Smooth Doom (SMOOTHDOOM.PK3)

SMOOTH DOOM

by "Gifty"

Hundreds if not thousands of increasingly complex Doom mods have been made since the advent of ACS and DECORATE in ZDoom. Many of them offer significant gameplay changes but others are of a more aesthetic variety, "polishing" the game's appearance. Smooth Doom was born out of a proof-of-concept from SgtMarkIV. Gifty took the cue and pursued the idea to its logical conclusion, first releasing it on Doomworld in 2014. It remains one of the community's most beloved mods, particularly for those folks who still enjoy the look of the stock resources but can't stand the staggered animations. Since ZDoom's retirement, Smooth Doom requires a current revision of GZDoom.

Abyssal Speedmapping Session 5 (ABYSPED5.WAD)

The Abyssal Speedmapping sessions changed hands a couple of times but it's still going strong. At this point I'd go so far as to call it a Doomworld institution. The general idea is that a bunch of authors get together on a group Skype session and then kick off a two-hour limit for making a map. Once the initial period is up they get 15 minutes to change textures and pick music and then 15 more for bugfixing. Excepting chaps like Gus, who was notorious enough for taking an extra hour that doing so was dubbed "The Alfonzo Treatment". Session 5 was released in May of 2014, replaces MAP01-MAP12 of Doom II, and is meant to be played in Boom-compatible ports.

Abyssal Speedmapping Session 1 (ABYSPED1.WAD)

There are plenty of Doom communities besides Doomworld. One of them used to be NewDoom, which was really before my time. NewDoom eventually went behind an insane paywall, forcing most of its userbase elsewhere or out of the community entirely. I guess some of the folks were already Doomworld pariahs. Anyway, some of the NewDoom users migrated over to The Abyss, which served as the foundation of a new Doom community institution - the Abyssal Speedmapping Sessions (this being the first), named as such because of its outgrowth from the Abyss community, though Obsidian wasn't one of the NewDoom emigrants. The goal is to get people to work together over the course of two hours (plus thirty minutes for music / textures and bugfixing) to make a bunch of speedmaps.