Hello again.

I was recently in Belfast along my friend and his friend, attending QCon, held at the Student Union at Queen’s Uni. QCon usually isn’t something I want to go to. Last couple of times I’ve went it’s been awfully boring. This time was a little different, mostly  because I had more time to see stuff at the cost of inconveniencing a friend by crashing on his couch.

But weirdly enough, the day in Belfast started with our group going to get ramen. My friend had been harping on about a place called Wagamama on Victoria Street, which I believe is chain restaurant. I’ll be honest, the chicken ramen I ordered was sub-par, and I couldn’t finish it.

Following that we walked back up to QCon. Most of the time was spent walking around looking at the various things for sale and then checking out all the games you could sit down and play. I only played two things, a 2D Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure fighting game, and Quake 3. And let me tell you, Quake 3 is still pretty fucking great and I won the first round I played of it. And it would serve as a warm up for later.

After pissing about till about 7pm, the real reason I bothered coming to QCon presented itself; a chance to 1v1 one of the main designers of DOOM, John Romero.

Meeting the man in person, I can say this; his hair is spectacular. Even in the darkly lit basement of the student union. But on to the main point, he wiped the floor with everyone who challenged him.

The first guy who went up against him had the poor luck of a 30 frag limit, meaning his suffering was prolonged and Romero went 30-0 against him. Following him was another chap, but this time with a frag limit of 10. The guy managed to get at least one kill in at least.

After that it was me. I asked to have the map changed to MAP01 of DOOM II, AKA “Entryway”. I got 3 kills, but for most part got slaughtered. Romero’s use of the RPG and BFG9000 often led to my quick demise. At the end I shook his hand and thanked him for the match. My friend soon followed me and got a bit luckier getting 4 kills.

We stuck around for a bit. I got a signed poster and a picture with Romero. The poster is currently hanging on my wall.

Myself, Romero, and my friend Craig. Sorry for not smiling, my legs were hurting badly from walking around Belfast.

Here’s the poster, framed.

We watched other poor souls walk up to receive an absolute arse-kicking, but around 9.15/20pm we had to get going. Having got something to eat, we went to Queen’s Film Theatre across the road and watched Perfect Blue. Which is still an excellent film from the utter legend that is Satoshi Kon.

So anyway, playing against John Romero reminded me that I still hadn’t finished DOOM II, and I decided that I wanted to also play multiplayer, which more or less requires a source port. So I booted up Chocolate DOOM and decided almost immediately that I would prefer to use GZDoom, which I already had downloaded but previously avoided it because of the amount of settings I had to tweak to get it to be what I wanted it to be.

So this time I actually bothered changing the settings and have been having a great time with it since. Apart from the part where DOOMSeeker requires Zandronum, which basically another version of GZDoom. Which again required me to make a bunch of tweaks to get to where I wanted it, but still required more. So I gave up on it.

And then I got it into my head that I wanted to play some Quake 1 as well. So I installed it via Steam and tried to tweak the settings so it would be 1920×1080. It failed to boot in OpenGL mode. So I Google’d the issue and found that the version of GLQuake that Steam provides is out of date and you need a later version of the executable. So I downloaded it and started using that, and it now fits to my resolution. But the framerate is 72FPS, which is half of my refresh rate.

So then I downloaded EZQuake and couldn’t get it running. So instead I downloaded nQuake and it worked, but then tweaking the graphical settings caused my desktop to have fucked up colours. Additionally I couldn’t turn off the Quake Live style HUD. And then to top it off, it randomly crashed on me.

So I gave up on Quake 1, for now.

As for how my project is going, well you can check up on it on its itch.io page and even try out the prototype demo. I’m working on a new demo with additional features and tweaks, but it likely won’t be out for a while.

Other than that, it’s just bloody hot. And I can’t really be arsed watching the football. I’ll try and fight through the heat and work on my game.

-Adam