Any one played the 1999 ZDoom Demo Wad?

[Unicide]

Hey guys, i decide to post here about this dinky ol thing from like 25 years ago, cuz i decided, hey why not try this thing out. to see what it was like. It was an interesting playthrough. Seeing all the things ZDoom 1.22 was already able to do, i thought it was just gonna be a couple of rooms, with some like, acs stuff and poly objects and that would be it. But i was pleasantly surprised to see like, alot of personality and attempts at humor. Just a cool piece of history, even with the sudden loud custom sfx.

Now what im REALLY wondering is if anyone here played this lil thing back when it came out. im just wondering the reactions to witnessing such WITCHCRAFT in the doom engine.
I just want some detailing their experiences i guess/

Probably a redundant question since im sure half the people who where in the community during the 90s are probably not in it anymore, or even knew that it existed, since ZDoom was very new at the time.

But i would like to hear, if any of you could provide that.

[Enjay]

Probably a redundant question since im sure half the people who where in the community during the 90s are probably not in it anymore, or even knew that it existed, since ZDoom was very new at the time.

You might be surprised.

Yeah, I remember it. It came out a time when there was still lots of excitement generally because source ports were already starting to do a lot of things that were not possible in the original engine, or simply removing a lot of limits. I think my reaction to the demo was initially "OMG, how is that being done" followed quite closely by "oh, it looks complicated" and then followed by "actually, it's not so bad if you take your time to unpick it."

But, yeah, it was a good showcase of several things that had not previously been possible in Doom. Many of the things were possible in Hexen, of course, but Hexen had never had the same level of attention as Doom (still hasn't - but it has improved), so a lot of what ZDoom could do was stuff that I was aware of but had never really taken the time to learn properly. So, there was also a bit of a feeling of "I've got to learn a bunch of new stuff now" - which was both exciting and a bit challenging.

Overall, however, I do remember having this very strong appreciation for the fact that Marisa had looked at what Hexen could do and had the "out of the box thinking" to say, "well it's the same engine, so why not give Doom all the Hexen features?" Bear in mind, ZDoom invented ZDoomHexen mode, there was no UDMF and the other ports were working on extending and removing limits from the Doom format. By creating ZDoomHexen, Marisa opened up so many new features and possibilities that we now kind of take for granted. It really was (IMO) quite a revolutionary bit of thinking. It was also (presumably) a pretty big task that was achieved with minimal end-user difficulties (i.e. it worked pretty much as soon as it was publicly available). So, in the idiom of the time, mad props to Marisa.

[drfrag]

Wenas. I think i tried that demo and it was cool but now i'm not sure. I've been here since 2004 and that version was around for a long time as stable, for me it crashed a lot but later betas surprisingly didn't. I never debugged it though xD. I remember that ZDoomGL crashed even more but i played them anyway.

[Chris]

I remember the demo wad. There were actually a few revisions of it, with some stuff being added to showcase more capabilities as the engine got new features. I don't know if I was around when the first demo wad was released, though I do remember being around when versions with enhancements were released as the engine gained support features like deep/swimmable water and rotated flats. I have a later (the latest?) copy of it still.

[Unicide]

Thanks for the pretty lengthy response Enjay. You know i saw you before on these forums, but i didn't know you were a part of of the community for that long lmao.
But yeah it's nice hearing the basics of what your actual thoughts and feelings from back then when this was new. So thanks man