Doom Connector

Doom Connector is a free lobby-based service which was developed by Pascal vd Heiden and was ran by Vindict6. With Doom connector you could play Doom online with several popular Doom multiplayer ports such as ZDoom, Zandronum, ZDaemon, Doom Legacy, SRB2, and GZDoom.

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


 * [[file:doomconnector3.png|180px|thumb|Doom Connector 3]]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 was developed by Pascal "CodeImp" vd Heiden, and has been continued by Zorcher in 2008.

On June 25th, 2014, Doom Connector went offline. On March 22, 2016, Doom Connector was reopened by Vindict6 and a new administrative team. On January 25, 2018 Doom Connector 5 finally rests in peace. Some time after this, Dagger, who was with DC2/DC3 management, picked up the code and started hosting it again. The service is still currently up as of October 24th, 2020.

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. Pascal vd Heiden decided to try going for a total new build for Doom Connector, which was known for a while as "Doom Connector 4", being it's fourth version of the product. Unfortunately, it wasn't released, even after 3 months of work using Microsoft .NET to provide Doom Connector better and newer features. A few months later, Pascal vd Heiden retired from administration, because other work required his attention. He passed control over to Dagger.

After 4 years, The Doom Connector service was discontinued on May 30, 2005, and the source code of the product was given to Brad "Carnevil" Carney, author of the Skull Tag sourceport. A few years later the source was given to Zorcher, who rechristened it as Player Connector. Player Connector added support for many other games aside from Doom source ports, such as Tribes and Quake II. Player Connector 3, which was to allow the creation of custom support DLLs, was released as a beta but never finished.

As of January 14th 2014, Doom Connector 3.50 was hosted by Zorcher and maintained by Zorcher, Kasper, and Tribeam, Engine game support was still updated periodically based on engine updates, feature changes, and new Doom engines.

On June 25th 2014, the Doom Connector service went offline but, on March 22, 2016, Vindict6 reopened the service to Zandronum, ZDoom, and GZDoom users. Several improvements were made on the client including improved netcode, an updated UI, chat color insertion, IRC integration, and numerous others.

After almost 2 years on January 25th 2018, Doom Connector is discontinued by Vindict6, as work and time constraints became too much for him to continue development. On October 19th, 2020, after Dagger got the Doom Connector code, he now hosts it and is continuing to improve it.