Steve Boom

Steve Boom, also known as PrjBoom, was an early source port based on DoomWorld!, a DOSDoom based source modification and Boom. Initially meant as a learning project by its author Stephen Friederichs to study the Doom source code, Steve Boom eventually incorporated several enhancements over the stock Boom engine.

It became the basis for PrjDoom, a enhanced successor.

History
Steve Boom initially started as TCP/IP Boom, a merger of the Boom 2.01 codebase with DoomWorld!, a DOSDoom based modification that added TCP/IP functionality to the engine so players could play over the Internet without requiring a seperate setup program. This was simply called PrjBoom. Starting from its second version the port got renamed to Steve Boom.

Over the course of little more than a month, Steve Boom saw five releases. These followed rapidly one after another, providing several new enhancements, including sloshing sounds in water and loading of DeHackEd patches through a seperate lump. The last version was labeled v0.5, and was released September 29, 1998.

Shortly after the 0.5 release and in accordance with the late Ty Halderman, it was revealed in a December 29, 1998 news posting on Stephen's webpage entitled Woof! that an agreement was reached to rebrand the existing work done on Steve Boom, as its file name (PrjBoom) was deemed "too similar" to Boom.

Stephen then started a new port using his prior work as a basis and with a upgrade to Boom 2.02. This was to be called PrjDoom.

Source code release
Although the source code remained under the Doom Source License per its Boom legacy, Stephen released the source code to v0.3 of his port on September 12, 1998. This was released as-is and only contains the files modified by Friederichs. The user is to copy these over the then current Boom 2.01 codebase to apply the differences. Seeing as the Boom source code only got released in 1999, this mean't that one had to have permission from TeamTNT to acquire these at the time, before the changes could be added.

Features

 * TCP/IP support
 * Single Player death messages with BEX extensions, so you can change them if you want with a file and the -deh extension (v0.1)
 * Sloshing sounds in water ala Heretic. This is added through a seperate sub WAD, called (v0.2)
 * Falling damage parameter (v0.3), with refinements through a .cfg file in v0.4
 * Sky-for-Every-Level support. This works by checking for the existence of a "sky_def" texture, which is a default sky texture that will be used in every level instead of the original sky texture, but not instead of the sky's level. Then of course, it checks for the level's own texture, which follow the names of sky_1, sky_2, and so on. These are textures, not flats. Two PWADs are included:  which shows off sky for every level, and  which shows the default sky texture feature (v0.4)
 * Loading of DeHackEd patches as a seperate lump (v0.5)