The True Doom Murderheads Club
First convening Saturday 07th of May, 9:30pm London Time (Click for time zone conversion). Got Zandronum already? Know your way around Doom? Skip all that mess below and just join our Discord channel for chat, support and more info.
We’re a week away from the launch of Doom 4 (officially minus the number, but whatever), so now seems as good a time as any to dust off the old classic, slap it into the Zandronum engine (GZDoom + Better online play) and go hog wild, hopping servers, playing mods, killing each other and a hojillion weird demons, like so:
https://youtu.be/Wnqj5QFxtBg?t=43
While this might sound intimidating, it’s easier than it looks (plus, we’re not likely to be playing the mod above, as it’s a bit of a mess). You just need one file from Doom, an easily installed engine, a chat window and Doomseeker (Zandronum’s server browser) will do all the rest, including downloading whatever mods a server might require. You don’t even technically need to own Doom 2, although it helps.
What you’ll need:
- Discord. It’s like Skype for voice/text only, but better. You don’t even need to sign up, just join the True Doom Murderheads channel via this link (needs updating every 24h) and if you have any problems or questions with the stuff below, just ask in chat!
- Zandronum. Get the latest stable build (2.1.2) from the official site here. The installer version ideally, as it comes bundled with Doomseeker, an essential server browser. Install it.
- Doom2.WAD, the main data file from the game. Any version, Steam, GOG or otherwise should suffice. If you don’t even have that, you can substitute in Freedoom Phase 2 WAD file from here, although you can expect some ugly sprites and maybe some glitches along the way. Place Doom2.WAD into your Zandronum directory.
Got that all set up? Rad. You should probably run Zandronum in singleplayer for a little bit and make sure you’ve got everything set up to your liking. Rebind controls, tweak video settings, etc. Some recommendations:
- Enable mouse-aim & auto-run. Some mods are fine playing pure vanilla with heavy auto-aim, but many are not.
- If you like your textures sharp, change texture filtering (In OpenGL settings) to ‘None [Nearest Mipmap]’
- Make sure you’ve got buttons for Jump, Crouch, Talk, Inventory controls and a button for the developer console bound, as well as an altfire key. A lot of mods use more than the Doom defaults.
- Set up your player name and colour in the Player settings. Nobody’s more expendable than a Green rookie called ‘Player’.
- You might want to consider running the game windowed so you can see the Discord chat. If the text is too tiny, check the Message Scaling options.
- Watch some Pro Monster Mashing Strats for those who find Agitating Skeletons and Meatball Elementals too much trouble.
- Put [TDM] before/after your name, so that everyone know you’re a TRUE DOOM MURDERHEAD. Also so we can spot folks from the chat in-game.
Once that’s all up and running and you’re happy with your setup, it’s time to play! Just go to your Zandronum\Doomseeker directory, run Doomseeker.EXE and begin browsing for servers. Once we’ve decided what we’ll be playing, the server name will be posted in Discord. Just use the text-filter box to find it and double-click to connect. It should offer to download any required files, then launch you straight into the game.
Rock on.
