Timeline of Community Standards and Source Port Lineage

[Trigsy]

Hey, Doomers! I had this idea last month to make a sort of "family tree" of the Doom engine, including its many offshoots and source ports. I didn't think that the community would have much interest in this little thing, but then I noticed several mentions (mainly by Xaser) of community standards, and I wanted to incorporate them, as well. With more temporal organization, the tree could show both. Only later on did it occur to me that this updated idea could have somewhat wider appeal. Hell, there could be a twin tree that shows the history of Doom's editing utilities, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

My plan is to construct the actual thing in an open-source diagram drawing program called Dia, but there's a lot of information I simply don't have yet because of how new I am to Doomworld. On top of that, this is kind of a lot of information to process alone. I'll get there one day, but it'll be a lot easier to get to that point if I have a reference tool like this.

So... I'm going to be working on this. I'm letting the community know because I think you guys might be interested, and any input that people want to give me would be appreciated! Here are some things that I can think of immediate uses for:

• large PNGs of any graphics like titles, logos, icons, etc.. or if you could get SVGs, that'd be so much better that I might end up using the large PNGs as reference for SVGs
• version histories (preferably with detailed patch notes) for any components of the games or related software
• potential leads for where I should do my own research (apart from the pinned community standards topic in this very forum)
• vaguely threatening anecdotes unrelated to Doom

Edited May 15, 2024 by Trigsy

[Kappes Buur]

Timeline of Community Standards

I am not really aware of any standards other than what the capabilities of the various source ports are

 

Source Port Lineage

This may not be a complete genealogy but it comes close

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_source_port_releases

Edited May 15, 2024 by Kappes Buur

[Xaser]

The wiki page Kappes Buur linked is a pretty good starting point, though it could use an update since it's missing some notable stuff -- off the top of my head, dsda-doom, Woof!, Nugget Doom, EDGE Classic, Rum and Raisin, and Helion are missing from the chart, and I'm sure I'm missing several more.

 

All that said, while source port "genealogy" is worth documenting in its own right, it doesn't necessarily map cleanly to editing standard feature support (e.g. Boom, MBF21, et.al) -- for instance, ZDoom isn't directly based on MBF (the source port) or even the original Boom for that matter, but it implements pretty much all of their features, to the point that ZDoom has long been considered "Boom-compatible", give or take a few compatibility flags. :P

 

Then there are newer features like MBF21, UMAPINFO, DSDHacked, and so forth, which are newer standards that were adopted by multiple "downstream" ports that diverged long ago. As a random sample, Doom Retro, Woof!, GZDoom, and Helion all support MBF21, but none of their immediate "ancestor" ports do -- in fact, if you trace it backwards, technically speaking you'd have to go all the way to the original Linux source release to find a true common ancestor... for three of them. The fourth is Helion, which is technically a from-scratch reimplementation of the engine (albeit using the original code as reference). And we certainly couldn't get the shared ancestors to support new features without a time machine or two. :P

 

tl;dr, there's plenty of code sharing, to the point where the ancestry alone isn't quite enough to tell the full picture of what supports what. But maybe that just makes it all the more interesting to research. :P

[TimeOfDeath666]

6 hours ago, Kappes Buur said:

Source Port Lineage

This may not be a complete genealogy but it comes close

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_source_port_releases

I wonder if the initial BOOM release dates are correct. That page says May 27/98 and the BOOM page says April 17/98.

But the earliest uploaded boom wad on /idgames is from April 12/98: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/j-l/lih

And the earliest mention of BOOM I found was from March 15/98: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/megawads/inva2_09b

[Andromeda]

3 hours ago, TimeOfDeath666 said:

I wonder if the initial BOOM release dates are correct. That page says May 27/98 and the BOOM page says April 17/98.

But the earliest uploaded boom wad on /idgames is from April 12/98: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/j-l/lih

And the earliest mention of BOOM I found was from March 15/98: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/megawads/inva2_09b

From a quick look in the Doom Usenet groups Dawning seems to have been the earliest Boom wad released, the text file states that its first version was uploaded on 1998-03-09. While I couldn't find any announcement posts, Boom first appeared on the weekly RGCD FAQ on 1998-04-07, so I doubt it was released any earlier than that. Since Boom was developed by some Team TNT members, I suppose they had access to beta versions of the source port before its public release and were thus able to map for it, which explains why some Boom levels were released earlier than the port itself.

Edited May 15, 2024 by Andromeda

[Gez]

I have added a few low-hanging fruits to the Timeline article linked above about when some standards have been proposed, finalized, and adopted. There's a whole lot more work to do on that front; I think what's relevant to standards would be:

* UDMF adoption by various ports

* DEHACKED (the only recent addition would be the official port, obviously; most community ports have had it since forever)

* Boom feature support

* MBF feature support

* DEHEXTRA

* DSDHacked

* MUSINFO

* UMAPINFO

* MBF21

* Anything else listed here that is supported by more than a half-dozen ports