The King Doom Experience

The King Doom Experience (KDX) was mainly developed by Christian B. Caldarone, and is a software application, which allows to manage the variety of Doom engine source ports together with the huge amount of custom made levels (PWADs), available i.e. from the idgames archives. In addition to this, KDX provided an online platform, so users could play together over the Internet without beeing worried about level settings and synchronization. The online platform was implemented using The Universal Master Server (UMS), a classic master server software developed as well by Christian B. Caldarone. UMS is maintaining a database of online players and hosted game servers, based on continuous heartbeats UMS is receiving from its clients.

Besides the ICQ-style interface (DoomCQ), where you could find and talk to your online fellows, also an IRC-style interface existed, where you could join a many-to-many main chat, sending private messages to your pals and invite them for playing Doom online together.

For online play, KDX was not only restricted to its own online platform, but also had an option to make use of the Internet Doom Explorer (IDE).

Yet another alternative was given by using the KDX-to-GSA gateway application. An easy and efficient network synchronization protocol based on TCP/IP for Doom source port settings and PWAD custom levels. You could play KDX through the famous Game Spy Arcade (GSA), overriding GSA's restricted actions scope for playing Doom online.

KDX did further interact with other 3rd party software as well, thanks to its open approach and the intention to provide the best experience to the user. Therefore KDX came with built-in support for common Doom utilities like ZenNode, Glvis and others. As an extension to this, special plug-ins could be loaded to for example interact with:

- A Media Player for replacing the original Level music by MP3s played in the background, especially developed to play-back the PSX Doom music.

- The WAD Factory GUI as the most advanced frontend for SLIGE, the random level generator

- Auto creation of Glvis/ZenNode/bsp/glbsp nodes for levels

- Import/export of custom levels and whole databases of custom levels