Community Chest series

The Community Chest series is a set of 32-levels megawads for Doom II created by the Doomworld forums community.

The idea originated from TeamTNT member Dale Harris (Cadman), who launched the first issue in the series under the name of "The Community Chest Project". The mapping guidelines were vanilla Doom features only, but with Boom's bugfixes; no new textures, sounds, or music. However, new status bar graphics were provided (which would remain throughout the series), along with TITLEPIC and level name graphics (CWILV**); and six of the maps did sneak in a custom MIDI sound track. Music from  was also included for the title screen and text screen.

It was followed by a sequel after Cadman took note of people's interest in contributing to a new issue. The second Community Chest allowed new textures to be used, and fully embraced Boom features, including an ANIMATED lump and two custom colormaps. More people issued custom MIDI songs with their map, replacing half of Doom II's soundtrack.

Andrew Stine (Linguica) attempted a third Community Chest, aiming to make it a collection of innovative ZDoom maps, but canceled the project on 6th of July 2005 after too few contributors had anything to show for the first milestone date.

The series was revived by Andy Leaver, who decided to hold a poll to let the community chose kind of maps to make. This poll was won by the "old school Boom maps" option. A new CC3 project was started, and eventually completed. Again, Boom features were fully used, including the sky transfer effect which is actually an MBF feature. Also used were custom colormaps, SWITCHES and ANIMATED lumps, and an embedded DEHACKED lump (though an external .BEX file is also provided). CC3 was also when a custom MIDI soundtrack started to be considered seriously, with all songs replaced and full credits given in the accompanying text file.

The fourth Community Chest was organized differently, led by Eric Baker and Death-Destiny, the latter of whom soon left due to controversy from another project. Instead of allowing mappers to add new textures as they desired, a comprehensive texture pack was compiled first. While the CC4 project got progressively abandoned by the mappers despite measures taken to prevent it, a number of unrelated projects were released using the CC4 texture pack. Eventually, James Cresswell (Phobus) started a drive to finish the project's abandoned maps, which successfully revived the project and allowed it to see a long-awaited completion. CC4 also features three different MAPINFO lumps (variants are EMAPINFO and ZMAPINFO), an embedded DEHACKED patch, an OPTIONS lump to enforce one compatibility setting in Eternity Engine, and a MUSINFO lump used only by the Easter egg hidden map. Furthermore, the accompanying text file is also embedded as a WADINFO lump.

Doomworld forum threads

 * (First Community Chest project launch)
 * (Largest discussion thread)
 * (Launch of the second Community Chest)
 * (CC2 sign-up thread)
 * (Launch of the failed third Community Chest)
 * (Death of the failed CC3)
 * (Launch of the successful third Community Chest)
 * (CC3 map thread #1)
 * (Community Chest 3 poll)
 * (CC3 guidelines)
 * (Unofficial launch of the fourth Community Chest 4)
 * (first sign-up thread)
 * (second sign-up thread)
 * (second sign-up thread)