RELATIONSHIP OF RISEN3D TO DOOMSDAY

Some of you may have already read the history behind Risen3D in the R3DCredits.txt. The aim of Risen3D is  to  allow MBF/BOOM maps to be run in the Doomsday environment. I started this project purely for my own  amusement but, with  Jaakko Keränen's support, released it as Boomsday which was hosted and linked from  his site.

Much of the feedback I received urged me to incorporate the latest Doomsday features. The changes being  made to Doomsday, however, meant that I was spending too much time in just tracking them. This meant I was  not getting on with the task of dealing with the rendering issues surrounding many MBF maps.

The problems were not confined purely to maps with the MBF extensions. Requiem which is a stock DOOM2  wad, which will run with iD's DOOM95, uses a number of 'tricks' that had been discovered by authors playing  around building maps for the DOOM/DOOM2 engine. Try running and comparing MAP 13 or MAP 21 of  Requiem, for example, in Doomsday and Risen3D and you'll see both the problems the tricks cause and what  Risen3D has had to contend with.

Basically, in the evolution of DOOM, there was the official path DOOM - DOOM2 - HERETIC - HEXEN, which is  what Doomsday deals with so admirably well, and the separate unnofficial branch off to MBF/BOOM. The way  Requiem fits into this is that authors having found they could use 'tricks' expected these to be continued to be  supported.

The MBF extensions in their own right are a highly organised and logical extension to the original DOOM  engine. If the 'tricks' had not been required to be supported then the MBF extensions could have been included  in a separate dll for Doomsday. In order, however, to support the rendering tricks, this alone would not be  sufficient. To deal with the tricks the Doomsday engine itself has had to be massively modified. Supporting the  tricks cannot, therefore, be confined to an add on dll.

Since Jaakko has to deal with the four games mentioned then, following discussion, we came to the conclusion  that two separate engines would be required. Although Jaakko was willing to consider and had suggested the  possibility of a unified code base I had a problem with time in order to deal with this.

The divergence of Doomsday and Risen3D was not, therefore, intentional but was born out of the problems that  would undoubtedly have arisen had an attempt been made to unify what are completely disparate requirements.

In essence Risen3D is Doomsday prior to V1.7.8 - but heavily modified to allow the running of 'tricks' - as used  in many Requiem maps - and the MBF extensions. The compliance of MBF 2D engines in also supporting the  trick code, as expected by map authors at the time, means that these two requirements cannot be disentangled. Unifying both in one OGL/D3D engine that is also expected to run HERETIC and HEXEN would be impractical.

At the time of writing I have also only come across one MBF mega wad that relies on the MBF extensions alone  and that is PAR (Phobos: Anomaly Reborn) authored by Chris Lutz. So not supporting the tricks would  prove somewhat limiting. In general many MBF maps, 10sector and Eternal, for example, are stuffed full of  tricks. In addition the absence of any rules means that authors have found their own ways of doing things - so  the same effect may be generated in many different ways. In addition some maps have had 'fixes' put in to  cajole the engines they were written for to behave. All this has to be contended with.

GMJ October 2003