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11 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
# Doom
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Doom is a legendary video [game](game.md) released in 1993, perhaps the most famous game of all time, the game that popularized the [first person shooter](first_person_shooter.md) genre and shocked by its at the time extremely advanced [3Dish](pseudo_3D.md) graphics. It was made by [Id Software](id_software.md), most notably by [John Carmack](john_carmack.md) (graphics + engine programmer) and [John Romero](john_romero.md) (tool programmer + level designer). Doom is sadly [proprietary](proprietary.md), however its engine was later (1999) released as [free (as in freedom) software](free_software.md) under [GPL](gpl.md) which gave rise to many source ports. The assets remain non-free but a completely free alternative is offered by the [Freedoom](freedoom.md) project that has created [free as in freedom](free_culture.md) asset replacements for the game. [Anarch](anarch.md) is an official [LRS](lrs.md) game inspired by Doom, completely in the [public domain](public_domain.md).
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{ Great books about Doom I can recommend: *Masters of Doom* (about the development) and *Game Engine Black Book: Doom* (details about the engine internals). ~drummyfish }
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Partially thanks to the free release of the engine and its relatively [suckless](suckless.md) design ([C](c.md) language, [software rendering](sw_rendering.md), ...), Doom has been [ported](port.md), both officially and unofficially, to a great number of platforms (e.g. [Gameboy Advance](gba.md), [PS1](playstation.md), even [SNES](snes.md)) and has become a kind of **de facto standard [benchmark](benchmark.md)** for computer platforms -- you will often hear the phrase: **"but does it run Doom?"** Porting a Doom to any platform has become kind of a [meme](meme.md), someone allegedly even ported it to a pregnancy test (though it didn't actually run on the test, it was really just a display). { Still [Anarch](anarch.md) may be even more portable than Doom :) ~drummyfish }
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The Doom engine was revolutionary and advanced (not only) video game graphics by a great leap, considering its predecessor [Wolf3D](wolf3D.md) was really primitive in comparison. Doom used a technique called **[BSP rendering](bsp.md)** that was able to render [realtime](realtime.md) 3D views of textured environments with distance fog and enemies and items represented by 2D [billboards](billboard.md) ("sprites"). No [GPU](gpu.md) acceleration was used, graphics was rendered purely with [CPU](cpu.md) (so called [software rendering](sw_rendering.md)). This had its limitations, for example the camera could not tilt up and down and the levels could not have rooms above other rooms. For this reason some call Doom "[pseudo 3D](pseudo3d.md)" or 2.5D rather than "true 3D". Nevertheless, though with limitations, Doom did present 3D views and internally it did work with 3D coordinates (for example the player or projectiles have 2D position plus height coordinate), despite some dumb YouTube videos saying otherwise. For this reason we prefer to call Doom a **primitive 3D** engine, but 3D nonetheless.
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LOL someone created a Doom system monitor for [Unix](unix.md) systems called [psDooM](psdoom.md) where the monsters in game are the operating system [processes](process.md) and killing the monsters kills the processes. |