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 low-powered hardware, such as phones and old computers.

For Phase 1 and Phase 2, try to test in Boom towards the end of your level creation process, before submission. Incompatibilities will usually be discovered before a release, but it will help to be sure yourself. Since using DOS-compatible operating systems is uncommon these days, you may need to use DOSBox or similar virtual machine software to run Boom.

For FreeDM, while you can test in the original doom2.exe engine with DOS or an emulator, this original engine is not free software and not legally obtainable without Doom itself, in addition to the hassle of merely running it. Chocolate Doom is a free software, highly-portable, and strictly-vanilla-compatible engine without any extra features for levels, suitable for testing FreeDM.

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 can generate nice HTML documents out of them.

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).