DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter

June 11, 2023 3:28 PM

"I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut."
posted by brundlefly (9 comments total)

That is such a specific and nerdy and glorious thing. I wonder what future works either this creator or others will make based on this idea. Very cool, and thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 3:34 PM on June 11, 2023

Oh, this is really nice. Years ago I was laser cutting negative shapes into old paperbacks; now I kind of want to see if I can cut a map of E1M1 into a copy of the Doom novelization...
posted by phooky at 5:12 PM on June 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

Also in porting DOOM to X this past week: a Hyundai head unit.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 5:13 PM on June 11, 2023

They're was a good HN thread on this where some guy called out that the map was inverted from memory. Still pretty cool, though.
posted by lkc at 5:42 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I knew it didn't look right for some reason.

I've noticed this before, but it's also bonkers to me how few vertices and nodes there are in the whole map and how they seem stack/reuse them to make some of the stuff like stairs and other features, IE, you don't get that set of stairs happening without some of the other geometry happening as well.

There's so few points in the whole map that you can barely make a finger in a modern 3D game engine with how detailed mesh and voxels have become.
posted by loquacious at 9:41 PM on June 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is amusing... I'm currently working on a computational neuroscience project where we're using deep reinforcement learning to understand how ecology shapes the mammalian visual system. Long story short, to model different ecologies, I rely on vizdoom, which is a library that adapts the zdoom engine for vision science and reinforcement learning.

So I'm oddly, intimately familiar with the details of the doom engine? From a programmers perspective. I imagine I'd be able to have a lot of nice chats with this person.

Cool project.
posted by Alex404 at 11:10 PM on June 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

This work is a vital step to getting Doom to run on yet another unexpected device.
posted by FatherDagon at 6:40 AM on June 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

> This work is a vital step to getting Doom to run on yet another unexpected device.

I was expecting a different unexpected device
posted by nickzoic at 5:53 PM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, that is so cool, nickzoic! I need to go there.
posted by brundlefly at 6:17 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]