david_a

No, not really. UAC is only referred to as an architectural mapping style.

Quake losing the "use" button seems like a Carmack thing, although I don't remember if that's a fact. Once the other id old timers quit or were fired, I think he started carrying a lot more weight simply because he had been there from the start and he was A Name at that point. However, I think a lot of his input was around the way the player interacted with the game, not necessarily story or anything like that (he famously didn't care about story in the early days). I know he had Strong Opinions about how the player interacted with the terminals in Doom 3, and the artists had to pester him to add ragdoll physics for the enemies when they died.

Glad to hear you're doing OK Man of Doom!

You're making me feel old by not having seen the movie. When the marines first land at the colony they find it completely deserted. The first map is completely devoid of enemies which was a pretty bold move in 1994. I have no idea what the "annoying beeping thing" is supposed to be but I have a feeling you may not be loading the Dehacked patch correctly? Also make sure you are using Quasar's fixed version that works better with source ports. You can find that version here. You want to use the "Download the original" link (the website has them mislabeled). To run it you need: whatever-engine-you-are-using.exe -file alitcsf.wad alitcsnd.wad atclev.wad -deh atcud19.bex If the engine you are using isn't Boom compatible then you need to load atcud19.deh instead of atcud19.bex. For something this old I would recommend Crispy Doom which would use the .deh file.

Gradient noise (I think everyone uses Simplex nowadays; also from Ken Perlin) is good if you want to create enormous or perhaps infinite terrain. It's not so great for something like a cave in Wolf 3D / Doom / D&D where you want it to be an enclosed area. Cellular automata excels at that since you can set up the rules so that the empty area will never connect with the border. Chapter 3.4 in that book talks about CA a little, but there are lots of detailed write-ups online. Edit: One more link - if you haven't seen the Red Blob Games tutorials you're in for a treat. He has a ton of interactive explanations for various topics.

I realized I have a some images on my work machine I can show off. Attached is a generated cave. The pink dots are light sources and the yellow dots are treasure (supposed to be hidden in the shadows). I made a lighting system for ECWolf that relied on a ton of different texture definitions. It was completely fake (items/enemies/etc weren't affected by it) but still looked pretty cool. You can see that just the preview image could probably be pretty useful for D&D. I had moved on to generating caves in Doom instead of Wolf 3D since the limitations were annoying. Far, far harder. I don't have anything on hand to show off, but where I left off was adding height variations. What I tried was very unsatisfying and it didn't feel very cavey. Cellular automata for caves is pretty simple to get going with, but the hardest part will be stopping! 😊

Ah, I didn't realize it was all client-side JavaScript. I've messed around with generating levels for ECWolf since it has a text-based level format similar to UWMF that's not too bad to deal with. My generator was also at the stage of "slapping rectangles together." I found that book which has a lot of interesting ideas for more sophisticated generators, but I think one of my limiting factors is that I barely care about Wolf 3D so it's hard to get motivated. For something like D&D maps the ideas in there would be great. The stuff with "grammars" for describing the flow of a level sounds really neat. The prohibitive effort involved with making a "real" generator led me down the path of trying to use a GAN to generate levels based on user-created maps, but there's just not enough of them. I downloaded all I could find and after filtering out all the absolute garbage I only had something like 5,000. I can't remember if that was before or after I expanded the data (mirroring, rotating, etc). Oh, I remember that I did make a cave level generator using cellular automata. That's also covered by the book I believe; it's a fun rabbit hole to go down!

Do you have the source for the generator published anywhere? I'm curious about the generation; looks like you might just be generating rectangles next to other rectangles? Have you looked into using a quad tree? Chapter 3 of the free Procedural Content Generation in Games book goes into this. I think if things like height variation get added to PNG2WAD it will start to get out of hand - either the image will have to rely on a ton of subtle shade differences that humans won't perceive very well or it would need multiple images (for layers) and it starts kinda defeating the point, since it would be easier just to fire up a map editor.

Some Italian researchers already made Doom levels with a GAN about 5 years ago: https://github.com/DanieleLoiacono/DoomGAN It turns the levels into simple images, run a GAN against those, and turn the resulting images back into levels. The results are fairly... crude. Although GANs have come a long way in just five years, the number of Doom levels hasn't grown that much so the data set size would probably still be the biggest limit. I actually attempted to do the same thing with Wolf 3D around the same time frame but didn't even get this far (I was also attempting to learn all this ML stuff from scratch). Wolf 3D should be a better fit for the approach since all the maps are the same size (64x64 tiles) and the map format is far, far simpler. However, the biggest problem I ran into is that GANs produce continuous results but Wolf 3D maps are very discrete - what does it mean if a tile is 50% between "open space" and "wall?" For images this isn't a big deal (you can obviously calculate the a color between two others) but it doesn't fit very well with a level. It feels like there should be some other ML approach for discrete data that would work far better for Wolf 3D maps but I gave up working on it; it was mainly a learning exercise and I feel like I got what I wanted from the project.

It's hard. I'm only like a month ahead of you. Things are starting to settle into a new normal (it will never be the same) and I have more mental room to really start feeling the loss. I'm glad you're seeking help. Asking for help is the hardest step. It sounds like you still have a family you need to be there for. Remember that you need to take care of yourself in order to help others. That's not being selfish - if you try to do too much on top of a bad foundation you're going to burn yourself out completely, which will leave everybody worse off. Take care of yourself, and remember to be kind to yourself too. Take things one step at a time.

In the last year I've lost my aunt, my dad, and now my mom last month. I have three estates I need to deal with across two continents on top of the emotional toll. It's... a lot. I'm not trying to "misery brag" here but just pointing out that people somehow survive through these horrible situations even if it might seem impossible right now. It sounds like neither of us has a family being actively shelled in Ukraine, or is suffering through the Syrian/Turkish earthquake, or any other more mundane horrors actively happening, but those situations all have survivors too. Everybody reacts to this stuff differently. What I've found is that just telling your troubles to others is beneficial - in the beginning I had problems physically saying that my mom had pancreatic cancer, but just repeating it made it easier. If you have the means, I would highly recommend finding a therapist or counsellor. I made a promise to my mom in the hospital that I would keep going. I'm sure your mom also wanted only the best for you - she doesn't want this to ruin your life forever. It will be hard and there are times when it will all feel like too much. That's fine, you have a right to be angry, frustrated, sad, whatever. Take care of yourself, take things one step at a time, and I promise you that you will find the strength to get through this.

Very excited that this is a reality! Looking forward to the Mac version since my Windows machine is ancient. I assume there will also be an Apple Silicon native version?

This is my greyhound Katie She raced down in Florida before I got her, one of the last before Florida banned racing in 2021. There are currently only two tracks left in the US, so ex-racers are going to be super scarce going forward (if you've seen a greyhound in the US it's probably been an ex-racer; show dogs are a different bloodline and are really rare). Nice to see some other longdogs in the thread. And yes, sighthounds are incredibly lazy. Greyhounds especially are sprinters, not endurance athletes. When she runs, it's a few minutes of top-tier zooming and that's pretty much it for the day. She probably sleeps 18-20 hours a day if you let her. Greyhounds are super sweet, incredibly quiet & calm (other than zoomie time), and grow very attached to you. They're also extremely stubborn and somewhat independent, since they bred to run after game on their own.

What are you talking about, they did make a show 😛 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dv6MEstMLw Anyway, for anybody who liked the book I also highly recommend Rocket Jump. It's a book-sized article from Shack News about the development of Quake (I think they might even sell it as an ebook).

Man this makes me feel old. Once upon a time, Doomworld actually had a front page! With news! And there were other sites like this too! But yeah, in 2022 (almost) a monthly video or something would be a way better medium.