Boom

Boom is a source port created by TeamTNT. The design goals of the Boom project were to create a source port of professional quality, fix bugs and remove limitations of vanilla Doom, and add extra editing features, while keeping the same "feel" and "spirit" of the original Doom engine. The final version of Boom was released on October 22, 1998.

Boom itself only ran under MS-DOS and was developed using DJGPP, the DOS port of gcc. The code was ported to other operating systems by other people, however.

Because of its strong emphasis on maintaining the original feel of the Doom engine, Boom can be viewed as a much more conservative source port than some others. While many contemporary source ports concentrated on adding Quake-like features (such as a console), restructuring menus, or adding impressive new graphical features, Boom behaves very similarly to the original Doom executable. Many of the changes made in Boom are not immediately visible, such as the removal of limits (e.g. the visplane limit error) and the addition of editing features which, while immensely useful to level designers, may not be obvious to the player.

A large number of WAD files have been developed which require Boom to run. Because of the attractive editing features provided by Boom, many popular source ports have adopted support for these features. This has led to the term "Boom-compatible engine": such WADs may run on many different source ports provided that the source port used supports the Boom editing extensions.

Features

 * Removal of engine limits and bugs. This includes the visplane limit, the tutti-frutti and medusa effects, the savegame size limit, the venetian blind crash, and many others.
 * Optimisations to the engine.
 * Extra editing features. These include:
 * Configurable animated and switch textures.
 * Deep water effects.
 * Scrolling walls, floors, and ceilings (including support for conveyor belts).
 * Translucent walls.
 * Friction effects, such as mud and ice.
 * Custom colormaps (which can provide, for example an underwater blue "tint").
 * Silent teleporters, which can be useful for fake "room over room" effects.
 * Generic linedef types - a particular linedef behaviour can be "calculated" using a separate linedef calculator program called TRIGCALC.EXE.
 * A DeHackEd extension standard, BEX.

Authors
The primary authors of Boom were:


 * Jim Flynn
 * Stan Gula
 * Ty Halderman
 * Lee Killough
 * Rand Phares

Derived source ports
After the Boom project ended, several source ports arose which were derived from the Boom source code. These include:


 * LxDoom, which later merged to PrBoom, a portable version of Boom.
 * MBF, Lee Killough's continuation of his work on the Doom engine.