WolfDoom

Scene of WolfDoom, demonstrating its curved walls, sector based lighting, parallaxing sky and Doom textures.

WolfDoom was a early fan made technology demo by Mike Dussault, who would later go on to serve as the Lead Engineer for version 1.0 and 2.0 of the Lithtech engine at Monolith Productions. WolfDoom was one of his first projects, and it relies on DOOM.WAD or DOOM2.WAD to load the textures from.

History

Not much is known about WolfDoom. It originally was named LastWolf for being the last Wolfenstein 3D ripoff, but Dussault assumed more people would get this reference if it was named differently. Thus WolfDoom was born. A demo was released on January 29, 1995, with its source code following on April 5, 1995 as the author forgot to include it in the initial release.

Engine

WolfDoom uses a custom engine that places it mid-way between Wolfenstein and Doom. Like the latter, it uses a BSP tree on start up, running in Mode X as opposed to Mode 13h in VGA employed by Doom.

Features

WolfDoom's 400x600 resolution mode.

Being a DOS engine, WolfDoom employs several features unique to it:

• Renders walls with a fixed height, like Wolfenstein
• Various resolutions can be used, to a unusual 400x600:
  • 320x200
  • 320x240
  • 360x360
  • 360x480
  • 400x600
• Non-rectangular walls, curved walls
• Parallaxing sky
• Sector based lighting like Doom
• Depthcueing
• Brightness intensity for parallaxing sky
• Non-textured floors

Trivia

• WolfDoom allows a custom WAD file to be used with it. This file has to be called BSPTEST.WAD. According to the manual, the following commandline parameter needs to be used: WolfDoom bsptest.wad out.txt 50 MAP01 \games\doom2.wad. An explanation of each line of that parameter follows below, cleaned up from the manual:

* bsptest.wad:  The name of the WAD with your new level in it.
* out.txt:  A text file WolfDoom always outputs describing the BSP tree it made.
* 50: The ratio of best balance to best split it chooses when generating the BSP tree (50=same amount of each)..
* MAP01: The name of the level in the WAD file (Doom 1 ones are ExMx and Doom 2 ones are MAPx).
* doom2.wad: Points to your DOOM or DOOM2.WAD file. (in which case, the commandline is \games\doom.wad.) This is used to load all the textures out of.

• To run WolfDoom properly using DosBox:
  • Make a folder called games in the root directory of WolfDoom and place your doom2.wad (without caps) in there. Then start test.bat. It will read from your games sub-folder and start the program. You will need to include DOS/4GW in the folder before starting WolfDoom through TEST.BAT.

External links

• WolfDoom binary, on ftp.lanet.lv, a X2FTP mirror
• WolfDoom engine source code, on ftp.lanet.lv
• Mike Dussault profile page, at The Blood Wiki