Freedoom

Everything you submit must be 100% your own work. You must not base upon resources from Doom or any other game. You may not even rip textures from WADs you have downloaded (if you find a WAD with textures in which look useful, let us know — that way, we can contact the author).

Do not simply copy the original resources. Where possible, try to make an effort to make the new versions look visibly different from the originals.

Be especially careful of “free texture” (or “free sound” or “free graphic”) sites. Although these would appear at first to be okay to use, many are free for “non-commercial use only”. One of the things we want to be able to do is put this on GNU/Linux CDs (which are sold — “a commercial use”).

The main exception is that you may of course reuse anything in the Freedoom source tree. In fact, this is encouraged, as reusing material will give the WAD a more consistent feel.

Make sure that skill levels are implemented, and that all multiplayer start points are present.

Make levels appropriately difficult for their position within the progression of the game. Also bear in mind that not all players may be as skilled a player as you.

Do not use tricks that exploit Doom’s software renderer; some source ports, especially those that use hardware accelerated rendering, may not render it properly. Examples of tricks to avoid include those used to simulate 3D bridges and “deep water” effects.

Boom removes almost all of the limits on rendering; however, do not make excessively complicated scenes. It is desirable that Freedoom levels should be playable on old or low-powered hardware.

Always test in Boom itself rather than a derivative such as PrBoom. This ensures that your levels really are Boom-compatible rather than using any extra features. As DOS is rather rare these days, you may not have a system which can run Boom natively, so you may use either DOSBox or FreeDOS.

Graphics should be the same color and size as the originals to remain compatible with PWADs (otherwise, they may end up looking like a mess). They cannot use the Doom font.

Textures should be the same dimensions as the originals. They should be similar but not identical (to avoid IP infringement) —  in fact, they should be as different as possible while keeping to the general theme of the texture. As mentioned above, try to make a conscious effort to make the textures visibly different from the originals. Critically, the textures should tile in the same way as the originals.

Some textures contain the letters UAC or references to UAC; this is an intellectual property of id Software (trademarked). Instead, use the letters AGM in your textures.

Sprites should be roughly the same size and shape, but different to the originals. Doom monsters are id’s intellectual property (which means no imps, cyberdemons, etc). The new monsters will behave the same way as the originals, but will be totally new.

We use AsciiDoc for writing the documentation. AsciiDoc is a simple plaintext-based format which is simple to read and write in its source form, and makes pretty HTML documents out of them (it also supports other formats like DocBook/PDF/manual pages…).

Headers are formated in a wiki-style format, this makes it easier for Vim (perhaps other editors, too) to automatically re-format text.

Text is kept at 72 characters wide. In Vim, you can set the editor to automatically insert line breaks as you’re typing by performing set textwidth=72. Special exceptions to the width rule might be allowed when necessary (for example, inserting long URLs).