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Telemassacre

Is your computer better at wad making than humans?

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Technology is at a point where you can download a small program, click a few buttons, and generate an entire wad, ready to play and completely clean.[Clean as in not a single human has even touched it yet.] And they are pretty good at it, too. Test this out: Download OBLIGE, hit the Build button, and when you play it, it's likely gonna be one of the better maps you've played. And it is also fast, too. On my AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, it takes roughly 7 minutes and 41.18 seconds to make a full 32 map wad. Untold hours of slaving over a keyboard done in less than 10 minutes. Here is the wad that was generated: this_wad_is_untouched.zip Keep in mind that the only thing i have done is send the file to a zip folder and uploaded it here. Obviously it's not the BEST doom wad out there, there is definitely better made by humans. Personally, i think it's as if John romero and/or Sandy peterson had made this, but they didn't. Neither did I.

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10 minutes ago, Telemassacre said:

Test this out: Download OBLIGE, hit the Build button, and when you play it, it's likely gonna be one of the better maps you've played.

 

I agree that programs like OBLIGE are neat, but... have you actually played any community wads? :P

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1 minute ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

 

I agree that programs like OBLIGE are neat, but... have you actually played any community wads? :P

I have played some community wads in my spare time.

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Hmm, in my experience... auto generated maps tend to be quite obvious in games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, meaning you can tell them apart from man-made levels. We could argue that the fact that the machine can create a WAD on its own to be amazing in its own right, which it is, but just because it can make it doesn’t mean it really understands exactly what it’s doing to make the WAD. The machine is simply following instructions that were created by a programmer. So the human element to it isn’t really gone completely, but the personality of the human mapper is not present, which results in bland, dull, repetitive maps. 
 

Now, I haven’t bothered with auto generated map programs in over 10 years or more now, so maybe there’s been improvements since then, but to me, I don’t really care for the end product. Also, it feels lazy and dishonest in my eyes for someone to release a WAD with computer generated levels and claim them as their own creation. Though, I haven’t seen or heard of anyone doing that in a long time now. 

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If this is the best Skynet can come up with, I am suddenly a lot less afraid of terminators.

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As a huge fan of Oblige i can confirm that most Oblige maps are better than perhaps 30-40% of wads I play, especially wads from the 90s / 00s . I really love Oblige and always fire up a map or two when a new mod / hud comes out.

However there is no substitute for human designed progression and visual story telling. Map sets like Sigil are well thought out and perfectly crafted and put together for a well balanced and unique user experience. Programs can never achieve this level of tailoring and uniqueness. After 50 maps, Oblige tends to feel " same old, same old" , no matter how you chose to tweak it. 

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Oblige, but with machine learning, so you can dump all your favorite wads into it so it can learn from human mappers, and then build maps based off of ones you actually enjoy.

 

Also wouldn't worry about computers replacing artists until quantum computing is realized, good luck recreating human creativity in a binary system.

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Well this gives playing against the computer a whole new meaning. If Sunbeam's Doom bot is ever able to complete these levels then that's game over for humans. The only thing left would be to program bots to post their speedruns and host their own Cacowards.

 

Even though the maps are samey and sort of have that uncanny feeling, it's definitely impressive and fun to play with all the options. And there's no doubt that the quality will only improve over time!

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3 hours ago, Telemassacre said:

Technology is at a point where you can download a small program, click a few buttons, and generate an entire wad, ready to play and completely clean.[Clean as in not a single human has even touched it yet.] And they are pretty good at it, too. Test this out: Download OBLIGE, hit the Build button, and when you play it, it's likely gonna be one of the better maps you've played. And it is also fast, too. On my AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, it takes roughly 7 minutes and 41.18 seconds to make a full 32 map wad. Untold hours of slaving over a keyboard done in less than 10 minutes. Here is the wad that was generated: this_wad_is_untouched.zip Keep in mind that the only thing i have done is send the file to a zip folder and uploaded it here. Obviously it's not the BEST doom wad out there, there is definitely better made by humans. Personally, i think it's as if John romero and/or Sandy peterson had made this, but they didn't. Neither did I.

 

In general, you need to have an idea about what you're making whither it was an artistic view of a whole .WAD design with the smallest details of every sector or a plain .WAD where, "This Takes Place In Hell.. Boom!". The generic computational and A.I. products takes this small human satisfaction to turn it into, "I don't feel like I made a .WAD or even anything". To be honest, I would play an artists made .WAD, and I would play a simple plain .WAD made by someone. Still, I would never play a generic computational A.I. .WAD for the sake of 01000100 01001111 01001111 

01001101 if you know what I mean of course.

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I never used OBLIGE, but I saw some of the pics and the visuals of some of the levels were quite impressive

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Well, OBLIGE's "creativity" has to come from somewhere, and in this case it's the creativity of its very human programmers :-)

 

Any "generate X automatically" kind of program in general falls into two broad categories:

1. those that simply put together prefab parts/templates, like that software that churns out those boring, database-driven, run-of-the-mill generic inventory/warehouse/bookkeeping programs with a few clicks, based on minimal input/customization requests from the user, lots of "game maker" software, or those dime-a-dozen "easy website builders".

2. those that use a painstakingly trained AI, with neural networks and the such, using actual datasets as training. That's how e.g. chess-playing AIs are trained nowadays.

 

Between the two there's a gray area where templates/prefabs/mechanistic rules are refined with a few touches of conventional, hand-coded AI, which, refined as they can be, at the end of the day they are still mechanistic rules. Or even a partially trainable/neural network AI/engine.

 

I think that SLIGE was more of 1, while OBLIGE is more of 1 with enhanced "prettifying" rules bolted on top. I think SLIGE had those too, but they were arcane enough to use that in practice nobody did.

 

Caveat emptor: the fact that SLIGE maps were considered good enough (in their time) led to the well-known distaste/ban for them from idgames.

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31 minutes ago, Maes said:

Well, OBLIGE's "creativity" has to come from somewhere, and in this case it's the creativity of its very human programmers :-)

absolutely, but it is not capable of being creative in and of it's self. OBLIGE or SLIGE might have been groundbreaking as tools, the tools themselves aren't capable of breaking ground (as far as mapping goes). for instance they wouldn't have been able to figure out the many uses of voodoo dolls without having that information being figured out previously by a person. (I have no idea if they are capable of using voodoo dolls, it's just an example)

 

39 minutes ago, Maes said:

 

Caveat emptor: the fact that SLIGE maps were considered good enough (in their time) led to the well-known distaste/ban for them from idgames.

How did the archivists know they were SLIGE maps if they were good enough? particular textures or something?

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17 minutes ago, Dylan Omen said:

How did the archivists know they were SLIGE maps if they were good enough? particular textures or something?

 

You see, a SLIGE map is kinda like pornography: hard to formally define but unmistakable once you see it. ;-)

 

Another interpretation, SLIGE maps tended to look kinda repetitive, aimless and "soulless" and by default resulted in something like OHNO.wad: just shooting monsters in room after room full of monsters, but without even the mid-map surprise. No elaborate puzzles, no clever/atmospheric decoration or detail (unless prefabs were coded in), no monster placement strategy, no ambushes/surprises etc.

 

Failing that, early SLIGE levels automatically marked the first room as a sector, and all versions added a Dead Lost Soul object to the map. Not every uploader went (even) though the effort of removing those.

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2 hours ago, Lippeth said:

Well this gives playing against the computer a whole new meaning. If Sunbeam's Doom bot is ever able to complete these levels then that's game over for humans. The only thing left would be to program bots to post their speedruns and host their own Cacowards.

 

Even though the maps are samey and sort of have that uncanny feeling, it's definitely impressive and fun to play with all the options. And there's no doubt that the quality will only improve over time!

 

Excuse the clickbaity title, but basically there's a Dotabot that can beat pro players thanks to machine learning;

 

 

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From what I’ve seen and played, OBLIGE can definitely out map me or others like me with low to medium mapping skill but it still has nothing on the decent mappers out there.

 

As @Doomkid said, you can really feel that the maps it creates lack intent and I can usually tell pretty quickly if a map was made by a computer.

 

They also lack the artistic / visually creative side of mapping too which is a big issue for me. I love the visual spectacle aspect of modern WAD’s and that isn’t something I can’t see a computer being able to spit out anytime particularly soon.

 

Hopefully the technology continues to evolve though as would love to be able to generate a brand new, unique, jaw droppingly beautiful, amazing experience each time I sit down to play.

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6 hours ago, Telemassacre said:

Download OBLIGE, hit the Build button, and when you play it, it's likely gonna be one of the better maps you've played.

 

Just gonna stop you right here.

 

I obviously cannot say that there are not people for whom this is true.  I can state, without fear of refutation, that it will not be true for anyone who is reasonably discerning about the iwads they play.  Will an OBADDON map in 2020 be better than a sizeable chunk of Maximum Doom?  Of course.  But pretty much anyone on this website has standards that are higher than that.

 

As you yourself say,

 

6 hours ago, Telemassacre said:

Obviously it's not the BEST doom wad out there, there is definitely better made by humans.

 

but even this strikes me as a bit of weasel-phrasing, as it implies that OBLIGE et al. is extremely good, without overreaching by claiming it's actually the best.  One can imagine someone in 1996, when Deep Blue lost its first match against Kasparov, saying "Obviously it's not yet the BEST chess player out there, there are definitely better humans", even though Deep Blue would already at that point already have been better than 99% of competent chess players in the world.  But OBLIGE and its descendants are not the Deep Blue of Doom mapping.  Assuming one confines themselves to maps that have had a reasonable amount of care and polish invested in them, the vast majority of WADs one plays will be better than anything produced by OBLIGE or OBADDON.  And there is scarcely any reason not to curate one's experience thus**, given the embarrassment of riches the Doom community produces year-on-year.  Even a relatively rapid-fire series of releases like the DBP series manages to keep up a consistently high standard of quality and creativity; once you get into the actual marquee projects like BTSX or Going Down, Jim Ross starts begging the referee to ring the damn bell already because putting those against OBLIGE is such a brutally one-sided contest.

 

At best, one could make a reasonable argument that the most recent versions of OBLIGE/OBADDON are capable of making something in the same quality bracket as a decent 90s level (or a more recent level emulating that feel).  And that's perfectly impressive for an automated program.  But the human will always have the advantage, because the human in Doombuilder can do whatever operations OBLIGE does (albeit not as fast), yet still have the potential for creativity on top.  Speed is OBLIGE et al's only real claim to triumph, as they can automate in seconds what might take a human at least a half-hour of manually copying, pasting, and tweaking textures.  

 

 

** Not counting maps that one plays for the purpose of testing or giving feedback to developing mappers, of course.

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Because Oblige has been discontinued since around 2017 I'd suggest downloading and using ObAddon instead. It has A TON more features and options and can generate far more varied and larger levels than Oblige along with ZDoon specific features such as custom DECORATE/ZScript actors, slopes, 3D floors, 3D skyboxes etc.

However there is one fundamental problem that Oblige has with how it actually generates maps which ObAddon can't do anything about either and that would require making a new level generator from scratch or remaking Oblige from the ground up. And that is that Oblige/ObAddon seem to pretty much just stich together rooms, hallways etc from a large list of rooms without many limitations for what it can stich together with what. Not to mention that as others have already mentioned it can't really just know what looks and plays well and especially not when Oblige works by just sticking together premade rooms.

As a result a lot of Oblige/ObAddon maps don't look and/or play as well as maps made by other people who can actually know and understand what actually makes a map good or bad, not to mention learn and improve which Oblige/ObAddon cannot do, not without being programmed to do so, but again, that would require remaking the generator from scratch.

Another issue is that due to how levels are generated it's almost always pretty obvious when a map has been generated by Oblige or ObAddon because they follow a pretty distinct style on how they are structured layoutwise and how they look. Whereas with people making maps all of them have different ways on how they approach and do things, and can change up how they make maps as well if they want or need to while Oblige/ObAddon can really only do it in one way*.

Also another issue also stemming from how it generates maps, and especially from the fact that it has a limited list of rooms it simply picks from instead of being able to actually create new rooms from scratch, is that there's often repetition in level and room designs and layouts, with multiple similar rooms, sections, decorations etc



The only way to really bypass all those limitations and make maps that are indistinguishable from man made maps and almost always unique and made from scratch instead of using prefabs AND with an actual (If not limited.) understanding of what makes a map good or bad, would be to make an artificial neural network for generating Doom levels and then train it with almost everything from the idgames archive (Above a certain rating and amount of them to get good results most likely.). That way it could LEARN how to make maps and get better at it like an actual person would instead of following hard coded parameters and code to stich together mostly random rooms from a large list.
But of course the problem with that is that I doubt the vast majority of the Doom community has any knowledge on how to actually do something like this, and the ones that do would have to invest A TON of time and resources into making and training a mapmaking neural network.

*Or in the case of ObAddon 2-4 more ways/styles since it also has map generation settings such as "Streets Mode" that generates urban levels instead.

 

Quote

Man fuck SLIGE.  If I wanted to run around in some randomly-computer-generated crap I'd play Minecraft.  

You're like 10+ years too late to be complaining about SLIGE lol, also I'd say Minecraft's procedual generation is pretty good.

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I'm not a fan of using "gameplay" mods (like Brutal Doom) extensively on megawads because it ruins the intended gameplay. It would be like dumping a scoop of ice cream on a gourmet meal; both are delicious unto themselves but they aren't meant for each other. However, I am interested in using such mods with Oblige megawads. Oblige is very impressive, but it really doesn't pack any punch compared to good human-made wads. It's junk food while gameplay mods are sweets. They sort of go well together. 

 

I plan on playing Oblige megawads with the Doom Roguelike Arsenal mod. I'll probably stream it too (shameless self promotion). I would probably set the level size on the smaller size and try to beat the full megawad without dying. Does anyone have any tips for the best settings for Roguelike Arsenal in Oblige? I'll have to tinker with it to make it ideal.

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Semi-related but what's better ObAddon or Obhack?
Oblige i think is just cool to try gameplay mods with and nothing else really :O
Why play some maps made by bots if there's idgames full of better maps :D

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Oh sorry I have another topic. What is the community's opinion on using Oblige maps as a base?

 

I've dabbled a bit with mapping and while I'm somewhat proud what of what I can do, I find I stumble from writer's block at the beginning of the map. I think I might generate a small Oblige map, just to get "ink on the canvas", and go from there. I would guess that half of the vector points/linedefs would be changed and the texturing would be very different by the time I'm done. The small map would just give me some ideas as to the basic structure, perhaps it would roughly become the "main hub" if the level was structured like that.

 

I of course would state that an Oblige map was used as a "base" in the txt file and perhaps give a link to the original or include it in the download for comparison. What's the verdict? Utterly shameless or somewhat reasonable?   

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I Think oblige has 2 weaknesses

 

1 it has way too few premade map pieces to place

 

2 it can not make GZDoom 3d levels

(EDIT: apparently it can, but it does not use 3D floors, dynamic lights, reflective floors etc)

 

However

 

I Guess it could serve to make a base level that a human could then improve afterwards

 

----

 

Maybe someone could do a community project Where an oblige 32 map megawad is modded by a Buch of mappers??

 

Could be fun... but I have Enough projects Running right now

Edited by CBM

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3 hours ago, CBM said:

I Think oblige has 2 weaknesses

 

1 it has way too few premade map pieces to place


That's pretty spot on, not only can it not actually generate rooms themselves but the list of premade rooms it CAN semi-inteligently stich together is very small, leading to alot of obvious repetition.

 

3 hours ago, CBM said:

2 it can not make GZDoom 3d levels

(EDIT: apparently it can, but it does not use 3D floors, dynamic lights, reflective floors etc)


ObAddon DOES have the option to place and use prefabs with 3D floors and dynamic lights, though the 3D floors are pretty basic, being just a simple 3D platform or two, it can also generate 3D skyboxes and those look REALLY good and especially that sci-fi one. Definitely haven't seen it generating reflective floors though.
Another major weakness it has is that it cannot support UDMF without ObAddon just becoming a fork of Oblige so features like vertex slopes can't be used, in fact even its ability to use features that already exist in the binary ZDoom formats is pretty limited. For example it cannot actually generate polyobjects due to a technical limitation. As far as I can tell it also can't really make and use scripted events, with its only ACS usage being for custom ACS+DECORATE actors from Zandronum compatability, and probably for any boss battles it generates if you set it to, since that healthbar is probably made with ACS.

 

3 hours ago, CBM said:

I Guess it could serve to make a base level that a human could then improve afterwards


Generating maps and claiming them as your own is already frowned upon and I don't think adding on and modifying a generated map would be seen much better.
But you could definitely use ObAddon's decorations and probably even rooms as inspiration as I have a few times though, since those are still made by people to be placed down anyway. I even once asked if I could have some trucks and cars I made out of sectors added as placeable decorations once but they apperantly exceeded the size limit for a decoration.

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No.

 

I played through the first map, and the fact of the matter is: It's not fun to play.

 

I mean sure it's competent, it has premade bits that are reasonably well laid out, and the algorithm is setup so that it doesn't place a switch somewhere dumb and make the layout really obtrusive... But actually playing it is boring. The way everything progresses just feels so lifeless and clinical, there's no sense of actual challenging balance in the encounters, things in the level just sorta happen. I mean this is the main reason I don't play many Roguelikes,  I just really don't like randomly-generated maps (unless it's like Minecraft or something) because hand-crafted maps are always designed with a genuine purpose. 

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5 hours ago, VonHeer said:

Oh sorry I have another topic. What is the community's opinion on using Oblige maps as a base?

 

I've dabbled a bit with mapping and while I'm somewhat proud what of what I can do, I find I stumble from writer's block at the beginning of the map. I think I might generate a small Oblige map, just to get "ink on the canvas", and go from there. I would guess that half of the vector points/linedefs would be changed and the texturing would be very different by the time I'm done. The small map would just give me some ideas as to the basic structure, perhaps it would roughly become the "main hub" if the level was structured like that.

 

I of course would state that an Oblige map was used as a "base" in the txt file and perhaps give a link to the original or include it in the download for comparison. What's the verdict? Utterly shameless or somewhat reasonable?   

 

I'd go with somewhat reasonable as long as you're actually going over and tweaking what Oblige spits out.  But if, as you say, you just have a hub of Oblige-generated sectors to which you've added a number of bespoke rooms, that's less good.  If half of the "vector points" (vertices?) and linedefs are changed, that means half are still the same, and in my book that's still far too many.

 

If your problem is solely not knowing what the hell to do when you've got a blank UDB screen (and I definitely empathize), what you could do is generate a modestly sized Oblige layout and then make something from scratch based on it.  That is, based on the map view of it or on your memory of playing it, but without actually editing the Oblige-spawned wad.  That wouldn't be much different than the ways in which some people already get inspiration from real-world floor plans or from bits and pieces of other maps they've played.

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1 hour ago, HQDefault said:

I played through the first map, and the fact of the matter is: It's not fun to play.

Well, the difficulty loves to spike.

  • Hell knight in MAP 02
  • Revenant in MAP 03
  • You don't get a shotgun until Map03
  • I looked at MAP30, There are 4 cyberdemons on the easy difficulties.

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I really enjoy fucking around with Oblige + ObAddon. I've had a thing for procedural level generation for a long time (SoF2 was really cool in that regard IMO). Seeing people complain about the lack of diversity in the prefabs makes me think it could be worthwhile having a map jam to add some new flavors to the mix.

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I downloaded Oblige 4 because that was the latest version to have a Quake map generator (removed in later releases). I have yet to test it but I'm excited. 

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