Helion

About

Doom is id Software's genre-defining 1993 first-person shooter; its sequel, Doom II, followed in 1994. Helion is a from-scratch, performance-focused Doom source port that uses static rendering with a state-management system instead of the original engine's BSP-tree rendering, aimed at running even complex modern community maps well on both high-end and older hardware. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple Silicon Macs, supports WAD content built for vanilla Doom, Boom, MBF, MBF21, partial UDMF, and ID24, and requires the player to supply their own IWAD.

How it differs from the original

Unlike the original engine's BSP-tree rendering, Helion uses static rendering with a state-management system to handle dynamic map changes, which the project says yields large performance gains, particularly on complex fan-made maps.

Getting started

Download a prebuilt release for your platform, supply your own IWAD — such as the Doom + Doom II Steam release, the Doom shareware episode, or Freedoom — and run the engine; Linux users also need the libsndfile and mpg123 libraries installed. Compiling from source is supported as an alternative to using a prebuilt release.

Media

Additional notes

Note

Nightly experimental builds are available for testing newer features but may be less stable, or contain half-finished features, compared to official releases.