Caverns of Darkness

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Caverns of Darkness is a 12-level partial conversion for Doom II created by the Chaos Crew and released on April 24, 2002. It is packaged with a required custom source port executable for MS-DOS, a fork of the Eternity Engine dubbed "EE 3.29 dev beta 5 joel-2". The levels are well-known for their use of voodoo doll conveyor belt scripting, ambient sounds, and fake 3D (through middle textures) to create more realistic subterranean environments. Caverns of Darkness was named one of 2002 entries in the Top 100 WADs of All Time.

Authors[edit]

Levels for the WAD were made by:

Programming for the engine was done by:

Music for the WAD was written by:

  • Justus Johnson

Content[edit]

Custom content[edit]

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Levels[edit]

All levels by Christopher Lutz unless noted otherwise.

Soundtrack[edit]

Aside from one custom track, all levels use Doom and Doom II songs by Robert Prince.

Caverns of Darkness Engine[edit]

Caverns of Darkness Engine (or CoD Engine) is a source modification created by Joel Murdoch and based on Eternity Engine v3.29. The COD.EXE file included in the PWAD's archive is a source modification compiled for MS-DOS. To play Caverns of Darkness in Windows operating systems, a DOS emulator such as DosBox must be used. The binary adds more level editing features including:

On May 4, 2002, The Chaos Crew member Christopher Lutz published Joel's source code to the team's web site. However with the file stored on Joel's personal hosting, the link eventually went dead and the source became unavailable for more than a decade. On May 26, 2019 Joel Murdoch re-uploaded the source and posted a new download link to the Doomworld forums. It was made available on the idgames archive on January 31, 2020.

A new source port, Tartar, was released in December 2021 based on the CoD Engine source code and integrating various other improvements.

ZDoom version[edit]

On January 23, 2005, Christoph Oelckers (Graf Zahl) supplied a source modification called ZDOOM-COD.EXE, derived from ZDoom 2.0.96 that made the necessary additions to play Caverns of Darkness. It reports in-game as ZDoom 2.0.96c (COD custom). On November 15, 2008, he released a CoD PWAD patch to instead allow the levels to be played using the regular ZDoom build. It substitutes DECORATE actors in place of the original hard-coded custom thing types and weapons, as well as using MAPINFO to apply map translators that replace the CoD engine's new sector and linedef types.

Trivia[edit]

External links[edit]