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Hoodie

How many maps could fit in a wad?

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I don't feel like throwing maps in until it won't work and google won't answer my question, so I'm asking you guys.

Just how many maps could go into one wad?

I'm asking because I have this idea where I put all of Id's work into one huge wad, just as a convenience and challenge thing for myself. I guess I could just try it and see if it works, but I don't want to fuck anything up on accident and I don't want to do the work. I think you could just put infinite maps in and it would eventually lag, like that one joke wad.

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In vanilla, there's the obvious limit of 32 maps in a megawad, possibly raised on 35 with constraints.

In ZDoom, it should theoretically be possible to stack unlimited number of maps into a wad. However, each of the maps would need its unique map name. Standard map names are MAP01, MAP02, MAP03..., but they can actually be whatever 8-letter sign: MXYZABC1, XZABCYM2, etc. You will need to define the order in which they'll be played, using MAPINFO.

Putting all of Id's work into your custom wad might be a huge copyright infringement issue and I don't recommend doing it.

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scifista42 said:

Putting all of Id's work into your custom wad might be a huge copyright infringement issue and I don't recommend doing it.


The "convenience and challenge thing for myself" bit seems to hint he's not planning on distributing it...


I did something like this for myself too a long while ago. Then I changed my mind and thought the idea was dumb since I wasn't playing the IWAD maps anymore.

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Doomguy2000 made this some years ago, and if I'm not mistaken, it was some sort of "proof" that ZDoom can handle at least 30,000 levels.

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Zed said:

Doomguy2000 made this some years ago, and if I'm not mistaken, it was some sort of "proof" that ZDoom can handle at least 30,000 levels.


I mentioned that in the original post, thanks for the link.

ETTiNGRiNDER said:

What port do you intend to use?


GZDoom.

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scifista42 said:

However, each of the maps would need its unique map name. Standard map names are MAP01, MAP02, MAP03..., but they can actually be whatever 8-letter sign


Using this, I've come up with the theoretical maximum of 1.22 trillion levels. This is assuming it's not capped at something lower like a power of two.

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ZDoom's archive manager can load 2^31 lumps (2 147 483 648). Even taking advantage of the built-in nodebuilder to remove the nodes, blockmap, rejects, etc., a map still has at least 3 lumps (marker, TEXTMAP, ENDMAP for UDMF; binary format maps have more lumps since things, nodes, sides, lines, and sectors are in different lumps). Let's count 4 lumps per map to allow each one to have its own music track.

Then let's count 4096 lumps for non-map game data. Doom II alone has more than 2500 of them, if you add more textures and flats to merge in Ultimate Doom, TNT, and Plutonia you'll get there easily. I think we can even push to 8192 or 16384 if you're starting to merge in common texture packs, like RETRES, GOTHICTX or CC4TEX. Let's be conservative and stay with the 4096 figure for now.

You get enough room for 536 869 888 maps. A megawad is officially defined as having 15+ maps. This therefore allows to have up to 35 million megawads, or 35 megamegawads.

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I think you're limited further, by 2^31 bytes in the wad file, since the lump directory has to point to the start of the lump data, using a 32-bit absolute offset.

So, if each map was the size of Doom E1M1, that allows 37,753 maps, or a map a day for 103 years.

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