Mitzi's Little Dragon (Dean Wiley) - WinDOOM Involvement History/Diary.

September 6 2001
OK - there was some play with the codebase in '99 and talk of a Doom2000 project.  It all came to nothing.  The code work was to add a correction and command line parameter "-mididev ##" to fix a rare (but happening) MCI error having to do with some form of exotic incompatibility with cheap sound card (of which I was an owner).  It's not in the faq or help, its a secret hehe, but it is in the code and works, usually "windoom -mididev 1" fixes that annoying unreadable box at the intermission screens.  I never did fix the No Wad->corrupt .ini file bug.  If the keyboard dies just delete windoom.ini, put the *.wad files in the windoom directory and start again.

Tested in: win9x, win me, win 2k all fine.  (Sound and music is beautiful in ME and 2000)













10-9-98: First dl and eval.  Pretty good.  Sound file crash and no music.  Compiler="resource file not found" so made one with cheap a$$ icons.

10-9-98/10-10-98: Sound file bug (chaingun v-linked to pistol) identified and fixed by plain copy of sound file 1 to sound file 86 at runtime.

10-10-98: Midi conversion code enabled but bug:  the conversion routine is flawed.  Researching later... 10/10 (incidentally doomsday :) is my bday.

10-12-98: Midi quest continues....  can't find original source of qmus2mid.  Found the source, wasn't helpful.  Exported a mid file using a wad editor and compared.  Worked out all the various (and considerable) bugs from qmus2mid code -- 4pm finally working.

10-12 -> 10-13-98: Added/modified routine to draw credits,etc at 640x400 (double bitmap) so looks good at that res.  Stretched stuff looks good at up to 1024x768.

10-13-98: Bug:  testing Doom][ ending... crashed zmalloc error 256K sought. 2:44am-this error was a doozey, really effectively corrupted the system.  Locked files and devices everywhere.  Fixing I_Error() so it shuts down better before bug fixing the ending.  Just couldn't find a bug in the way its handled... hrmmmm??  Oh well, tried again and crashed once more and ended ok twice... who knows.

10-13-98: Double sized help screen and clean up coded.  (Was leaving junk >320 wide).

10-13-98: removed all calls to V_DrawPatchDirect() since it just called V_DrawPatch().

10-14-98: Double sized text in 640x400 & > modes.  Found a map bug > 320 with large text.  Leaves some screen junk - fixed the map junk by reducing text size in automap, looks best that way.

10-14-98: Double sized finale text.  Looks good, but , & . need offset and screen needs wipe after text so animation is clean.  Another note is, need a DOUBLESTUFF var to quit testing with so many ifs (opt).

10-14-98: Shareware showing help at Read This! menu.  Tougher fix than I thought. Got rid of the SKULL over help screens while I was at it.

10-14-98: Double sized the bosspic at the end of Doom][ for high res.  Didn't want to waste/spend the time to beef up all the little anims tho.

10-15-98: 1st coding of new feature - score.  Just ruffing the outline with the code here:
	Do damage to something - get that much score.
	Get an item (itemcount++) get a score point.
	Take damage - lose that much score (even environmental thats the breaks).
	% complete at intermission added to score as bonus (so even monster/monster kills count).
	Cheat - lose all score.
	** First draft/attempt will just write score to debug file **
	** Eventually (hope) dump to another file (coded) so can be emailed or ftp'd for compare.
	((10-15-98 ruff version working))

10-17-98: Score working now
	-keepscore
	-showscore
	There was more to figuring damage than I thought, but got it.
	-keepscore : turns on scorekeeping and writes the score to the .dbg file at the end of each level.  I plan to make this do some 4th grade encrypting to a separate file so ppl can submit legit scores.
	-showscore : puts the score in the HUD.  Its got a little lag because the HUD hang's its message for a few tics, but otherwise real good.  Turns on keepscore if not specified on command line (so you don't have to type both).
	Did a good test of the program today, even with 'ETERNAL' wad.  Had to fix up some of the score stuff for the user wad but got it done.
	Was lookin at the update to glDoom (web page...) today.. that start screen is good!  I need one of those :)


10-26-98: Well, I haven't kept my history up to date very well.
	Between then (10-17) and now, besides not working on the prog very much I have gotten this stuff done:
	1. Front End 1.0 --- doesn't yet do dos doom and windoom etc.  just doom4win.  And the net stuff isn't added/tested yet.
	2. Cleaned up some more source... optimizing.
	3. Got scores pretty much finalized and tested.
	4. Got a startup display working - no graphic but its pretty anyway.
	5. Started the web page.
	6. Networking note: socket errors aren't handled so bad things happen if the sockets don't play right.  Gotta fix that.
	7. Keeping the rest of this history in the .htm file...