==== The History of TMT and Realm of Chaos ====



== Preamble: "Why bother?" ==

I suppose one could always ask whether the world needed another 32-level WAD. After all, there's Icarus, Heroes of Doom l&2, Dickwad l&2, memento mori l&2, and so on, plus the new efforts in Final Doom. All these were done on the PC side by authors of ever-greater experience -- much more experience than the authors of Realm of Chaos (RoC).

Could we possibly match them?

Well, yes and no. Some of the RoC levels are as good as anybody's. In general, as each author created level after level, the designs got better and better. We experimented a lot with gosh-wow architecture, seeing what we could do with the Doom engine. We put in lots and lots of traps. We designed rooms where you're caught in the crossfire, or where you have to face monsters in a variety of elevations. There are traps where monsters teleport in. There are puzzles and secret doors, self-raising stairs, perpetually moving floors and crushing ceilings. Indeed, scattered throughout the Mac-made mega-WAD, you'll find most of the tricks in Doom. With a little more time to experiment, we might have delivered invisible staircases as well.

I'm not sure where I'd rank RoC on the list of mega-WADs. Really, that is for the players to decide. The only thing I know for sure is that we did our best and learned a lot in the process. I also hope that many other potential Mac designers play RoC and search a little harder for ways to use that elusive Group Mode and otherwise master Hellmaker or DEMON. As a designer, you always design with one goal in mind: the player is your enemy and must be made to suffer. Thus, there's nothing so satisfying as making an innocent-seeming room whose floor suddenly drops as soon as the player steps inside -- and in the process reveals four lower passageways with enemies pouring in from every direction. You know you've got the player. You know how much ammo they're likely to have, and how much health and armor. Basically, you know they're in deep trouble.

Believe me, that makes it all worthwhile ....

- Steve Duff



== Part I: A Bit of History ==

The Macintosh Team (TMT) was formed in early May 1996, but this story really begins in August 1995, when the Mac port of Doom II was released. MacDoom was an instant hit, just as Doom II was (on the PC) the previous year. In fact, since the appearance of Doom more than three years before, Macintosh users had longed to do battle with the minions of hell, and thanks to the excellent port by Lion Entertainment, we were now able to frag away to our hearts' content.

Further, MacDoom was able to play nearly all of the "homebrew" Doom II WADs on the internet. There were thousands upon thousands of such WADs, most available at the cdrom.com FTP archive, among other places. Some of the best homebrew WADs, including Raven and memento mori, have been discovered by Mac users and reviewed here in MacDoom Review. And new WADs just keep coming out every day.

Until recently, homebrew WADs were created by PC doomers using editors written by Doom-loving hackers. To this day there are a slew of these tools available: some create maps, some process the maps (i.e., build the "nodes" and "blockmap") so Doom can use them, and others import new graphics and/or sounds.

As MacDoom users played more and more, we got the itch, as did our PC bretheren before us, to create our own WADs. But when MacDoom came out, there were no editors available for the Mac. For five months, MacDoomers' pleas for Mac editors could be heard on Usenet and the Web. Finally, Mac hackers came through. First, James Knight's port of the PC level editor DEU, now named DEMON, came out in January 1996. DEMON was a strict port, and as such the editor was powerful but not intuitive or user-friendly. Then, on April 5th of the same year, Paul Davidson released Hellmaker, a graphical-oriented, Mac-like level editor. In my opinion, the $10 shareware fee for Hellmaker is a total bargain for this elegant, easy-to-use editor. Nearly all Mac-made WADs available today, and most levels in Realm of Chaos, were made with Hellmaker.

Several other freeware editors have come out for the Mac that were critical for Realm of Chaos. First, MacBSP (Thomas Hart's BSP port), which came out in January, and James Knight's Mac port of ZenNode, which came out in March, build the nodes and blockmap for WADs. I have found MacBSP to be faster and to build better nodes than ZenNode, which also has a bug that causes occasional texture misalignments.

(DEMON and Hellmaker are also capable of building nodes/blockmap, but trust me, MacBSP is the best.) The final editor used in the making of Realm of Chaos was DEIMOS, a sound and sprites plug-in editor that allowed us to import new wall textures, sky textures, and artifact graphics. (We'll get to the actual assembly of Realm of Chaos later.)

So, in April 1996, MacDoomers were tinkering around with Hellmaker, learning how to make their own maps. The progress was a slow but steady routine: change the map, build the nodes, then load the new WAD with Doom and playtest the level. Some WADs were uploaded to cdrom.com, but most Mac-made WADs remained on our hard drives.



== Part II: The Birth of TMT ==

Enter Clint Sago. In early April, Clint created a Web site dedicated to MacDoom. Unlike other MacDoom Web sites that featured PC-made WADs, Clint called out for Mac-made WADs. As the WADs slowly rolled in, Clint realized that many MacDoom level authors, being Mac users, had a sophistication for good level design. Clint decided to form a group of (in his opinion) the best of the new MacDoom level authors for the purpose of creating a 32-level Doom II mega-WAD (originally to be called the TMT WAD, for "The Macintosh Team"). After several weeks of playing the WADs being sent in to his site, Clint had invited six people into TMT: Slava Pestov, Jim Bagrow, TwoGunMojo, Steve Duff, Antoni Chan and myself.

Slava immediately came up with the TMT WAD's storyline: the player starts the game in a military base on Mars and has to battle the monsters on Mars through level 11. The player ends level 11 by taking a ship back to Earth, then battles the monsters on Earth through level 20. At the end of level 20 the player is captured, and then begins level 21 in a prison in Hell. The player eventually escapes the prison, then battles the monsters in Hell through the last level, Level 30. Levels 31 and 32 are the secret levels, and as in MacDoom, are played by taking a secret exit door in Level 15.

Slava also came up with the idea to use a certain structure in many of the levels. This common structural motif is a platform 256 units wide by 1152 units long, usually 64 units high with three 64x128x16 stairs set in near the left end, and a switch in the back center of the platform, usually flanked by the LITE3 texture. (Can you find which levels have the common platform?)

Clint set up a TMT Web site for the public to keep up with the project, and a secret Web site for the TMT team where he would post the latest news and a list of the levels. The TMT members signed up for particular levels, three or four per person, and started working with Hellmaker. Level 30 was to be designed by all of the TMT members, and was left until the end. Clint also asked us to name our levels, and he posted the names on the secret Web site.



== Part III: The WAD Comes Together ==

Things were relatively quiet for two months, with only a couple of levels finished in that time. These were posted on the secret Web site so the others could download them and playtest them. Then TwoGunMojo unexpectedly resigned from the group, citing time constraints. At this point we were only six people, and we would need five levels per person to finish the WAD. Clint looked for other qualified people to join the group, but over the next month or two found no takers. Jason Fowler, who at the time was creating levels for Avara, the shareware hit from Ambrosia Software, agreed to help out with the new sky textures and several levels when he was done with Avara. Beau Mullis, creator of the excellent Oupost and Circa WADs, agreed to do the prison level, 21. With quite a few empty slots remaining, we decided to make the rest of the levels ourselves. During this period, the e-mail flowing between our in-boxes grew considerably.

At the end of August, Clint realized that he didn't have the time to maintain the secret Web site or finish his levels; he was too busy making the splash screens for our WAD (in addition to school and work). He had one very nice level which I finished (Level 3), but the other two were abandoned and created from scratch by Steve and Slava. At this time, we decided to release the WAD on Halloween and to release a preview WAD (containing three levels and some of the new graphics we were working on) in mid-September. Also at this time, we realized that our WAD had no official name. Everyone came up with names, including leaving the WAD as simply "the TMT WAD," and after some time we voted on our favorites names. "Realm of Chaos" was the most popular choice, with "The Hand of Hell" and "Revelations" closely behind.

September was crunch time for Realm of Chaos. Only about half of the levels had been finished, and some hadn't even been started. We wanted all of the levels completed by October 10th, to give us time to playtest the full WAD and to make the final revisions. As the days went by, we worked like crazy, and the remaining levels started coming in. Having finished my levels before, I started level 30 and passed it on to the others so they could work on it. However, nobody had any good ideas on how to add to it, and besides, everyone was too busy with their own work. So I finished the level myself, giving it a feature no other Level 30 has (I won't ruin the surprise for you, in case you haven't played it, but it does concern the boss shooter!)

On September 20th we released the Realm of Chaos preview WAD, containing what would become Levels 13, 25, and 26 of the full WAD. We put Clint's two new splash screens and Jason's new Mars sky into the file to add to the fun. Jim also had generated a bunch of new sprite graphics, based on the old Doom graphics, which we wanted to add. However, since new sprite graphics cannot be used in Doom like new levels and textures can, the tool WADenizer would be required to merge the new sprite graphics with the rest of the Doom II sprite graphics, creating a three megabyte sprites WAD. We thus decided to put the new sprite graphics into their own WAD so that people who wanted the new sprites could run WADenizer and then load the sprites WAD with Realm of Chaos, whereas those people who didn't want the sprites could just load Realm of Chaos. Lastly, we whipped up a simple READ ME based on the standard Doom text form.

Assembling the WAD was no easy feat. DEIMOS, the Mac sprites/sounds editor, allowed us to import the new textures and splash screens, but there was no way at that time to merge the three levels while retaining their nodes/blockmaps. Hellmaker could merge levels, but would throw away the nodes and blockmap. ZenNode could theoretically build the nodes/blockmap for each level after they'd been merged, but the program was too buggy to reliably use. Since then, a new utility called WADCompositor has been written by Rod Midthun, author of WADenizer; as the name suggests, WADCompositor merges levels AND retains their nodes/blockmaps. However, WADCompositor was not available in mid-September when we needed to assemble the preview WAD, nor was it available in October when we needed to assemble the full WAD. Our only option was to use an editor on the PC, WinTex, which Antoni had on his PC. Thus, everything in Realm of Chaos was made on a Mac, but the full WAD was assembled on a PC. (Even so, we still consider Realm of Chaos to be a totally Mac-made WAD!)

Antoni e-mailed the assembled WAD to me, whereupon I packaged it with the sprites patch WAD and the READ ME and uploaded the package to the cdrom.com ftp archive. I also e-mailed the package to Clint so he could put it up on the TMT website, and I sent the package to several MacDoom Web sites, including MacDoom Review, the MacDoom WAD Pages (Clint's old site, now run by Nate Warren), and Elf's WAD of the Day page. After more than four months, some of our work was finally online! There wasn't much response, at least in the form of e-mail from MacDoomers, but what we did get was very complimentary.



== Part IV: The Release ==

As our October 10th pre-release deadline approached, we still were missing a few levels. Jason had only recently finished Avara, and though he had quickly created three beautiful skies for our WAD, hc was still working on his first level. Beau's level was only half-finished, and we were having a hard time reaching him. On October 15th, Antoni assembled thc full WAD, minus Jason's two levels and Beau's level, and e-mailed it to the rest of us. Unfortunately, the file was too large for some of our mail servers; however, Antoni was able to put the file on his ftp server so we could download it. Crisis averted!

The next ten days were spent playtesting the WAD, though only Steve and I had time to play through most of the levels. In addition to finding a few texture misalignments and other minor problems, it became apparent very quickly that our WAD was too easy. Ail the levels had been playtested by their authors on a cold-start; that is, starting the level with nothing but a pistol and 50 bullets. And in fact, most of the levels were pretty challenging when started that way. However, when the levels were played sequentially, each level was started with the guns used in the previous level, plus any ammo left over. As a result, Steve and I found that as the levels progressed, there was more and more unnecessary ammo. To a lesser extent, there also were too many health artifacts.

This was indeed a calamity. Steve and I were playing on Ultra-Violence, which should be EXTREMELY hard even for Doom Gods. Though we were both experienced Doomers, and knew most of the levels fairly well from prior playtesting, our WAD still seemed too easy. We had less than one week left before the release date, and we knew that we had to revise most of the levels. In addition, there were still two levels missing: Beau's level and Jason's second level (Jason had finished his first level, which would become Level 12, and sent it to me while I was playtesting). Steve suggested pushing back the release date by a week, but I convinced him that if we worked really hard during the week, we could adjust the ammo and health in most of the levels and still produce a good, hard WAD by Halloween, assuming the two missing levels arrived. We divvied up the levels and "got busy" during the weekend of October 26th. I finished tweaking my bunch of levels Sunday night, then, after failing to find Beau's missing level in my inbox, started designing a prison level to fill Level 21. I spent six hours Monday night creating the level, then five hours on Tuesday night playtesting and revising it. Late Tuesday night (the 29th), I sent my batch of levels and the new READ ME to Antoni. Steve sent his collection of levels to Antoni on Wednesday, and Jason sent his last level (which became Level 10) to Antoni Wednesday night. Whew!

But there was yet another problem! For some reason, America Online mail servers have problems communicating with .edu mail servers, such that attached files become non-detachable. And as luck would have it, Steve has an AOL account and Antoni has an .edu account. To get Steve's file to Antoni, Steve sent the file to Jason on Thursday (i.e., the release day), who then passed it on to Antoni. Antoni assembled the full WAD Thursday night and put the final file on his ftp server. I downloaded it late Thursday night and then uploaded it to the cdrom.com FTP site. Clint downloaded it on Friday and immediately put it up on the TMT website. After six months, our WAD was done!



== Part V: After the Release ==

The troubles did not cease once the file was online. Reports started flowing in that the files, both the zipped and stuffit files at the TMT website and the zipped file at the cdrom.com ftp site, were corrupt. This was surprising, since some people had been able to download, decode, unstuff and play the WADs with no problems. In addition, we realized that there were no multiplayer starts on Jason's Level 10, and that an infrequently occurring bug in Level 3 was now occurring all of the time, causing the game to freeze. Plus, we never created demos (aka preview films) for our WAD!

I quickly amended the two problem levels and sent them to Antoni, who made three demos using his PC. Antoni assembled the Update WAD containing the two levels and demos, then e-mailed the WAD to me. I wrote a quick READ ME and sent the package by e-mail to the rest of the group, as well as to the MacDoom Web sites that featured the original Realm of Chaos release on their sites. People who had successfully downloaded a working copy of Realm of Chaos could then download the update WAD and, when playing, load the update WAD after the full WAD to get the two updated levels and demos.

For the people who didn't yet have a working copy of Realm of Chaos, we decided to merge the update WAD with the full WAD, generating Realm of Chaos v l.1. In the day or two before Antoni did the assembly, Steve made some minor changes to a few of his levels and sent them to Antoni for inclusion in the new WAD. Finally, on November 8th, Realm of Chaos v1.1 was uploaded. Unless any major bugs are found, there will be no more new versions.

For those people who have not been able to download a working copy of Realm of Chaos, we still do not know how the files are getting corrupted. We believe the files themselves are not corrupt, since some people can download and play with no problems. My only recommendation is to try downloading from different sites, perhaps at different times of the day (when traffic on the 'Net fluctuates).



== Epilogue: March 27, 1999 ==

Wow, seems like a long time ago. Not so much because the time has passed, but because of the online resurgence in Doom over the last year... thanks to all the source ports. The new features of Doom, which grows daily in ZDoom and the like, make Realm of Chaos and all the other PWADs up to '98 seem old-fashioned, even limited. Look up/down, crouching, jumping, hi-res, translucency, mouselook, slippery/sticky floors, conveyor belts, over/under windows, bridges, deep water, currents, friendly monsters... Randy Heit, the BOOM folks and the other coders deserve a big hand.

As it turns out, Realm of Chaos did have a few more releases. Slava's level 6 from RoC, which I thought was a joy to play, was deemed too derivative of Doom's E1M9 -- itself an outstanding level -- by the cdrom.com maintainer. Steve generously donated one of his new levels -- a huge, beautiful level called Splatterhouse -- to replace Slava's level, and I made a TON of cosmetic changes to the WAD after getting the advice from the way-cool program Doom Consistency Checker (DCC). After I uploaded v1.2 to cdrom.com, reports began filtering in that a transporter in level 27 did not work... turns out I made a boo-boo while implementing the DCC changes. I fixed the damn transporter and uploaded v1.3... only to get reports that there were 2 bugs in level 3!! I also noticed that the original demos recorded for v1.1 by Antoni were now out of phase. I recorded 3 new demos (though I don't remember how), fixed level 3... and v1.4 became the FINAL version. The TMT website also moved, and is now being maintained by Slava.

Unfortunately, it seems that RoC didn't make much of a dent in the PC Doom community. I guess it's not surprising, since we barely promoted it on the PC Doom websites and we were novice level authors. Hopefully, this website will get the WAD played a bit more. In any event, I'm very proud of RoC. It has a nice build-up, features some cool new graphics, and at least half of the levels are superb. Not bad, from 5 or 6 guys with only a month or two of level-authoring under our belts.

- Rob Berkowitz