Eternity Engine

The Eternity Engine is Team Eternity's advanced Doom source port and the primary subject of this Wiki.

History

The Eternity Engine began in 1998 as a simple modification of Boom meant to power Eternity TC, which was at that time a new and active project. When Lee Killough began the MBF project, James "Quasar" Haley became a beta tester after emailing Lee with questions about the early Doom alpha versions. The Eternity project moved to an MBF code base after that port's first release.

In late 1999, Fraggle released v3.10 of his MBF-based source port SMMU, which contained support for the new FraggleScript scripting language. Although activity in the Eternity TC project by editors had steadily dropped to almost nothing, Quasar was still interested in developing the code associated with it. Needing features such as scripting and the console, he then moved the Eternity project's code into SMMU.

Despite this long history of jumping between Boom-based ports, no public release of Eternity based on any port other than SMMU was ever made. The first private alpha, released to a select few beta testers, was derived from SMMU 3.21 with selected modifications from 3.30. Because of this, Eternity began at version 3.29.

After the release of the Caverns of Darkness project, which used a customized version of Eternity Engine v3.29 Development Beta 5, the project began to attract more attention. A second programmer, Steven "SoM" McGranahan, joined the project and immediately set to work porting the code to use SDL, making it capable of running on many operating systems, including Windows.

Immediately after version 3.31 Public Beta 1 was launched, Eternity suffered a major setback which manifested as a severe case of random memory corruption. This problem, which stemmed from previously masked buffer overflows that had been introduced in SMMU, was repaired after two solid weeks of efforts by numerous community members, but it caused development delays which lasted for half a year. Since that time, however, Eternity has ranked amongst the most stable source ports.

Releases

A complete listing of Eternity's release history follows.

Version 3.29

• 3.29 Private Alpha - September 14, 2000
• 3.29 Public Beta 1 - January 8, 2001
• 3.29 Public Beta 2 - January 9, 2001
• 3.29 Public Beta 3 - May 10, 2001
• 3.29 Public Beta 4 - June 30, 2001
• 3.29 Development Beta 5 - October 2, 2001
• 3.29 "Gamma" - July 4, 2002

Version 3.31

• 3.31 Public Beta 1 - September 11, 2002
• 3.31 Public Beta 2 - March 5, 2003
• 3.31 Public Beta 3 - August 8, 2003
• 3.31 Public Beta 4 - November 29, 2003
• 3.31 Public Beta 5 - December 17, 2003
• 3.31 Public Beta 6 - February 29, 2004
• 3.31 Public Beta 7 - April 11, 2004
• 3.31 "Delta" Pre-Release Alpha 1 - August 23, 2004
• 3.31 "Delta" Pre-Release Alpha 2 - November 11, 2004
• 3.31.10 "Delta" - January 19, 2005

Version 3.33

• 3.33.00 "Genesis" - May 26, 2005
• 3.33.01 "Outcast" - June 24, 2005
• 4.02.00 "Warrior" - October 1, 2005