Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus/Book and Cd

Comment: DooM modding was at its height in 1994-1996 but there are still thousands of levels made every year, see [...] or doomwadstation.

Making DooM levels is fun because it keeps the game alive and new. It's also easy to make basic levels. It's hard to make a good, long WAD, but it's easy to make a few rooms and improve on it over time. It's not like a lot of other games where even making a basic room is incredibly intimidating and challenging.

DooM's engine was GPL'd in 1997 and there are dozens of source ports available for every platform. Due to this, a lot of the information in this book is out of date. For example, in the original DOOM engine, you could not have a bridge (or a "sector over a sector"), the engine was coded this way for speed on the crappy 386 computers of the time. Some modern source ports redo the entire game in openGL and include the ability to make sectors over sectors. However, this book will still teach you basic concepts like how to make everything you'll find in the original DOOM.WAD or DOOM2.WAD. If you have no idea where to start, you'll like this book.

The tools it mentions and/or includes on the CD are a complete waste. NWT is a DOS based resource editor which no one uses anymore, in favour of XWE. The various map making tools are all archaic and suck, go with Doom Builder. For a modern source port, try ZDOOM or DooM Legacy. Of course, maps made for vanilla doom are always good too because they work in anything, but some source ports have some incredible features that the map will feel lacking without.

Bottom line: Use this book to keep from bad mapping habbits, make great base maps, but use modern tools and source ports to make a real modern level.

Comment: i got this book waaaayy back when it first came out and it has been a companion for me for editing doom which i still do as a hobby today. doom has to be the easiest game to edit on the planet and the possibilities are endless. this book is huge first off and theres a reason why. it gives you step by step instructions on level editing, graphics editing and miscellaneous editing to make your own custom doom. every chapter explains how to use the editors and also surprisingly tells how they work and how they can work for you. theres also another book that came out which is newer, 3-D alcemey however you spell it which is a continuation of this book. i recemmend this book to anyone with barely any computer programming knowledge who wants to make their own game out of doom.

Comment: Now that Doom has become 3d with all these new ports (DosDoom, Zdoom, DoomGL) people really want to learn how to edit levels, quickly and beutifully. This explains step by step. A very good book! I'd suggest it to anyone that wants to male there own Doom levels!

Comment: Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus is an excellent book due to the fact it is easy to follow and *all* lessons are required to do otherwise the end WAD will not be complete (unlike some other how-to computer books) Pictures, Diagrams and tables are included to help the reader understand the various elements in Doom. An excellent feature of this book is that when you finish reading it you will be fully qualified to make excellent WAD files without ever needing to refer back to the book, and its another point of its easy-to-understand feature. Overall, the book is an excellent work and good. However, its only let-down is that Doom gets out-of-date very quickly with more modern games, and it doesnt teach you much for the future; however, this is of no fault of the authors.