30/09/2011 @20:47:49 ^22:09:52

Playing Doom online with Odamex

Odamex is a nice engine. You can build it yourself instead of having to rely on sourceless binaries of unknown providence. For some reason I think this is important. On a whim, when 0.5.4 came out, I spent some time configuring it and setting the controls to how I like them. The mouse code actually works nicely, unlike a lot of others*.

But Odamex's focus is multiplayer and there's little point just for killing monsters by yourself. Recently they've been having these weekly events to promote it and I decided I should try it out. I've been to a few of them.

I went to the first as I was still awake - the start time is unfortunate if you're in Europe. I have no idea where the next two hours actually went. I blinked and it was nearly 3am. Oh well. It was a lot of fun.

Running it is very simple, I didn't bother building the launcher, odamex -connect host:port worked fine. Most of the other reasons why I don't like engines other than rboom didn't apply. Another example, along with the aforementioned mouse code: there is of course no overdetailed map cheat, but since you don't use the automap in deathmatches it doesn't matter.

Odamex's problem is that there's never anyone on outside of these events. Odamex was, as it were, late to market, and has not been greatly successful in capturing a critical mass of players from the "big two" (ZDaemon and Skulltag.)

I always said I'd never bother with deathmatch, but, well, here we are...

* In PrBoom-Plus for instance, it seems impossible to remove the symptoms of mouse acceleration unless it is actually disabled in the X server with "xset m 1". PrBoom-Plus's mouse code has found its way into several other engines, such as Chocolate Doom and Eternity.