Playing Doom online with Odamex
Odamex is a nice engine. You can build it yourself instead of having to rely on sourceless binaries of unknown providence. For some reason I think this is important. On a whim, when 0.5.4 came out, I spent some time configuring it and setting the controls to how I like them. The mouse code actually works nicely, unlike a lot of others*.
But Odamex's focus is multiplayer and there's little point just for killing monsters by yourself. Recently they've been having these weekly events to promote it and I decided I should try it out. I've been to a few of them.
I went to the first as I was still awake - the start time is unfortunate if you're in Europe. I have no idea where the next two hours actually went. I blinked and it was nearly 3am. Oh well. It was a lot of fun.
Running it is very simple, I didn't bother building the launcher, odamex -connect host:port worked fine. Most of the other reasons why I don't like engines other than rboom didn't apply. Another example, along with the aforementioned mouse code: there is of course no overdetailed map cheat, but since you don't use the automap in deathmatches it doesn't matter.
Odamex's problem is that there's never anyone on outside of these events. Odamex was, as it were, late to market, and has not been greatly successful in capturing a critical mass of players from the "big two" (ZDaemon and Skulltag.)
I always said I'd never bother with deathmatch, but, well, here we are...
* In PrBoom-Plus for instance, it seems impossible to remove the symptoms of mouse acceleration unless it is actually disabled in the X server with "xset m 1". PrBoom-Plus's mouse code has found its way into several other engines, such as Chocolate Doom and Eternity.
Doom Wiki
The Doom Wiki moved from its old home on Wikia to a new host. In a fit of exhuberance I made an account*.
Then earlier today I wrote a page on an old bug I reported years ago: Wrong sound for exit switches, one of the three original switch sound origin bug patches which I blame for my ending up with commit access to PrBoom in the first place. I suppose I shall do the other two, in time.
Also I did a mass search and replace of link URLs on this site. There weren't that many. I don't usually bother updating links in old posts but they're trying really hard to deprecate the old version so I thought I should help.
* note to self: mediawiki account names are case sensitive, and if you try to use all lower case it will capitalise the first letter.
High-Profile Modern Map Releases
I seem to be halfway through a large number of recent high-profile wad releases. These include:
1994 Tune-up Community Project a.k.a. Let's Ruin A Bunch Of Classics With The Horrible Fashions Of Modern Mapping. Well that's what I thought when I first heard about it but there is some really nice stuff in here. Map15 continues to amaze me because even though I know the original** really well I completely failed to recognise it. I didn't think much of the Deimos Subway remix though, the original is better.
Vanguard and Lunatic, both by the author of Sector 666.
- Plutonia: Revisited Community Project - the release of this thing prompted me to go and play Plutonia 2. So far I mostly prefer the latter... Incidentally there is apparently a TNT Revisited in the works as well.
EPIC 2, which I downloaded when it came out last December but for some reason never really got far into it... It is good, though, another great WAD from Eternal.
** Officially TECHBASE.WAD, although there are several variants of TECHBASE's layout. Another version of the same map can be found in Serenity, for instance. They were all based on an example that came with an old map editor - see the comments there for a list.
