Overview
Play Doom / Doom II / HacX / Heretic / Hexen / Check Quest games with a modern touch.Doomsday engine enhances video, audio, graphical user interface and many many other things that make your game experience much better without loosing the classy gampeplay and touch.
Why Doomsday Engine
Well is an amazing engine with a fantastic user interface and enhancements.
Taken from their web site, most outstanding stuff:
Features
Graphics
- OpenGL based renderer
- Dynamic ambient occlusion (corner shadowing) for world surfaces
- Dynamic lights with halos and lens flares
- Dynamic shadowing effects for world objects
- Dedicated particle physics effects system
- 3D models for world objects (with per-vertex lighting and multiple light sources), skies, skyboxes and particles
- Automatical world surface (light) decorations
- Detail texturing, shine and glowing effects for world surfaces
- Fogging and vignette effects
- Environmental mapping effects for 3D models and world surfaces
- World movement smoothing (actors, monsters, missiles, surfaces) to remove the original games’ limitation of 35 FPS
- Smart texture filtering using a modified hq2x algorithm
Resources
- Flexible containers: WAD, ZIP, native directory (any resource can be loaded from any container type)
- High-resolution textures: PNG, JPG, TGA, PCX
- 3D models: MD2, DMD with LOD support
- External music files in MP3 and other formats
- Plain text definitions that all share the same syntax
- Internal BSP builder (originally based on glBSP)
Audio
- Plugin based driver architecture: FMOD Ex, DirectSound, FluidSynth, OpenAL, SDL_mixer, Windows Multimedia
- Red Book CD audio playback
- MIDI playback with SF2 soundfonts
- 3D sound stage for positional effects
- Environmental echo and reverb effects (EAX 2.0)
- Runtime sound effect resampling to 22/44 KHz with 8/16 bits
Note: Not all audio features are supported by all audio drivers
Networking
- TCP-based client/server networking
- Automatical discovery of servers running on the local network
- Central master server for discovery of servers across the world
- Standalone lightweight server (a daemon process)
- Standalone Doomsday Shell tool for server management (both local and remote)
Multiplayer
- Clients can join games in progress
- In-game chat and server management (shell-login)
- Up to 15 player games
- Player movement prediction/smoothing
User Interface
- Graphical command console and task bar
- Easy to use game selection screen for runtime game changing (e.g., from DOOM to Heretic)
- On-the-fly add-on resource loading
- Flexible input control bindings system
- Built-in updater for easy upgrades
Other
- Open source
- Cross-platform
- Plugin based extensible architecture
- Snowberry: GUI frontend based on game profiles; for managing custom maps, resource packs, add-ons and starting different game configurations easily
Where to get Doomsday Engine
Doomsday Engine can be downloaded from :
Also they have a nice Wiki:
Doomsday Engine Wiki[dengine.net]
What else to get for startup
I am only listing few things that will add value to your gamplay but don’t make it much different from the original experience, since I truly believe this is the way to play this games.
On the Add-ons page of Doomsday engine[dengine.net] are two things you should download :
- DOOM Resource Pack (jDRP)[files.dengine.net]. 3D model pack (addon.box version).
- Sycraft Remixes 4[files.dengine.net]. DOOM, DOOMII and Final DOOM music remixed by Sycraft.
The first one it’s just to make monsters look a bit better and in 3D.
The second one it’s a nice remix of the music. This one is really really a must and you’ll find out once you tune up sound options in the engine, such as 3D,EAX and reverb.
Installing Doomsday Engine
The installer is really straight forward.
Just leave it at default, will install all the components for all supported games.
After that , the engine will install.
At the end, let the Run program ticked.
Go to tools – Setup wizard
The process show repeats for as many games as you want a profile created.
In my case :
C:Program Files (x86)SteamSteamAppscommonUltimate DoombaseDOOM.WAD
on the second one. Done, know you have the engine installed and a game profile created.
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Enhancing Doom. Part 1 – Engine settings
Before doing anything, let me explain something :
Dommsday Engine have 2 types of settings. Shared settings and specific game profile settings.
The perfect scenario is where you set shared settings, that are more or less global to all your games / games profiles, and then override them if you need to do so, on the specific game profile.
For the pourpose of this guide, I will be setting Shared Settings and override one of the Ultimate Doom Profile.
First thing we’ll do is to set – up our Add-ons. Remember, the enhanced models and de music remix.
After you downloaded them, the easiest way to have everything under control and tidy, is to copy the files to the addons folder on the engine, and add that folder to my “addons foldes”.
Let’s see how.
First, copy both jdrp-packaged-20070404.zip and jdmu-all-remix-Sycraft-v4.pk3 to
the path C:Program Files (x86)Doomsdaysnowberryaddons.
If you installed Doomsday Engine in some other path, it’s on snowberryaddons whre you have to copy them.
Next, we will add snowberryaddons as a shared setting path for addons, so we will have access to the installed addons from all game’s profiles.
Select Shared settings on the left, and Settings tab on the right.
Click the + buton , browse you Doomsday Engine installation and select snowberryaddons .
In my case, the path C:Program Files (x86)Doomsdaysnowberryaddons.
Now, go to the Addons tab, and click Refresh.Addmons will show there.
Next , we activate both addons for the Ultimate Doom game profile.
Select the game profile on the left, and Addons tab on the right.
Next, click on the left of both addons, to activate them.
Enhancing Doom. Part 2 – ingame settings
First time to fire the game, do the taskbar tutorial.
Will teach you to use it, it’s an must do.
After that , hit Esc key, go options and SHOW TASKBAR, or use the shortcut key Shift-Esc
First, we’ll take care of render options.
Make sure everything is on.
Next, we go to audio options. This are the settings I use.
Finally, we check on the video options.
I use full screen, on the pic is disabled for taking the screenshots for the guide.
I get some graphical glitches if I turn off vsync, your milleage may vary.
Conclusions
I wrote this guide so people can play the original game, without much change to it.
You can play around wit both engine settings and in game settings, to achive a more personal taste, but in my optinon this is the minimum setting to enjoy the game with a modern touch, and still having the blast of it’s classic and classy gameplay.
Multiplayer is a work in progress, they still have work to do , but is still playable. They have 2 servers up that you can use.