Today I released 0.08. I have not been working on libdoomwad a whole lot lately for various boring reasons, so I figured I would take a little snapshot of what I have so far. Hopefully I will have another update in a few weeks with some real improvements, such as implementing some missing functions as well as some sample code to teach new users how to use this library.
Go get it. I made some interface changes, added some documentation, and fixed a few minor bugs while introducing new ones.
There are many changes, additions, bug fixes, etc. There are a few issues with certain classes not working correctly, but I was able to use it to do actual work when testing. Yay!
It took two months, but finally I have a minor update to libdoomwad. I ran some tests on it and it worked for the most part. It is still a little rough around the edges, but should work well enough to test. If anybody knows Doom and C++, please take a look and tell me what you think.
My goal for 0.06 is to get the core library working completely and correctly: Lump, Wad, and WadGroup. There are a few other bits and pieces such as event logging and endianness that could use some help, but those are minor. Once I get the big three classes working, I want to start on the data structures that take Lumps and make something useful out of them.
I released it today, although it was done two days ago. Anyway, new features include a Lump class that is more like an STL container, some more stub classes, better Doxygen documentation (although not all of it is done). Hopefully 0.05 will not take as long as 0.04 did. I had a bunch of work done, then lost it due to a failed USB flash drive. It failed right as I plugged it in to copy the files to my desktop. Talk about shitty timing.
Lately I did a bunch of work to libdoomwad. Then I lost some of it. I had a very productive day, and my USB flash drive died before I could copy the files off. I will clean up the source a little bit, updating comments and documentation, then release version 0.04. Some of the changes I had planned will have to wait for 0.05 because after three months I need to release something.
It is out. I restructured and recoded most of what I had done to make the design better. I am happy with it now, but there is much work left to do. For those who are interested, the details are in the CHANGELOG and TODO files in the archive.
Today I put the finishing touches on the first release of libdoomwad version 0.01, a library of Doom classes and functions written in C++. It compiles with g++ on Linux and MinGW on Windows as a .so or .dll file. The Doxygen documentation is online here, or you can generate it with the included Makefile.
If you are a programmer and like Doom, please take the time to try it out and tell me what you think. It should be fairly intuitive to use, even if it is not complete. Feedback is welcome and appreciated. Please note that if you are not a C++ programmer this release does not concern you, because libdoomwad does nothing on its own. It is a library, which means another program uses it, users do not.
This is version 0.01, despite what the readme file says. Not everything is complete, but the core functionality is in place. I can successfully read in a wad file, convert it to the library's internal representation of objects, and write it back out without any degredation of data or memory leaks. Beyond that it has some functionality but nothing that is complete yet.
I am not looking for any help in development or maintenance, but if you want to contribute a few lines of code or some advice, I am open to that. Keep in mind that libdoomwad is GPL software, and by contributing code you transfer ownership of the code to me and it will also be licensed under the GPL. I do not want to steal from anyone, but my goal is to ensure that libdoomwad is 100% free and open. Since it is GPL and not LGPL, keep in mind that it is illegal to link programs against it that do not have GPL-compatible licenses.
Winwad is coming along nicely. Unfortunately I do not have anything useful to release as a beta. So far the bulk of my work is on the back end, the wad-handling code. I am writing a few classes, structures and functions to do just about anything you will ever need, encapsulated in C++ objects. I may actually release the back-end separately as a library.
Progress is fast and slow. Sometimes I have time to code for hours, sometimes college and my family creep up and grab me. I really do want to get this done, now that it is ten years after Doom's original release.
Right now my plan is to develop it for Linux first, Windows later. At first it will likely be read-only, in that it will not be able to modify wads. Its main function will be to examine wads and entries. I may add limited editing functionality like cutting and pasting entries, but full functionality will have to wait for later.
If there are any C++ programmers out there who want to help test what I have so far, please let me know. Linux experience is not necessary because like I said, I am mainly working on the back end which is OS-neutral. If anyone has Qt experience, I could use your help later to help out with the Linux GUI.
Today I looked through the web server's logs and came across some errors from a broken link. Quite a few of you tried viewing readme files from the download page and the requests failed. The problem is that a filesystem link broke when I renamed a directory without updating the links pointing to it. I replaced the link, which works now.