DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter
theor.xyz
theor.xyz
At the conversion, because the elevations are not flipped.
The models were readily available online, I had to add some supports, scaffolding and caps to make solids of what was essentially a giant surface but it only took a few minutes per map.
I am genuinely surprised how rarely you see classic gaming models and levels printed.
You were there, it was real. The memories are real. The spaces are real even if not corporeal.
For me it's places from my childhood I can still visit without feeling alienated. If I visit my childhood home that we sold decades ago, there's someone else living there and I don't see with the same eyes either. But the multiplayer maps are the same.
I play the FOSS FPS called Xonotic now just for the entertainment. I realize I was never as good as teenager me believed I was. But I can learn. Sometimes when I'm gibbed early in a Clan Arena match, waiting for the round to end, I'll just rise to the top of the map and see the fake sunrise backdrop of my childhood. I can also recommend defrag mode, just running around a track parkour style trying to maximize efficiency is extremely relaxing.
Gotta wonder if this could be used to improve elder care for our generation. Imagine being in an old folk's home with VR headset and playing with your peers in familiar surroundings?
I know I did. Until one night I randomly pursued the place in street view. It's uncanny, looking at it, not being sure which things changed and which you don't remember correctly. Was the swingset in the park always yellow? Was that store always on that side of the other one? It really fucks with your sense of reality
would have been much more impressive if all surfaces were lasercut (with automatically generated finger joints for extra bonus). Could even have marked the surface with hints for assembly.
Instant product to sell on etsy for people to paint their own physical 3d doom level.
3dprint some floating eyeballs, and grab a G.I.Joe figure and you have a doom tabletop game.
That's a bit of a claim? Just because the data is separate from the binary doesn't say anything about the goal.
“Recently someone posted about their experience in determining the file structure of the Doom WAD file. How did you feel when people were discovering how to modify Doom, from building new levels, to changing the executable itself (dhacked) originally without any information from id? In your opinion, is the modding community a valuable place for creating future game developers?”
John Carmack Answers:
“The hacking that went on in Wolfenstein was unexpected, but based on that, DOOM was designed from the beginning to be modified by the user community.
[…]
I still remember the first time I saw the original Star Wars DOOM mod. Seeing how someone had put the death star into our game felt so amazingly cool. I was so proud of what had been made possible, and I was completely sure that making games that could serve as a canvas for other people to work on was a valid direction.”
Not having to rebuild the executable speeds up iterations when designing a level.
Having the ability to easily have a single-level game is very useful during play testing.
Then there's PWAD ("patch" WAD), which are applied on top of the primary WAD ("IWAD").
There's no reason to implement support for that except for the ability to add modifications ("patches")
I don't know why people in the comments are speculating about this when it's well documented that this was the intention of the WAD system.
I don't know if all laser cutters support that kind of operation, but I had some badges and a wax seal stamp like that made at a makerspace about a decade ago. I brought in PostScript files[1] where different colours were assigned to different depths on the cutter. The depth was remarkably precise and consistent - it looked like it had been performed using a tiny CNC router.
[1] I think? I made them in InkScape, but the makerspace couldn't use SVGs directly.
for extra bonus points, fill the pools with glowing green slime (or lava, depending on the map)
In addition to that, there’s also teleports used for elevators or water. They move you around then using/jumping in. Multiple elevator transports can move you in impossible ways like getting into an elevator, driving down, only to arrive at other side of the same floor.
So I agree. Might work for some maps, but not in general.
As a player, you could see the extents of a sector when you looked at the automap, because the map became visible sector-by-sector.
The exact rule of the editor / engine was actually even stricter. Not only could a sector not overlap itself, you had to make sure that at no position you could see two sectors that overlapped, or the graphics would glitch. If you wanted overlapping, you had to split sectors just to please the engine, even if floor/ceiling height, lighting, textures etc. were the same.
The engine DID need the "lots of sectors so you don't see two overlapping sectors at once", which came for free with a spiral staircase.
I just made two sectors separately and moved one on top of other.
Just tested it: https://imgur.com/a/uDxMDBp
Amazing work.
Love the result, and can't wait to see it in multiple colors.
That said, for purely binary formats, I strongly recommend folks check out Kaitai Struct if they haven't already, just because I think the concept is really solid. I found out about Kaitai Struct because I accidentally did something fairly similar that was Go-specific (go-restruct) and someone else pointed out Kaitai to me.
Parsing file formats was never super awful, but I'm glad that the ergonomics of writing fast, robust parsers has improved to the point where it's a superior experience in some regards to the tried and true but fairly unportable "dump structures from memory" approach that seemed to be popular when I was younger.
Tangentially in this category, I think Wuffs is quite compelling too.