https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-doom-guy-john-romero-abrams-press-143005383.html
Since its release in 1993, id Software's DOOM franchise has become one of modern gaming's most easily recognizable IPs. The series has sold more than 10 million copies to date and spawned myriad RPG spinoffs, film adaptations and even a couple tabletop board games. But the first game's debut turned out to be a close thing, id Software cofounder John Romero describes in an excerpt from his new book DOOM GUY: Life in First Person. With a mere month before DOOM was scheduled for release in December 1993, the iD team found itself still polishing and tweaking lead programmer John Carmack's novel peer-to-peer multiplayer architecture, ironing out level designs — at a time when the studio's programmers were also its QA team — and introducing everybody's favorite killer synonym to the gamer lexicon.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 12 2023, @11:52PM (3 children)
I had forgotten it used IPX; its been awhile since I played multiplayer Doom.
If you're bored you can read
https://www.winsocketdotnetworkprogramming.com/winsock2programming/winsock2advancedotherprotocol4a.html [winsocketdotnetworkprogramming.com]
On my heavily shielded ad-blocked machine that looks great, your mileage may vary.
If you've ever done IP programming then Novell IPX network programming will look eerily similar. Ya got your socket that you bind to, etc.
I have not read the doom source code (didn't it leak a long time ago?) but I'd assume it used the weird DNS-alike thing that IPX had.
As you can see in the example I linked to, you can do a lot with just a couple pages of code when you use IPX; its not hard to use. Of course IPX doesn't do much and doesn't WAN as well as TCP/IP or more likely UDP/IP but whatever.
Although this is off topic, that whole page I linked to is a wild blast from the past; I have not even thought of IrDA in a long time, for a real retro feel look at the support for IPv6 in Winsock 2 on that site.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday September 13 2023, @01:09AM
Yes, trip down memory lane. I did some Novell stuff back in the mid-90s, including server .nlm modules, and my own packet stuff. I even invented my own protocol for doing basically live streaming / broadcast (not video), Ethernet II frames, buffering, packet resequencing and retransmitting... So much fun in those days. Well, it was pretty cool.
Some routers could route SPX/IPX but IP was growing, becoming ubiquitous, so there were IP wrappers for IPX for WAN stuff. Those worked well too.
One customer (Mayo Clinic) had IPX WAN in place, btw., certainly from Minneapolis to Jacksonville, and AFAIK all the campuses. I think it was T1 or Frame Relay or some other kind of leased line, not general Internet, but it could have been using IP "tunneling" (encapsulation).
Thanks for that link btw.
Back then I had gotten one of my favorite books: The Zen of Code Optimization, and it seemed to talk about lots of code and graphics tricks, probably what Doom and others were using to make so much happen so fast on such slow hardware. Probably still a good book to have.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Wednesday September 13 2023, @01:22AM (1 child)
They released it to the public decades ago. It's sort of one of the reason for the whole "can it run Doom?" thing. It's funny but it's also just there so you can make it go on basically anything if you like and take the time to tweak it.
https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM [github.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday September 13 2023, @02:54AM
[waves hand from the BOOM beta team]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by iWantToKeepAnon on Wednesday September 13 2023, @03:00AM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snospar on Wednesday September 13 2023, @08:16AM (2 children)
I remember someone bringing an early version of Doom into the office and getting it installed on several PC's. It flooded the local network segment, eventually cutting everyone off from the Novell server which was trying hard to use the IPX network for serious work. Even when the bosses found out what had been going on there was less anger and more open curiosity about something that really was so brand new. It seems hard, now, to imagine that jump into multiplayer gaming as such a new and literally game changing shift but then you're forced to remember that the Internet (well, the WWW) was only just beginning. We take so much for granted now.
Time for some Doom!
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jman on Wednesday September 13 2023, @01:03PM
Different office, but I was that guy.
Netware 3.12, DAS PC's, myself, Stan in Accounting, Lisa at the box office, Bob in Sales, CFO Jim. We crushed every byte of bandwidth out of those 2.5 Mbps Thomas Conrad cards!
Alas, CEO Frank didn't play. The only reason I didn't get into trouble was thanks to Jim. We just quietly stopped playing during normal business hours.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mcgrew on Wednesday September 13 2023, @04:30PM
It's harder for me to believe that you have to pay a monthly subscription to Sony or Microsoft to play online in this new dystopian century. I have a PS4 but just use it to watch DVDs and Blu-Rays. I'm not going to rent server space!
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry