Immediately after the initial shareware release of Doom, on December 10, 1993, enthusiasts began working on tools to modify the game. Not everybody in the id Software crew was happy with this development some, including Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud, objected due to legal concerns and in the belief that it would not be of any benefit to the company's business. The idea of making Doom easily modifiable was primarily backed by Carmack, a well-known supporter of copyleft and the hacker ideal of people sharing and building upon each other's work, and by John Romero, who had hacked games in his youth and wanted to allow other gamers to do the same. According to Doom's initial design document, WAD stands for " Where's All the Data?". This allowed players to make their own data without any modification to the engine itself. For that reason, game data such as levels, graphics, sound effects and music are stored separately from the game engine, in "WAD files". John Carmack, lead programmer at id Software, designed the Doom internals from the ground up to allow players to extend the game. However, the procedures involved in creating and loading modifications for that game were cumbersome. When developing Doom, id Software was aware that many players had tried to create custom levels and other modifications for their previous game, Wolfenstein 3D. IWADs contain the data necessary to load the game, while PWADs contain additional data, such as new character sprites, as necessary for custom levels. There are two types of WADs: IWADs (internal WADs) and PWADs (patch WADs). Several WADs have also been released commercially, and for some people the WAD-making hobby became a gateway to a professional career as a level designer. Thousands of WADs have been created for Doom, ranging from single custom levels to full original games most of these can be freely downloaded over the Internet. Immediately after its release in 1993, Doom attracted a sizeable following of players who created their own mods for WAD files-packages containing levels, graphics and other game data-and played a vital part in spawning the mod-making culture which is now commonplace for first-person shooters.
Doom WAD is the default format of package files for the video game Doom or its sequel Doom II: Hell on Earth, that contain sprites, levels, and game data.
0 kommentar(er)
