The first thought on everyone's mind once Adobe released Alchemy: "Time for Doom in the web browser!"

Naturally, it's only the demo. id Software still actively sells Doom -- on both Xbox LIVE and Steam -- so if you've never played it, you should pick up the full version.

There are a few things missing in the port:

- No music. Doom's music files are MIDI, and Flash can't natively play MIDI files. I was tempted to include OCRemix's Doom soundtrack as MP3, but even a few of the songs would be bigger than 2.5 meg Flash file!

- No mouse control. Flash has no way of "locking" the mouse to the game area, so it's impossible to do true Quake-style mouselook. I'll be ranting about this more in a future post.

- Bad keyboard controls. Doom's original keyboard controls (ALT, CTRL, etc.) don't get along with Flash and caused odd behavior on different platforms. I changed them around, but what I really need to add is configurable controls.

- Yea, the secret is missing in E1M1 and the BFG isn't there. These weren't in the shareware version! :)

As per the GPL license, the source code for the port is publicly available! Feel free to play around with it here:

http://github.com/Herschel/flash-doom/

tree/master

Also, check out Max's AS3 Doom engine. He actually reprogrammed the DOOM-style raycasting engine in AS3, before Alchemy was even announced! Wow!