README.book

The DOOM Book

Shortly after the Wolfenstein 3D source release,
I sent a mail to Jay Wilbur suggesting a book
about the DOOM engine. I anticipated a similar
release of the DOOM sources within a year or
two, and the obvious problems with the Wolfenstein
sources (lack of accompanying artwork, a code 
base not maintained for quite some time) seemed
to demand a better approach. I talked to some
publishing company reps at the Book Fair in 1995,
and while they were cautiously interested, id was
not.

In the last weeks of 1996, following a visit at
id Software two months earlier, and after the
departure of Jay Wilbur, John Carmack asked me
whether I was still interested in doing the book.
I was, Bear sent me a code dump, and  Todd
Hollenshead set out to address the legal concerns
(of which were many).

Unfortunately, what might have worked in 1995
turned out to be a doomed attempt in 1997. I won't
go into the details - let's just say that my
leaving university and going back to full time
writing for a living repeatedly forced me to
change priorities on what looked more and more
like a project unlikely to generate any revenue.

By mid of the year, when the legal issues had
finally been settled, it didn't look like I was
going to find a publisher at all. Following the
Book Fair in 1997 and some more discussions
(with about a dozen publishers, total), I gritted
my teeth and decided to abandon the project.

Note that the book project as such wasn't supposed
to hold up the source release to the public.
However, given the legal concerns relating to
the third party sound code in DOS DOOM, and the
lack of Win32 support as well as the advantages of
an OpenGL based release, the idea was to put
together a consistent, stable code base prior to
public release - most of which was supposed to be
an offspring of my reformatting and modifying the
code for the book.

None of this worked out as intended. However, I
hope that, at long last, this distribution
will finally provide a good point to start for
any cooperative effort to extend the already
impressive lifespan of DOOM into the age of
multiplayer servers and hardware-accelerated
clients.