Boom

Boom is a source port created by Team TNT. The design goals of the Boom project were to create a source port of a professional quality, fixing bugs and limits in the Doom engine, and adding extra editing features while keeping the same "feel" and "spirit" of the original Doom engine.

Boom itself only ran under MS-DOS and was developed using DJGPP, the DOS port of gcc. The code was ported to other Operating Systems by other people, however.

Because of its strong emphasis on maintaining the original feel of the Doom engine, Boom can be seen as a much more conservative source port than others. While some other ports developed at the time concentrated on adding Quake-like features (such as a console), restructuring menus or adding impressive graphical features, Boom behaves much similar to the original Doom executable. Many of the changes made in Boom are not immediately visible, such as the removal of limits (eg. the visplane limit error) and the addition of editing features which, while immensely useful to level designers, may not be immediately obvious to the player.

A large number of WAD files have been developed which require Boom to run. Because of the attractive editing features provided by Boom, many popular source ports have adopted support for these features. This has led to the term "Boom-compatible engine" - WADs may run on many different source ports provided the source port used supports the Boom editing extensions.

Some of the features of Boom:


 * Removal of engine limits and bugs. This includes the visplane limit, tutti-frutti and medusa effects, the savegame size limit, the venetian blind crash and many others.
 * Optimisations to the engine.
 * Extra editing features. These include:
 * Configurable animated and switch textures
 * Deep water effects
 * Scrolling walls, floors and ceilings (including support for conveyor belts)
 * Translucent walls
 * Friction effects, such as mud and ice.
 * Custom colormaps, for example to give an underwater blue "tint".
 * Silent teleporters, which can be useful for fake "room over room" effects.

The primary authors of Boom were:


 * Jim Flynn
 * Ty Halderman
 * Lee Killough
 * Rand Phares

After the Boom project ended, several source ports arose derived from the Boom source code. These include:


 * LxDoom, later PrBoom, a portable version of Boom.
 * MBF, Lee Killough's continuation of his work on the Doom engine.