Doom Connector

Doom Connector is a free lobby-based matchmaking service to play Doom online with several popular Doom multiplayer ports such as ZDoom, Skull Tag, ZDaemon, Doom Legacy, csDoom and jDoom (Doomsday).

This service allows you to see all public servers from all Doom master servers, but also allows you to create private peer-to-peer games. The support for each source port is built as a plug-in, which allows very flexible support for all the features the source port has. Doom Connector provides very comprehensive features such as:


 * Browse and join all public (dedicated) servers.
 * Setup, host and join peer-to-peer games.
 * IRC chat specialized for the service features.
 * Buddylist to keep track of your buddies.
 * Whiteboard to draw strategics.
 * File transfers.
 * Offline messages.
 * Shows the ping (latency) on all servers and players.

This product is developed by Pascal vd Heiden and is currently hosted and maintained by several other people.

History
The development of this product started in July 6th 2001 as "Doom Legacy Connector". At that time, Doom Legacy needed a replacement for its master server. The software was announced finished and stable somewhere at the end of September 2001 and it opened its doors at October 9th 2001. The service was hosted by Joen Joensen and maintained by Pascal vd Heiden and several moderators from the Doom Legacy community.

Not long after its release, the authors and users of other source ports requested support implementation for their source port as well. The software was then rebuilt to include support for the above mentioned source ports and was named "Doom Connector 2", since it was the second major version and no longer specific to Doom Legacy.

More than a year later, the entire software was rebuilt again to better support the different source ports and to provide more features. The service also needed more professional administrative features to maintain the system and community. This version, released at February 28th 2003, was named "Doom Connector 3" and is currently the latest release of its kind.

At February 14th 2004, the service went down because Joen Joensen was unable to host this service any longer. It didn't take long for MancuNET to bring this service back with a complete new management. At March 3th 2004, Doom Connector 3 was re-opened by Mancubus II with several moderators from all over the Doom multiplayer scene. A few months later, Pascal vd Heiden retired from administration, because other work required his attention. He passed control over to Dagger.

Plans and a basic framework were once made for a "Doom Connector 4", but were short lived. Doom Connector is scheduled to be taken offline at the end of May 2005. Contributing factors include source port wars between the ZDaemon and Skull Tag communities, as well as a lack of time to commit to future development of the program itself.