And what’s gzdoom?
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Gzdoom is an advanced modder friendly continuation of zdoom.
I feel obligated to continue the chain...
what is zdoom?
ZDOOM is the DOOM we've all been playing for a really long time now.
Few even remember that the original release of DOOM was not full 3D. It was 2.5 dimensions. You couldn't look up and down or jump. In fact, that's where rocket-jumping came from, as it was the only way to go vertical.
ZDOOM was a backport of the z-axis code from Quake back into the DOOM engine. It enabled full 3D and dramatically enhanced the game. Carmack open-sourced DOOM code first, and then a couple years later Quake was open-sourced. The community did the rest.
I'm an old DOOMer. I'm gonna download this UZDOOM and give it a whirl.
I never knew the etymology of zdoom until now. That's really cool
Doom always had a z-axis you can find in the linux doom port on id software git repo.
If you are talking about room over rooms and 3d floors that came from the build engine.
Zdoom had a version that could play duke3d
Original DOOM and DOOM II game engines were 2.5 D.
You could not look up and down or jump.
That is not to say that there was no z-axis in the maps themselves, but the game engine handled it in a simplified, flattened way.
Its been a really, really long time since Quake z-axis code was backported to create zDOOM.
You are a great example of people not realizing this.
John carmack and Romero will tell you that doom is 3d.
Heretic which is idtech 1 has looking up and down and flying since day 1 which zdoom git that from.
I have worked on the doom engine before. I submitted patches to odamex in the past.
Yes, the key aspects of 2.5D are that two things cannot be on top of each other, the world is entirely described by a 2D map, along with a height value for each floor and each object (these are separate). Jumping and looking are just not features included in the original game, but they are not defining properties of 2.5D, they could have been coded in and still be 2.5D
You can go up and down on lifts in doom, there is a height property that changes, and if you step off a ledge you fall in an arc to the ground. If an object is in front of the ledge somewhere at ground level you will collide with it even if you are higher, so eg if you are trying to jump across somewhere a mob far below can cut your jump short and you fall to the ground.
Heavily updated id tech engine
An idtech 1 (well, it was called Doom Engine first) source port thanks to John Carmack you can do that for most of id Software game engines up until idtech 4.
Aimed for heavily modding support to be specific
There are other source ports which tend to:
- Be as close as how it was intended while fixing critical issues (Chocolate Doom)
- Modernize the framerate but keep the gameplay same and welcoming to new users (PrBoom Plus and its forks)
- Make as ugly as possible (Doomsday)
It was probably the "gold standard" modern port of the OG DooM/DooM II/Hexen etc games. There are some other source ports made for multiplayer, some made for cranking the graphics up to 11, some made to ensure exact match to original engine behavior for speed running purposes, but GZDoom was kind of the standard the community had settled on that did enough of all of that to be good.
There are full "boomer shooter" style indie games built off of it and the expanded features it offers, like 3D model support and greatly improved lighting. Then the lead dev went a little bonkers (I don't know the specifics) and people forked it into this and have kept improving it.
If I remember right, they got kicked for using AI to code and being an absolute shit about it when they got caught. This is on top of past issues with their behaviour as well.
I'm not a member of the Doom community at all, so this is just what I remember from when it happened.
Not quite but close. Graf wasn't working on gzdoom for a while and showed up just one day and push code to prod without the other devs knowing. Other devs found out it was LLM code and got upset and graf did graf shenanigans which was the ladt straw for the other devs and they forked it.
Feel free to fork the project under a
An game engine that happens to play classic doom.
While UZDoom technically started by forking GZDoom under a, it's more accurately a direct continuation of GZD, just under a different name. The goals and dev team (with one exception) are exactly the same as they were before.
For german speakers: Usedom? Die Insel?