Doom 1 and 2 maps mapped

[xvertigox]

Saw this on reddit and it doesn't seem to have been posted before:

http://ian-albert.com/games/
http://ian-albert.com/games/doom_maps/
http://ian-albert.com/games/doom_2_maps/

It has most (E4 missing) maps from Doom 1 and 2 mapped as images in a surprisingly comprehensible manner.

I wrote a custom Java program to parse the Doom WAD file format and render all the levels in a simple oblique projection. All the hidden areas are shown, and the sprites from all the skill levels are shown.

[Maes]

This one is actually quite old (it predates Mocha Doom, as far as Doom and Java go) and yeah, it has been posted here (too lazy to remember/search link, suit yourself).

I always had a resentment towards the author for not releasing any code or even executables, it might have had spared me some extra work and make Mocha Doom playable a bit sooner.

Then again I might not have liked his solution/approach towards WAD management anyway (I didn't quite like STARK's or JWadLib's, for that matter).

[Khorus]

I also recall the Doomsday engine doing something like this.

[xvertigox]

Maes said:

This one is actually quite old (it predates Mocha Doom, as far as Doom and Java go) and yeah, it has been posted here (too lazy to remember/search link, suit yourself).

I always had a resentment towards the author for not releasing any code or even executables, it might have had spared me some extra work and make Mocha Doom playable a bit sooner.

Bah, sorry, I searched for the URL but got no hits. I was wondering if he had released his work and it saddens me that he didn't ;<

[Maes]

If I could have the code, I could still integrate something like this in Mocha relatively easily, as an alternate automap mode or even as an alternate renderer.


Edit: here is the older post (not terribly old, but I was still struggling with Mocha Doom's infancy ATT). I searched for "isometric", BTW ;-)

[xvertigox]

Maes said:

If I could have the code, I could still integrate something like this in Mocha relatively easily, as an alternate automap mode or even as an alternate renderer.

Have you had any contact with him? Does he flat out just refuse to release it at all? It would pretty sweet to see this being used in game.

[Vermil]

Khorus said:

I also recall the Doomsday engine doing something like this.

Noclipping into the void in Doomsday produces a view of the whole map, that looks similar to those images, yes.

I used Doomsday to take this overhead image of E1M3:

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110629202229/doom/images/8/82/Doom1-ultimate-001.jpg

[Maes]

xvertigox said:

Have you had any contact with him? Does he flat out just refuse to release it at all? It would pretty sweet to see this being used in game.

I just kind of forgot about the whole thing, as I was far more excited about my project at the time (as I am now).

If my experience is any indication though, I wouldn't expect much cooperation: other than the author being apparently hard to reach/offline for some time (though now he's on Twitter...that might have changed), for some reason all other projects (other than mine) which combined Doom + Java in some form suffered from a tendency to be extremely cryptic and closed-source. Only Notch had the courtesy of releasing the code to STARK when he decided to abandon it, and even then it risked being completely lost.

[epg]

I exchanged mail with him back in May. His response was the usual embarrassed of the code and it's stuck in a rewrite. I see that a lot from people who haven't worked on free software before. Anyway we all think our code is crappy.

Oh well.

[Maes]

Hey I kept Mocha Doom's code open since day one when you could not even call it code, for all of its ugliness, and with comments that the AVGN would definitively approve in plain view ;-)

Anyway, I've seen worse in this respect. Doomcott's code (from what I've gathered from the decompilation) was a horrible hack that had a snowball's chance in hell of ever becoming a Doom source port. STARK had an interesting engine, but no logic or resource management to speak of, so that too wouldn't go very far (check out RUIN @sf to see what I'm talking about).

[Koko Ricky]

Checked out a handful of the pics, and I gotta say I'm very impressed. It's really sharp looking and it emphasizes how much exploration the Doom games offered. If you were to represent a modern shooter like that, I imagine it would be prettier, but significantly less complex.

[DaniJ]

Although it does suffer when presented with invalid map constructs. See the map of E1M3 for instance which has a noticeable "horizontal band" artefact near the exit: http://ian-albert.com/games/doom_maps/E1M3.jpg

GL node builders like glBSP correct issues like this so he would get better quality results if the maps were generated from the GL nodes instead.

[Maes]

I guess the thing is simply software rendered on a truecolour canvas (that's how he gets decent transparency) using pure isotropic projection. In that case, I doubt he would bother decoding/computing GL nodes just for an isometric projection (you never know though).

What you see in Doomsday OTOH is pure 3D/hardware accelerated.

[DaniJ]

It really depends on your goals. One could for instance use the gl nodes and continue to use a hand-rolled isotropic renderer, drawing to a canvas. Or one could use the same isotropic renderer, implemented using a hardware rendering library like JOGL, thus obtaining easy anti aliasing and other such quality improvements.

I guess the author just preferred to keep things simple.

I do like the translucent back-face drawing of walls pointing away from the viewer, it's a useful visual cue to deciphering the maps from his chosen projection.