The DOOM BookShortly after the Wolfenstein 3D source release,I sent a mail to Jay Wilbur suggesting a bookabout the DOOM engine. I anticipated a similarrelease of the DOOM sources within a year ortwo, and the obvious problems with the Wolfensteinsources (lack of accompanying artwork, a code base not maintained for quite some time) seemedto demand a better approach. I talked to somepublishing company reps at the Book Fair in 1995,and while they were cautiously interested, id wasnot.In the last weeks of 1996, following a visit atid Software two months earlier, and after thedeparture of Jay Wilbur, John Carmack asked mewhether I was still interested in doing the book.I was, Bear sent me a code dump, and  ToddHollenshead set out to address the legal concerns(of which were many).Unfortunately, what might have worked in 1995turned out to be a doomed attempt in 1997. I won'tgo into the details - let's just say that myleaving university and going back to full timewriting for a living repeatedly forced me tochange priorities on what looked more and morelike a project unlikely to generate any revenue.By mid of the year, when the legal issues hadfinally been settled, it didn't look like I wasgoing to find a publisher at all. Following theBook Fair in 1997 and some more discussions(with about a dozen publishers, total), I grittedmy teeth and decided to abandon the project.Note that the book project as such wasn't supposedto hold up the source release to the public.However, given the legal concerns relating tothe third party sound code in DOS DOOM, and thelack of Win32 support as well as the advantages ofan OpenGL based release, the idea was to puttogether a consistent, stable code base prior topublic release - most of which was supposed to bean offspring of my reformatting and modifying thecode for the book.None of this worked out as intended. However, Ihope that, at long last, this distributionwill finally provide a good point to start forany cooperative effort to extend the alreadyimpressive lifespan of DOOM into the age ofmultiplayer servers and hardware-acceleratedclients.