Zandronum

Zandronum is a source port focused on offering a modernized multiplayer experience, offering new game modes such as capture the flag, invasion or domination. The International Doom League adopted it as its port of choice in 2014.

History
Zandronum was forked from its parent project Skulltag on June 3, 2012, continuing the development of the latest Skulltag 98e. Since Brad Carney (Carnevil) requested the name Skulltag not to be used by a project over which he had no control, the community was asked to find a new name. Two of the most popular choices were Andromeda and Infernum, which emphasized respectively Doom's sci-fi and occult elements; other people wanted the port's name to begin with a 'Z' to reflect the port's ZDoom affiliation. In the absence of clear consensus, these were combined into a. Despite the construction of the name, it is intended to be nonsense and the lack of any results in major search engines at the time made it a favorable choice.

In addition to rebranding, the team decided to change the goal of the source port. Skulltag, having started as a mod rather than a full source port, added a large selection of stock resources and made tweaks to existing things. These resources were helpful when the engine was more primitive, but with ZDoom now supporting ways for people to add these resources without modifying the source code, these changes were seen as unnecessary, were at times a source of minor incompatibility between ZDoom and Skulltag, and caused minor issues with games outside of Doom. As a result, Zandronum stripped most of the added content. The support structures needed do remain in order to provide full compatibility with Skulltag provided the file skulltag_data.pk3 is loaded manually.

Zandronum's version numbering scheme uses two or three values. The major value increases with updates of the underlying ZDoom codebase, while the minor value increase for releases which do not change the base ZDoom compatibility level. For instance, Zandronum 1.x is based on ZDoom 2.3.1, while Zandronum 2.x is based on ZDoom 2.5.0. For pure bugfix releases, a third number can be used: Zandronum 1.2.2 has the same feature set as Zandronum 1.2, but fewer bugs.

Features

 * Support for up to 64 players in cooperative, deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, possession, domination, invasion, Last Man Standing, survival, and other game modes.
 * Support for most ZDoom and GZDoom features, including the latter's hardware accelerated renderer.
 * Continuing support for unique Skulltag editing features as well.
 * Console, Quake-style keybindings, free look, jumping, and other advanced controls.
 * Full support for all Doom engine games, including Heretic, Hexen, and Strife.
 * Runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Team members

 * Torr Samaho - Lead developer
 * Braden Obrzut (Blzut3) - Port developer, Doomseeker developer, webmaster
 * Dusk - Port developer, forum moderator
 * Edward-san - Tester
 * bond - IDE developer
 * Zalewa - Doomseeker developer