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skyjake.fi

Spring Cleaning

📅 2026-05-01

🏷 Doomsday

I've been clearing cobwebs off the Doomsday codebase recently.

The project has been on hiatus. I last worked on this code 5-8 years ago. It's amazing how much of it I've forgotten. Doomsday represents a solid 20 years of invested time, and it shows. There is so much stuff: an amalgamation of Doom/Heretic/Hexen, a complete GUI framework, a smaller widget framework for the game menus, a scripting language, a document processing tool, partially finished next-gen renderer, scriptable 3D model system, and heaps of UI for configuration and package management.

The actual games having been largely left in vanilla state highlights where my focus has been over the years. I was never a game modder, concentrating instead on the scaffolding.

In practice, I've been making progress toward the 3.0 goals: SDL 3 migration, Qt 6 migration (still in use peripherally), superficial UI facelifts, better CMake structure and dependency management, completely functional MSVC build on Windows (instead of relying of MSYS or MinGW), and cleaning up the macOS and Linux builds. It's mostly maintenance, but I've appreciated the walk down memory lane. It's nice to see the games working as before.

Question is: do I still have interest in pushing Doomsday forward? The next-gen rendering is an interesting challenge, but it's also a huge investment.

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