Masterpack for Doom II

The 'Master Levels for Doom II' is a grab-bag collection of various unstructured, unorganized WAD files, all made by various map authors with a wide variety of styles and design conventions.

Most of the authors involved in the project, made these maps with the intention of them being a part of larger episode or campaign overarching a certain theme even before being contacted by id Software for this project of theirs.

John W. Anderson, for example, directed a series of 9 total levels themed around the first third of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Inferno. While James Flynn concocted a series of 6 mind-cracking puzzle-oriented adventures set in Saturn's moon, Titan. And Sverre André Kvernmo told the story of a cyberdemon betrayed by his fellow hell-spawn, taking revenge on the Cabal that conspired against him.

However, not all maps made by these authors were accepted by id Software, being later released freely by their creators after the fact, with some of them even continuing their work further, beyond the original submitted level sets.

With all this in mind, why should anyone play the works of these masters in their original amorphous format? Why should we accept the way things are? Why should we allow people to miss out on the great works of these authors just because the pieces are all over the place? Why should we be holden by the shackles of someone else's bad decisions? Why are we not allowed to have fun with some of the best level designers of 1995?

The Masterpack works by taking everything made by the authors past, present and future to the original Master Levels release and bringing it together in a single WAD file for your enjoyment. All 45 relevant (plus 1 bonus) maps are now fully playable as 5 separate, organized episodes. And with this, you can now properly enjoy the works of Doom's early great authors, some of early Doom's most timeless work.

Here are the included episodes, for a detailed list of maps check out this table:

  Inferno     -  9 maps - John "Dr. Sleep" Anderson, Rest In Peace
  Titan       -  6 maps - James "Jim" Flynn, Rest In Peace
  Cabal       - 12 maps - Sverre "Soundblock" Kvernmo
  Klietech    - 12 maps - Christen Klie
  Lost Levels -  7 maps - Tom "Paradox" Mustaine, Theresa Chasar, and Tim Willits

Note about Waters of Lethe: The last Canto of the Inferno series, is long known to be the Doom community's most important piece of lost media, having no more proof than the author's own words and a single screenshot of the map to show for it's existence. In this map set, it is substituted by "An End to Darkness", by Xaser Acheron, an homage to Dr. Sleep, inspired by the only know screenshot of Lethe.

Note about Boot Assault: The only map to not have anything to do with the original Master Levels project is Boot Assault, a version of Kick Attack! for Doom II stripped of it's custom graphics. Coming from the commercial collaboration between RC Cola and id Software, organized and led by Tim Willits and released in early 1996, shortly after the release of the Master Levels, it is attached here by level design similarity, in order to round off the end of the "Lost Levels" episodes.

Inspiration

The infamy of the Master Levels in well known and understood in the Classic Doom community. As many have criticized the level design of some of the maps, the repetitive lack of proper music choice for many maps, amongst other issues plaguing the official release.

Many have attempted to improve upon this botched release, from Peter "Megasphere" Lawrence, who created the Master Levels 25th Anniversary MIDI Pack made specifically for each map in the the set, or Devalaous, who created a QoL patch to be used on top of PSN Doom's masterlevels.wad. But, by far, the most important improvement made to this highly underrated map set was made by JP LeBreton, when he released the Works of the Masters, a PWAD for his WadSmoosh utility, a complete set of maps returning all of the missing maps by the involved authors.

WotM is a fundamentally game changing mod for the Master Levels, by reattaching all of the missing maps, most of which remain less known even in the core Doom community cultural sphere. Merging together all of the levels in their originally intended complete form, WotM not only refreshes the Master Levels, not only does it give them new life, it shines their glory brightly, allowing them to be taken a serious piece of Doom mapping work.

By simply giving the maps an episodic structure, as they were all supposed to have, JP completely fixed the fundamental issues with these WADs, by letting anyone to play these levels as one single package, he allowed me and many other players to enjoy the work of Doom's early great authors. By questioning the way we are supposed to play the Master Levels, they were completely reinvented, given new purpose, shown what they could be something great.

However, for how great WS and WotM are, they remain exclusive to the popular GZDoom, severely limiting it to the community members that do not use the highly advanced source port. In the wake of my parting with GZDoom, to me using Woof! as my preferred source port, I set out to rebuild this superb "deluxe version" of the Master Levels, into something more palatable for the rest of the Classic Doom audience.

I started out using SLADE3 to extract the content of LeBreton's masters.pk3 into the more vanilla-friendly formats, using a plain WAD file (instead of GZDoom's pk3 format), the "TEXTURE1" and "SWITCHES" lumps (as opposed to TEXTURES and ANIMDEFS), etc. But soon, I came to a realization that my work could've fallen in vain, as a commercial release can not be redistributed, I came to thought of imitating @JPL once more, and needed a build script utility of my own. And that is when I decided to start making the Masterpack for Doom II, so everyone, and everyone, can enjoy the Master Levels the way they were meant to, the way the authors had intended, or at least as close to the best of the best as we can get.

Instructions

To get started, extract the contents of the Masterpack zip file, onto any folder, that you have dowloaded fron the official page on Itch.io or here on the releases section.

After extracting, you will see:

• The executable, masterpack.exe
• The folder source/, with the empty file delete_me.txt

In order to use this utility you will need the following, from your Steam installation of Ultimate Doom and Doom II (keeping in mind, these are the original DOS version of the IWADs and PWADs, the Unity ones will not work):

• Ultimate Doom, DOOM.WAD
• TNT: Evilution, TNT.WAD
• All 20 of the Master Levels for Doom II:
  • Inferno
    • VIRGIL.WAD
    • MINOS.WAD
    • NESSUS.WAD
    • GERYON.WAD
    • VESPERAS.WAD
  • Titan
    • MANOR.WAD
    • TTRAP.WAD
  • Cabal
    • BLOODSEA.WAD
    • BLACKTWR.WAD
    • MEPHISTO.WAD
    • TEETH.WAD
  • Klietech
    • SUBSPACE.WAD
    • COMBINE.WAD
    • FISTULA.WAD
    • SUBTERRA.WAD
    • CATWALK.WAD
    • GARRISON.WAD
  • Lost Levels
    • PARADOX.WAD
    • ATTACK.WAD
    • CANYON.WAD

If you don't know how to find these, check out this step-by-atep.

Once you have all the WAD files, drop them in the source/ directory and run the script as the following:

# Windows, Powershell
PS C:\Users\User .\masterpack.exe

The above is identical to simply double-clicking on the respective masterpack.exe on a graphical interface.

Once finished it will generate a build.log file containing the output of the script, if it was successful or not.

And, if successful, you will now be the proud owner of your own copy of masterpack.wad.

To play this, run it with a modern Doom source port, with xMAPINFO support, such as DSDA-Doom, Woof!, Nugget, Eternity, Odamex or the ZDoom family.

By merely dragging and dropping the masterpack.wad file on the source port EXE, or by running the following on the command line.

# DSDA on Winodws
PS C:\Users\User .\dsda-doom.exe -file masterpack.wad

# Or Woof!
PS C:\Users\User .\woof.exe -file masterpack.wad

# Or ZDoom-family ports
PS C:\Users\User .\gzdoom.exe -file masterpack.wad

Add-ons

This pack includes also a handful of "add-ons" for customizing the Masterpack play experience, currently the following are included:

• masterpack-ml25amp.wad
  • An alternative track listing that in the "Master Levels 25th Anniversary MIDI Pack" by Peter Lawrence
  • Note that these tracks only add in new music for the original 21 levels, and is not repeated for any other map
• masterpack-psx-tc.wad
  • Currently in alpha
  • A total conversion mod, adds in graphical and sound assets from the awesome VanillaPSX by DRON12261
  • Soundtrack uses the PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom OSTs, with the blessing of Aubrey Hodges, please check out his amazing work on his Bandcamp
• masterpack-freedoom-tc.wad
  • Currently in alpha
  • A TC that adds in freedoom assets on top of the base map set, rendering them a completely new look and feel
  • Taken from version 0.13.0 of the incredible free asset project Freedoom

To start, extract the contents masterpack-addons-alpha.zip onto the same folder as masterpack.wad.

To play, you can run them from the command-line like the following.

PS C:\Users\User .\dsda-doom.exe -file masterpack.wad masterpack-psx-tc-alpha.wad

Or make a masterpack-psx.ps1 batch file:

.\dsda-doom.exe -file masterpack.wad masterpsack-psx-tc-alpha.wad

Legalese

Master Level Masterpack
Copyright © 2024 Guilherme Marques Miranda

WideHud
Copyright © 2013 NightFright

WidePix
Copyright © 2020 Nash Muhandes

WadSmoosh
Copyright © 2018 Jean-Paul LeBreton

Works of the Masters
Copyright © 2020 Jean-Paul LeBreton

Omgifol
Copyright © 2005 Fredrik Johansson, 2017 Devin Acker

Doom, Doom II, Master Levels, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 id Software