Wadspy plugin for Doombuilder?

Wadspy is an older Doom utility that has drifted into obscurity. Its used with wads to print data on the things inside the map, giving the reader a brief on what weapons are available on the map, average brightness, number of secret areas, and how much of the map is covered in damaging floors. It also counts how many monsters and what type across the different skill settings, how much ammunition is on the map, how much combined HP of all the monsters on the map, and finally a calculated "difficulty ratio"

While its not an ideal substitute for testing your own maps, its not totally without its benefits. For me, I often have trouble guessing how much ammo I need to put in my maps without testing it first. Having wadspy work in real time as I'm editing map could help me gauge whether or not I'm placing enough ammo in my map before I start to test it, and it can help coordinate some contrast between balancing skill levels.

Perhaps there are some features or data that can be added to wadspy to help a mapper from the editing perspective too.

Like this?

Eeek! look at you, boris! always pulling through! That looks fantastic :)

Thanks. It uses the same formula to compute the ratios as WADSpy, so it has the same downsides. Besides the limitations noted in the WADSpy readme the forumla also does not take the SSG into account. So as long as a SSG is available to the player the damage per shell will actually be much higher in-game (and thus the ratio better).

boris said:

Like this?

Two questions, if I may ....

Is that a published, downloadable plugin?
What size monitor was that screenshot taken with?

Kappes Buur said:

Two questions, if I may ....

Is that a published, downloadable plugin?
What size monitor was that screenshot taken with?

Not yet published. The screenshot was taken with GZDB running not maximized, and the screenshot is 1382x1331. The size of the table is indeed a problem, if you have a smaller screen resolution it will have scroll bars. Note that only those things will be listed that actually appear in the map and have influence on the difficulty (i.e. no floor lamps or hanging corpses).

Is it possible to save this stuff to a text file? I can't see any button for this.

Graf Zahl said:

Is it possible to save this stuff to a text file? I can't see any button for this.

No, but it's a good idea. Funny thing is that the stock DataGridView doesn't seem to support copy'n'paste.

The plugin only works for Doom format maps, not with Hexen format or UDMF. Not sure if it's worth to get working for the latter formats, since it's common to spawn things using scripts and it's impossible for the plugin to take that into account.

Just a thought,
clicking on the skill highlights the entities, similar to the Comments panel in UDMF ?

GZDB already has a thing filters for skill settings. See the "(show all)" below the "Vertices" menu entry in the screenshot? You can select skill settings there.

Something like this would be exceptionally handy.

boris said:

GZDB already has a thing filters for skill settings. See the "(show all)" below the "Vertices" menu entry in the screenshot? You can select skill settings there.

Certainly, but this shows everything for a skill setting

and not on a per basis as would be the case if your plugin were clickable,

which would highlight only those 8 chaingunners.

But, like I mentioned, it's just a thought.

Unfortunately plugins don't have any control over the editing modes (unless their own, of course), so that's not possible. Maybe it's possible to create thing filters on the fly, but it'd still not change they way the things are drawn, i.e. the things not fitting the filter will be drawn translucent.

Alternatively you can:
1. Switch to Things mode (you don't need to reference BuilderModes.dll to do that).
2. Clear selected things.
3. Select required things.
4. Focus the view on selection.
5. Call it a day.

I guess it depends on what Kappes Buur wants to do. Do you want to just clearly see their position or do you want to edit them? Or something else?

[edit]
Also, you can create a things filter that filters by thing type.