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from the Anniversary-Spectacular-of-Spooky-Doom dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Ready to feel ancient? The original Doom is 25 years old -- and co-creator John Romero wants to make sure you know it. He's preparing an add-on for the 1993 game, Sigil, that serves as a "spiritual successor" to the classic shooter's fourth episode ("Thy Flesh Consumed") with nine single-player story levels as well as nine multiplayer deathmatch levels. The expansion will be free if you're just looking for some nostalgia-fueled demon slaying, but you can also spend a lot of money on it if you're determined to flaunt your fandom.
[...] Both the new levels and the physical copies are expected to arrive in mid-February.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/10/john-romero-doom-sigil-expansion/
According to Paul Thurrott, there will be 9 new single players levels and 9 new death match levels released for free but you will need the original DOS game in order to play them. It's planned for mid February so comfortably misses the 25 year anniversary.
"SIGIL is the spiritual successor to the fourth episode of DOOM, and picks up where the original left off."
I'm guessing you could get a legitimate copy from Good Old Games or fire up DOSBOX if you still have a version on floppy that will actually load.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:46PM (2 children)
I'd never heard of Vavoom (I see it has not been updated for a long time), despite being moderately active in Doom circles. But that's only one of several "modern" versions of Doom executables (called "Doom ports"), the most popular of which seems to be PRBoom+ followed by ZDoom (mentioned here). PRBoom+ has been ported to all sorts of platforms including handhelds and Wii, and is in the Fedora and Debian (hence Ubuntu etc) repositories, and obviously to WIndows. These ports are free and open source, but for any of them to run you need a large (by 1990's standards ~15Mb) data file known as the "iwad" file, of which there are several versions (I use "doom2.wad") - these iwad files include the original ID Software game levels and are NOT free (the original and now obsolete iwad, "doom.wad", was shareware).
The modern doom ports should be capable of running even the original game levels (PRBoom+ certainly does) but can also cater for later game features like water depth, conveyor belts, and even an optional pack of aggressive "helper dogs" to accompany you. There is no reason whatever to use the original doom.exe today (which was actually a bit buggy) unless you really want to re-live the struggle with DOS.
As well as an executable Doom port and an iwad file, you can load a third party level (such as Romero's new levels), also with the ".wad" suffix, of which there are thousands on the Doom fan websites. During loading, these patch over the original level maps in the iwad file. These third party levels vary from crap, through joke, to excellent professional quality. Most are free but some were made for boxed sales back in the 1990's. I still design (with Eureka on Linux) and play levels, and the longevity of Doom is due to the constant flow of new levels, and to the fact that level designing is within the capabilities of one person.
(Score: 2) by hoeferbe on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:52AM (1 child)
Thanks for informing me about PRBoom. I saw it in the Fedora repository as an "Open source port of the DOOM game engine", but neglected to give it a try.
Although it does not have the GUI launcher that Vavoom has, I see the command line arguments are pretty extensive. In fact, I already like how PRBoom lets one start the Doom game in a window instead of fullscreen. (If there is a way to do that in Vavoom, I have not found it.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday December 13 2018, @10:38AM
Just to be clear, you said "PRBoom" rather than "PRBoom+". Plain PRBoom is now somewhat obsolete, the last version (2.5.0) was in 2008 but the project has been continued to the present day (2017 at least) by a different maintainer as "PRBoom+"; it does add some features like the ability to look up and down. In the Debian repository it is called "prboom-plus" and the "prboom" in the repository is I believe just a link to "prboom-plus".
You might also notice something in the repositories called "Freedoom". This in effect includes a free and open source doom iwad (replacing the commercial ones such as "doom2.wad"). I have tried it briefly; the graphics are somewhat different, although the monsters are recognisable.
PRBoom evolved from a combination of Boom (a DOS port of Doom) and LXDoom (a Linux port), the underlying game engine being from LXDoom. Both Boom and LXDoom evolved from the original ID Software UNIX code of Doom which was developed on a Next workstation, never sold commercially but later open sourced. PRBoom was recomended by ID Software themselves for ports to other devices such as handhelds as it was very stable and faithfully reproduced the behaviour of the original Doom executable (minus the bugs). I had a small involvement with this evolution and my name is in the PRBoom credits somewhere :-)