Eternity Engine

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The Eternity Engine is Team Eternity's advanced Doom source port and the primary subject of this Wiki. It is meant as a versatile feature port which keeps gameplay compatibility with its roots (DOOM, BOOM, MBF and so on) while advancing with powerful features such as new ways to design levels (linked portals, 3DMidTex, polyobjects etc.) and modding capabilities (using the EDF definition language). Every new feature we add is tested not to affect anything that exists so far.

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.

Now it has UDMF support and a dynamic weapon and inventory system. It supports linked portals for full room-over-room gameplay. Current major goals for the engine include completing support for Heretic.

Major Features

Cardboard engine

Cardboard is a floating-point rendering engine created by SoM that fixes several problems inherent with the classic fixed-point Doom rendering engine.

EDF

EDF, which stands for Eternity Definition Files, is a textual input language that allows specification of almost all the static game data which was once contained inside the executable. This includes thing types, frames, sprites, terrain definitions, and more. EDF has a relaxed C-like syntax and can be used from both files and WAD lumps.

ExtraData

ExtraData is another EDF-like data specification language that allows the Doom map format to be extended with any kind of data. Use of special thing, line, and sector types within a map allows the editor to attach ExtraData records to those objects. Special data for the objects is then given inside the script.

Linked portals

Linked portals are surfaces that, like regular portals, connect different areas of the map, but in addition can be walked through, thus allowing multistory maps to be designed in Doom.

MapInfo

Eternity expands SMMU's level info system significantly, allowing dozens of new properties to be specified, and allowing cascading global EMAPINFO lumps as an alternative to inserting MapInfo data into level headers. Among other things, MapInfo is used to tie ExtraData and ACS scripts to the maps that use them.

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
  • 3.33.02 "Warrior" - October 1, 2005
  • 3.33.33 "Paladin" - May 17, 2006
  • 3.33.50 "Phoenix" - October 23, 2006

Version 3.35

  • 3.35.90 "Simorgh" - January 11, 2009
  • 3.35.92 "Nekhbet" - March 22, 2009

Version 3.37

  • 3.37.00 "Sekhmet" - January 1, 2010

Version 3.39

  • 3.39.20 "Resheph" - October 10, 2010

Version 3.40

  • 3.40.00 "Rebirth" - January 8, 2011
  • 3.40.11 "Aasgard" - May 2, 2011
  • 3.40.15 "Wodanaz" - June 22, 2011
  • 3.40.20 "Mjolnir" - December 26, 2011
  • 3.40.25 "Midgard" - August 27, 2012
  • 3.40.30 "Alfheim" - November 4, 2012
  • 3.40.37 "Gungnir" - May 27, 2013
  • 3.40.46 "Bifröst" - January 19, 2014 - first one with a macOS release

Version 3.42

  • 3.42.02 "Heimdal" - May 7, 2017
  • 3.42.03a "Heimdal" release 2 - August 2, 2017

Version 4.00

  • 4.02.00 "Völuspá" - March 17, 2018

Cross-platform development

For Windows, Eternity has a Visual Studio project. For macOS, it has an Xcode project. For other platforms (most notably Linux), Eternity can be compiled by using the CMake utility. You can download the source code and execute CMake.

Development builds

Development builds ("beta" releases) for Eternity are available for Windows and OS X at DRDTeam's website. They are recommended if you encounter serious bugs with any of the official releases, or if you want to test brand new features that didn't exist in the latest official releases. Due to their beta status, they may be untested and have other problems. However, due to the sometimes sporadic release cycles, it's often recommended to just try the development builds. The only problem is that by upgrading Eternity often, savegames tend to become unusable, so exercise caution before upgrading Eternity if you rely on games with saves.

System features

Gameplay and modding features