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57 lines
2.1 KiB
Text
57 lines
2.1 KiB
Text
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The DOOM Book
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Shortly after the Wolfenstein 3D source release,
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I sent a mail to Jay Wilbur suggesting a book
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about the DOOM engine. I anticipated a similar
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release of the DOOM sources within a year or
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two, and the obvious problems with the Wolfenstein
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sources (lack of accompanying artwork, a code
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base not maintained for quite some time) seemed
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to demand a better approach. I talked to some
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publishing company reps at the Book Fair in 1995,
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and while they were cautiously interested, id was
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not.
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In the last weeks of 1996, following a visit at
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id Software two months earlier, and after the
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departure of Jay Wilbur, John Carmack asked me
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whether I was still interested in doing the book.
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I was, Bear sent me a code dump, and Todd
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Hollenshead set out to address the legal concerns
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(of which were many).
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Unfortunately, what might have worked in 1995
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turned out to be a doomed attempt in 1997. I won't
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go into the details - let's just say that my
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leaving university and going back to full time
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writing for a living repeatedly forced me to
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change priorities on what looked more and more
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like a project unlikely to generate any revenue.
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By mid of the year, when the legal issues had
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finally been settled, it didn't look like I was
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going to find a publisher at all. Following the
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Book Fair in 1997 and some more discussions
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(with about a dozen publishers, total), I gritted
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my teeth and decided to abandon the project.
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Note that the book project as such wasn't supposed
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to hold up the source release to the public.
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However, given the legal concerns relating to
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the third party sound code in DOS DOOM, and the
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lack of Win32 support as well as the advantages of
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an OpenGL based release, the idea was to put
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together a consistent, stable code base prior to
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public release - most of which was supposed to be
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an offspring of my reformatting and modifying the
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code for the book.
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None of this worked out as intended. However, I
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hope that, at long last, this distribution
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will finally provide a good point to start for
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any cooperative effort to extend the already
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impressive lifespan of DOOM into the age of
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multiplayer servers and hardware-accelerated
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clients.
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