jamesdunne/wolf3d

Modification of Wolf3D for DOS to use modern WASD control scheme

What is it?

This is a small modification of Wolf3D for DOS to use a more modern WASD control scheme.

The original Wolf3D title used a strafe modifier button system which meant you could not turn left and strafe left simultaneously. This modification removes the strafe modifier button in favor of two dedicated strafe left and strafe right buttons. These buttons can be mapped to any input controller: keyboard, mouse, or joystick.

WASD Movement Demo

Running

Download a recent version of DOSBox for your platform. I use the SVN version as the current 0.74-2 is too old.

Copy the contents of this repository verbatim to C:\WOLFSRC within your C drive mount in DOSBox.

You can use the provided OBJ/WOLF3D.EXE binary to run this modification in DOSBox using vanilla Wolf3D data files (*.WL6 from an official distribution of the original game).

However, you'll need to overwrite the following files:

VGADICT.WL6
VGAGRAPH.WL6
VGAHEAD.WL6

Download compatible versions from here. Extract that ZIP file and copy its *.WL6 files into C:\WOLFSRC.

Run the game with:

C:\WOLFSRC>OBJ\WOLF3D.EXE

Default key bindings are W - forward, S - backward, A - strafe left, D - strafe right.

Mouse vertical movement has no effect. Mouse button 1 fires and button 2 opens.

The original strafe modifier button has been removed in favor of explicit strafe left and right buttons.

These strafe L and R buttons should be available to map to keyboard, mouse, and joystick buttons but only keyboard buttons have been tested. I don't see why it wouldn't work with mice or joysticks unless DOS and gameport hardware limitations come into play.

Use the Controls ... Customize Controls menu to change the button mappings to your taste, though the defaults should suffice.

This modification will not work with CONFIG.WL6 files generated by the vanilla Wolf3D as the format has changed to allow defining the separate strafe buttons. If you see a strange button mapping in your Customize Controls menu, exit out of the game and DEL CONFIG.WL6 and restart to get the default correct mappings.

Building

Follow Fabien Sanglard's excellent build guide to build this modification under DOSBox.

Skip the step about the INSTALL of WOLFSRC and instead copy this repository's contents to C:\WOLFSRC in your DOSBox C mounted folder.

You must have PATH=C:\BORLANDC\BIN set to include the Borland C++ 3.1 compiler's distribution. This is its default install path.

Ignore the steps in the guide about modifying the project files as this repository's copy of WOLF3D.PRJ should work assuming you have the project in C:\WOLFSRC directory.

Building should be easy enough by running:

C:\> cd WOLFSRC
C:\WOLFSRC> bc /m

The /m switch to bc will quickly open the BC IDE in Make mode and will compile the project from scratch, resulting in OBJ\WOLF3D.EXE. Again, invoking bc will not work unless your PATH is set correctly to include the Borland C++ 3.1 compiler distribution's BIN directory.

Follow the steps in the Running section to get started after build success.

DOSBox version addendum

The latest SVN builds of DOSBox fix the IMGMOUNT command to allow mounting a series of floppy images for installing software from floppies. Previous versions of DOSBox disallow this for floppy images specifically and only allow mounting multiple CD images in sequence. This was relevant to me because I had trouble installing the Borland C++ 3.1 distribution from floppy images. This compiler is used to build the project.

However, Fabien Sanglard's guide has a download link to a specially prepared installation folder for the compiler which bypasses mounting floppy disk images, so this addendum becomes irrelevant mostly.