komojo

I'm picking up a long abandoned project that I started back in 2019. I got back to it a year later to try and finish it, but I got caught up in feature creep and wasn't able to finish everything. This time I'm trying to avoid the temptation to make a bunch of new levels and just finish what I have. That means playtesting and trying to finish a bit of custom graphics and music. I still may have bit off more than I can chew...trying to make 8 original songs is like making a whole album, and I don't know anything about music composition. Still, I'm going to press on and try to come up with something by the end of this month.

Tileable Martian sky based on a NASA photo

Count me in. I started a project for nanowadmo about 4 years ago, but I never finished it. This year I'll try to finally tie up all the loose ends and publish something.

Count me in! I was working on the same project the last two times for nanowadmo, and it's already about 90% complete. I should be able to finish it this time, as long as I don't succumb to feature creep.

Entering the final stretch... My wad for this month is basically finished, but I think I'm going to spend a few more days polishing it and then release it this weekend. I was able to finish 9 maps total.

I tried this last year and only got halfway finished with a few maps. This time I'm working on the same maps and trying to actually finish them. Since I've got more time I decided to add a bit of custom graphics...so of course I've spent 3 weeks doing the graphics and barely started on the level design. It's getting there, though...

Not as much any more, but I used to try to view every line so it shows up on the automap. I'm still a bit irritated when there are lines that can't be seen without noclip.

I liked it. I was expecting more libertarian politics, but it was mostly just cool stuff about VR and rockets, and geeking out about Quake. I think he's a bit too dismissive of crunch culture in game development. He seems to think that people mostly work long hours voluntarily, that implicit threats to your job are overblown, and people complaining must be disgruntled employees. Maybe he means well, but that seems very naive to the way a lot of studios operate. It's another case of the Just World fallacy. (In his defense, he also says multiple times that he's only speaking from his own experience.) I only bring that up because it's the one part where I disagreed, it's definitely worth listening to if you're a fan of Carmack or Joe Rogan.

The name comes from the THINGS lump in the WAD file. That's what most editors call them, so I don't think it's going to change any time soon. I'm fine with calling them Things, the word is used often enough in Doom editing that it's usually easy to recognize the context.

The problem with this method is that it doesn't really work for sprite scaling. The Doom engine uses nearest-neighbor scaling with no mip-mapping, which means it's always skipping over rows of pixels. Your image looks like it has an ordered dithering pattern, which means you'd see a bunch of moiré patterns (look at the brick walls on MAP12 in vanilla Doom if you want to see what I'm talking about.) It might look better with a non-repeating dither function such as Floyd-Steinberg, but it still wouldn't look perfect. Theoretically you could render a high-color image and then apply ordered dithering to the whole screen, but in that case you probably wouldn't need to dither the image in the first place. It's interesting to think what they could've done with a more expansive palette, but in that case they probably would've used flat shading instead.

I use it when I'm making out-of-bounds areas for monsters to teleport into the map. If it's something the player isn't meant to see, I will choose a crazy texture like FIREBLU or SP_FACE1.

320x200 (VGA mode 13h) was the most common 256-color video mode at the time. The explanation I heard is that it's due to the video memory size. 320x240 pixels is 76800 bytes, whereas 320x200 comes out to 64000 which fits within a 64k address space.

I only set out to make 8 or 9 maps, and I got halfway finished with 6 of them. I think it's enough for me to keep going, though. I'll probably work on it a bit more this weekend and release it when it's finished.

'90s: Random angles and clashing colors '00s: 45/90 degree angles with brown bricks and metal '10s: Thoughtfully constructed angles with artistic colors

Fun fact: Trying to solve this exact problem as a kid was how I learned about the pythagorean theorem! For 45 degree angles, a diagonal line will be √2 times the length of a horizontal line of the same width, so it is impossible to get perfect texture alignment. A 64-unit line rotated diagonally would be 45.2548 units wide. A triangle with length ratios of 3 4 and 5 can be made using whole number lengths, so you should be able to make one of those with perfect alignment.

Here's a cool thing I just made: I recently discovered the Google Cardboard API which supports virtual reality on mobile devices. I can't really afford a high-end virtual reality setup, but I saw that the cardboard headsets cost a few dollars so I decided to give it a try. It only does rotational head tracking (no positional movement), but it's a lot more accurate than I thought it would be! I've worked with wad files a little bit in the distant past, so I decided to see if I could make something that would show a .wad file at full scale and let me look around to see it from all angles in 3D. I wrote a new graphics engine from scratch rather than using any of the actual Doom code. It took a while, but I finally managed to get wad files to show up at a decent frame rate on my 3-year-old phone. Here are some screenshots showing it in action: Features: - View .WAD files in a virtual reality environment - Add additional PWADs to change graphics and add more levels - Compatible with most vanilla Doom engine WADs - In-game map accessible from bottom menu - Miniature 3D wireframe view - Enable or disable gravity and collision detection - Switch between stereoscopic 3D and full-screen 2D Download: If you have a compatible Android device, you can download it from the play store --> HERE <-- Installation Instructions: This app requires external .WAD files which are not included. If you're reading this, I'm sure you know where to get wad files. If you need something to test with you can download Freedoom from https://freedoom.github.io/download.html or use the files from a compatible game such as Doom, Doom II or Heretic. Copy the files to a folder called "wads" on your device (it should be created when you launch the app) and then load them from the VR menu. Make sure the app has storage permissions. To use the VR mode, you must have a viewing device with a trigger input. WAD Compatability: This doesn't support other WAD formats besides the vanilla Doom engine, but I've tested this with a few popular vanilla mods, and a lot of them are supported. Here are some of the ones I've tried: - Aliens TC (ATCLEV.WAD / ALITCSF.WAD) - Star Trek Doom (NCC1701.WAD) - Star Wars Doom (STARDOOM.WAD) - Duke 3D Hollywood Holocaust remake (DUKEHH30.WAD) - Chex Quest - Batman Doom (BATMAN.WAD) - Various other level replacements These mostly work, but there are some wads that currently have graphical glitches! More info below: Bugs & Device Compatability Issues: I made this in my free time and I've only been testing this on my own phone, so it probably still has a few bugs and might not work on all devices. If you run into an issue, post it here and I'll do my best to respond! Other features I might add in the future: - Player-controlled teleportation (from the auto-map or the 3D view) - Controller input - More graphics options - Better-looking menus - Sample wads included - Interactive easter eggs in the main menu - I'll probably make it open source eventually If you get it to work on your device, let me know what you think! What are some interesting WADs I should check out in VR?

I took a bit of a hiatus from working on this but I'm back with a small update. I just updated the app to version 1.1 and there are a few improvements. I'm pretty sure I figured out why it was crashing on some newer devices, so that should be fixed now. I also added a few more features in this version. There are a few more options: You can now teleport from the auto-map (now I'm surprised I went for so long without this feature) You can also choose to teleport around the map rather than moving. I added this feature to help reduce motion sickness, but it's also convenient for getting around quickly. If you tried this last time and it didn't work, give it another shot because it's probably working now. From equinox.wad From steeptown.wad

The Nintendo 64 didn't have a lot of texture memory, so they probably didn't have enough space for a composite switch texture. If you had two polygons overlapping on the same plane it would show z-fighting, so they could either split the wall into multiple sections or move the switch in front of the wall. Moving it in front of the wall uses fewer polygons, so that may have been why they did it that way.

Finally got around to finishing this, and I thought it was great! This is one of the best wads I've played in recent memory, actually. I'm a big fan of real-world environments in Doom, and I thought both the indoor and outdoor areas were really well done. It has a really nice sense of scale. I'm no gameplay expert, but it seemed well-balanced to me (I played on HMP.) I was a little low on plasma ammo, but it didn't seem unfair. I especially like how you can see into secret areas and locked areas you can't get to yet, but you can work out where to go by looking at the map. I couldn't find the exit switch in the last room of MAP06 at first. I thought I was just stuck in the room and I was disappointed that I couldn't see the intermission screen. (I was also seeing a graphics glitch where the sky texture tiled vertically, but it went away after I got the latest version of GZDoom.) Nice work. It makes me want to make my own map with these textures.

It sounds like he's going on a break for a week or so. I think I heard someone say that in the stream chat. From his twitter:

I had a cool idea for this, but it doesn't look like I'll be able to finish it in time. Oh well. I'll probably keep working on this and release it on its own later.

That's too bad. I'll see if I can figure out why that's happening. For what it's worth, I've been developing it on an HTC One M8 phone. As for the Freedoom screenshots, there's an existing Google Cardboard Doom port called DVR that did that in the app store, so I followed their example. Even for a free app, it's better to not use copyrighted material in the advertising, so that's pretty much what Freedoom is made for.

This is pretty cool! I like the automap view, but I think there should be a player sprite. I like how you implemented the cheat codes. Since it's in Unity, I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to add better lighting and textures if you wanted to. I can relate to this because somehow I am also making a Doom-style engine that can load wad files (which I'll definitely be showing off more in the near future.) I can definitely appreciate the work that went into it!

Nice video. The "Doom is 2D" myth has bothered me for a while, and I was even thinking of making my own video explanation basically like the one you did, but you beat me to it. This is worth mentioning. The texture mapping in Doom has correct perspective (aside from possible rounding errors.) It's even more accurate than the original PlayStation. If you take a screenshot from Doom and render it using 3D hardware with the same field of view, it should line up exactly with the software version. If you rendered two images with the Doom engine you could even make a true stereo 3D image and it would look convincing. You could even say that about Wolfenstein, although none of the objects in that game have a Z coordinate. A bit off-topic, but I stumbled upon this video the other day that explains what 2.5D would really be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4

It was done that way for programming optimization, but it also makes it convenient to build levels with proportions of 1/4, 1/8, etc. Not everybody does it that way, though. Just the other day I discovered CROSS.WAD, which was the first Deathmatch level ever made (by hand, without an editor!) If you look at the vertex coordinates, you'll see that they are actually aligned to a 50x50 grid.