Joint Doom Standards
From DoomWiki.org
The Joint Doom Standards group, or JDS as an acronym, was a committee of source port authors, including at the height of its membership programmers of the Boom, DOSDoom, and Doom Legacy ports, with the stated goal of supporting propagation of cross-project standards for new editing features. It was founded and driven primarily by TeamTNT lead programmer Ty Halderman.
History[edit]
The Joint Doom Standards group lasted for a few months during 1998, during which time some of the cooperating ports adjusted existing features to accommodate the others. The largest and most visible result of this was the change of Boom push and pull points to use DoomEd numbers 5001 and 5002, as opposed to 4001 and 4002 as they did in the first release, to deconflict those things with the start things for players 5 through 8 which were already supported by Doom Legacy. Boom programmer Jim Flynn adjusted his previously released Boom demo maps to take this change into account.
After this, the group gradually fell apart, in particular after the announcement and subsequent failure of the OGRE project which partially replaced this group by merging together several of the participating ports.
Legacy[edit]
Though the JDS was not overwhelmingly successful in maintaining cross-project editing compatibility, this was partially due to the rapid sunset of development on the ports which participated in it. The at-that-time new ZDoom port instead took to gradual implementation of Boom features into its own code base, beginning a precedent which would see Boom editing features become the new shared standard basis. Other ports such as Doom Legacy and Risen3D would later follow suit.
Other cooperative efforts have emerged between ports since then, though typically limited in scope to individual features. One such example is the UDMF standard for a universal interchangeable map format which supports new port features. The Raven Software-created ACS and Hexen map format have also emerged as a form of shared "lowest common denominator" between several ports.
In the multiplayer world, a significant instance of similar cooperation is the creation of the CTF Standard, which allows for cross-port usage of maps designed for capture the flag gameplay.
Sources[edit]
- TeamTNT FAQ (archived 🏛), which still makes a passing reference to the JDS.
