Hey there. I suppose introductions are in order so here goes. I've been a gamer for quite literally as long as I can remember, with one of my earliest memories being me attempting to playing Tetris DX on my first console (the Game Boy Colour) not knowing how the game worked, and my father teaching me how to play. I grew up in a fairly varied household, with my oldest brother owning a PSX->PS2->XBox, and my middle brother owning an N64->GCN, though most of my playing was done on the Nintendo consoles (which I was given once my brother had moved on to different consoles). Though I didn't main parity with consoles until the Wii, I did manage to keep up to date with handhelds (which is a trend that has continued until the present day). A couple years after the Wii's release I got into PC gaming both old and new (I actively follow the Doom modding scene and help to develop a source port). This start gave me a good platform to go into game collection proper, which really kicked off in December of 2014 when I decided to buy a Famicom Twin Turbo (AN 505-BK) and Everdrive N8, which has spiraled off into an rather expensive hobby, but what is definitely a worthwhile one. On a slightly less game-related note, I am currently a second year student taking a four year computer science course at a central London university, but would definitely like to incorporate my gained knowledge in programming into a complete game. Looking around here you folks all seem quite welcoming and friendly, as well as helpful and experienced. I hope that my time here is a good one and can't wait to get to know you guys better. Congratulations, you got to the end of the wall of text! Thanks for reading it.
Very cool on the DOOM source port. I always like firing up strange WADs. Nice to see there's still such an active community for a game so old. What did you do for the source port?
While I haven't contributed a huge amount of lines or anything to the source code, I have fixed rotation of polyobjects (basically moving map geometry, allows for swinging doors and such, was originally used in Hexen but has been enhanced since then), as well as a bug that would cause a special type of midtexture that you could step on to go out of sync with a ceiling, if they were supposed to be attached. Also I have implemented fields that will in future allow users to specify whether or not blood spawned will be like Doom's or Heretic's for the project lead, as he has been busy. On the less-direct side of things I hang around in the IRC channel for the port and try to help other contributors out if they need it.
Nice, it seems like you have a hand in a little bit of everything. What makes the Eternity engine different than others? Sorry if you don't want your brain picked about this. Feel free to not reply if so haha
It's quite fine. Eternity is different from other "advanced" ports (eg ZDoom) in a fair few ways: it retains vanilla movement, unlike ZDoom; for the runners, it has the ability to play back and record vanilla demos without desync; it has a data specification language called ExtraData that allows for much more complex maps, whilst still keeping the binary format (the non-binary format is in the works); it has a language that can be used to define monsters, decorations etc (this is what I expanded with the blood types thing); and various other small things. Its biggest feature that other ports do not have is something called "linked portals". What makes these different from other portals is that they are not purely cosmetic, but you can actually move through them, shoot stuff, send projectiles through etc. This allows for the illusion of 3D maps, while still keeping the same engine under the hood. It can also allow for funky impossible geometry stuff (though is not the intended use of them). Not only is this cool from the player's end of things, but also can make life a lot easier for mappers, as they can arrange their map in layers, without needing to have all the 3D stuff overlap. Though development has been slow the past couple of years on average, in the past month there has been an explosion of activity with incomplete features being made closer to complete, as well as bugs being ironed out. Certain things (such as the language for making monsters, and the text-based maps) will take a bit longer to handle, as they require a fair bit of input from the main developer.
