Reading Games

Well, I was at Wally World the other day when I decided to go and grab the Doom collector's Edition. This contains Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom (a collection of user made levels) and usually sells for about 10$ here in the states. Look in the bargain section of your PC game department. ;)

The engine to run all three of these titles was open sourced eons ago (which allows third party programmers to redistribute the source, modified, unmodified, for pay, or for free with only one catch: The recipients should have similar freedoms), and as such has several engines available each focusing on varying things (as various hacking crews have taken up the responsibility of keeping the game fun). jDoom, which is commonly refferred to as Doomsday (which actually contains 2 other engines for games based on similar codebases, like hexen/heretic), so me being a linux user had to buy it... as my gaming options are sparse enough as it is. I never expected to enjoy it as much as I did.

After testing the varying engines, Doomsday stood out right off the bat. With just the stock textures the game looked magnitudes better, as most effects were already replaced with much better looking visuals. Fireballs were done in actualy 3D, explosions didn't look like paper, and everything was vastly smoother. Please note that this is with stock textures, and 2D sprites... The doomsday engine has gone so far as to make 3D Sprites and items possible, and even reccomended. While it's not going to make games like Doom 3 look bad, it certianly makes for a whole new way to experience a classic. ;)

Other improvements have been made including the ability to jump, mouse aiming, and adding a reticle (which, when you turn off auto-aiming, goes a long way) making it play and feel like modern run and gun shoot 'em ups. The only thing I haven't been able to do that would really seal the deal is turn off the head bob, which sorta makes me dizzy.

THe only downside to these 3D textures is that getting them all installed and setup can be quite difficult for a beginner, at least on linux. Windows users have a GUI to manage it all, which helps quite a bit in making application configuration more available to any user, but us linux users, the easiest way to do any of it is to rapack all of the game into auto-loading pk3 files, which a freind of mine from #gentoo-amd64 on irc.freenode.net was kind enough to provide for me.

All in all, if you don't mind a bit of tweaking, you can really begin experiencing Doom in a whole new way... and who doesn't love a good bit of mindless zombie and demon fragging?

I should be ashamed of myself.

This post was edited by Aynjell on Dec 04, 2005.