A deep dive into Id Software's DOOM editor: DoomEd!

[Thomas Cherryhomes]

In this video, I do a deep dive into Id Software's in-house level editor, DoomEd, which was written in #NeXTSTEP and #ObjectiveC, first touring all the features, and then creating a simple level. YouTube Video

 

A living artifact is here: https://archive.org/details/nextstep.tar

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #doom 

[OpenRift]

Honestly OG Doom Ed looks so cool, I wish someone faithfully ported it to Windows...

[Thomas Cherryhomes]

37 minutes ago, OpenRift said:

Honestly OG Doom Ed looks so cool, I wish someone faithfully ported it to Windows...

 

You can run it from inside the living artifact. See the link to archive.org.

-Thom

[OpenRift]

1 hour ago, Thomas Cherryhomes said:

 

You can run it from inside the living artifact. See the link to archive.org.

 -Thom

Yeah, I got that part, but still.

[Redneckerz]

2 hours ago, OpenRift said:

Honestly OG Doom Ed looks so cool, I wish someone faithfully ported it to Windows...

Close but no cigar:

 

[Ludi]

This is a great idea for a video! It's unbelievable to consider people made WADs without a 3D view. It's a very easy to understand video too, probably even for those without Doom mapping experience like many of us here.

[indigotyrian]

8 minutes ago, Ludi said:

This is a great idea for a video! It's unbelievable to consider people made WADs without a 3D view. It's a very easy to understand video too, probably even for those without Doom mapping experience like many of us here.

 

I don't have a source to point to for this but I believe id themselves were using Doom itself as their "3D View." Doom's source code has buried within it a way to re-load a map on the fly; it's possible that a level designer could've been working on a NeXT workstation with their map data kept on network-accessible storage that the game was looking at. Save your changes in the map on the workstation, go to the PC, reload the map.

[Ludi]

40 minutes ago, segfault said:

 

I don't have a source to point to for this but I believe id themselves were using Doom itself as their "3D View." Doom's source code has buried within it a way to re-load a map on the fly; it's possible that a level designer could've been working on a NeXT workstation with their map data kept on network-accessible storage that the game was looking at. Save your changes in the map on the workstation, go to the PC, reload the map.

 

That's pretty interesting. Are there any contemporary source ports that can replicate this behavior?

[cambreaKer]

42 minutes ago, segfault said:

 

I don't have a source to point to for this but I believe id themselves were using Doom itself as their "3D View." Doom's source code has buried within it a way to re-load a map on the fly; it's possible that a level designer could've been working on a NeXT workstation with their map data kept on network-accessible storage that the game was looking at. Save your changes in the map on the workstation, go to the PC, reload the map.

if i remember correctly there was a post on John Romero's website that showed a screenshot of Doom running alongside DoomEd on the workstation so i guess they had a version of the game that ran on NeXTSTEP

[heliumlamb]

26 minutes ago, cambreaKer said:

if i remember correctly there was a post on John Romero's website that showed a screenshot of Doom running alongside DoomEd on the workstation so i guess they had a version of the game that ran on NeXTSTEP

to paraphrase steve jobs, "You Can Run Your DOS Applications Alongside Your Good Applications", it was possible thanks to SoftPC, an early x86 emulator.

Edited February 20, 2023 by heliumlamb

[Thomas Cherryhomes]

1 hour ago, cambreaKer said:

if i remember correctly there was a post on John Romero's website that showed a screenshot of Doom running alongside DoomEd on the workstation so i guess they had a version of the game that ran on NeXTSTEP

 

sigh, GUYS, I literally show the NexTDOOM port running to test the map!

Dave Taylor (ddt) did the port alongside the MS-DOS port (and also did the Linux and SGI ports).

-Thom 

 

[Thomas Cherryhomes]

2 hours ago, segfault said:

 

I don't have a source to point to for this but I believe id themselves were using Doom itself as their "3D View." Doom's source code has buried within it a way to re-load a map on the fly; it's possible that a level designer could've been working on a NeXT workstation with their map data kept on network-accessible storage that the game was looking at. Save your changes in the map on the workstation, go to the PC, reload the map.

 

What you're talking about is the Launch and Save functionality, which allowed you to specify a special starting point for a particular map iteration. This could be hooked up to a test script to launch NeXTDOOM.

 

-Thom

[Kyka]

13 hours ago, Ludi said:

It's unbelievable to consider people made WADs without a 3D view. 

 

 

Back in those days, we used our imaginations, which was the style at the time. Of course there was a shortage of good editors back then, on account of the war.

 

@Thomas Cherryhomes Looking forward to watching. Thank you!