels to worry about.
(I found the link with google on my iPad, so my search was not as exhaustive as it might have otherwise been.)
It did use Mode X, but that was because it could do page flipping, and allowed for certain other rendering optimizations enabled by its more complicated video memory layout.
IIRC Quake was the first id game that fully exposed various X-modes (i.e. not just 320x240, but anything your video card supported, and your CPU could handle...).
How's this for serendipity? A comment about Doom brought me to 666 karma.
Good to see Daikatana has proven instructive to Mr. Romero about the pitfalls of writing checks with your mouth that you can't cash with your ass.
So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?
It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.
Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.
In other words, don't write a press release that will kill your team.
I think committing too much up front to tech features or a checklist pushes you to later lose face by dropping the feature or including it at the expense of fun. You might have a very clear idea of what the game is upfront, and the result might be a great game, but you're not pushing boundaries.
I think it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. You might want to change the direction into something that is not only doable but _better_. Remember Quake? It was supposed to be something completely different, based on their plans [1].
[1] https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2016/...