mapdata – Doomsday Blog

The spring months have been a little crazy with various Real Life time sinks preventing me from delving too deep into fun coding. Consequently, there has been little to no progress with the tasks on the roadmap, such as the multiplayer improvements for version 2.1. Given that several months have passed, it will be challenging to find motivation to restart this work. I am tempted to make some changes to the roadmap to get things rolling along again.

I have managed to steal away some time to explore an exciting new direction for the renderer, though. The basic gist of this effort is to completely revise how the game world is drawn, bringing it up to par with the recently redone 3D model renderer.

Continue reading Status update

Last week I went on a brief modding tangent and added a plugin that loads UDMF maps.

UDMF is an attractive choice for map editing due to its flexibility and potential to be widely compatible with map editors and source ports. However, it is basically only a syntax for describing map data; the real trick is interpreting the contents and supporting all the required gameplay logic, line and sector specials, etc. Doomsday at the moment supports only vanilla maps with a couple of Boom features. The new UDMF plugin also doesn’t yet transfer all the data to Doomsday, for example most line flags are ignored.

When it comes to extending Doomsday’s support for modding, I view full Boom compatibility as the first milestone to reach. Modding is on the roadmap for the future 2.4 release, so in the near future the UDMF importer plugin remains an experimental feature.

I also did many small improvements in preparation for the stable 2.0 release. Continue reading UDMF experiment, Shell game options, installer facelift