wadtoiv interactive

This page is dedicated to Martin Friedmann, the king of cool hacks, from whom the inspiration for this page came.

Last modification: 3/18/95

Wow, looks cool. What do I do?

Just click on the map (of Doom's episode 1, mission 1) below. A request will be sent to our render server, and if everything goes right, you will receive back a JPEG of the level rendered from that point of view.

How does it work?

We've got a program running on one of our SGIs that has the geometric information about E1M1 (extracted using wadtoiv, my Doom to Open Inventor converter), including textures and polygons, stored in its memory. When it receives a request from this page, it decides on a camera height and angle using the following heuristic:

Pick a position between the floor and the ceiling. If there is no floor or ceiling, pick a point between the (known) highest and lowest points in the level. The vertical camera rotation (about the x-axis) is a function of the height of the camera.
Pick a random horizontal camera rotation (about the y-axis) between 0 and 45 degrees.
Shoot 8 rays into the world, starting at this random rotation, at 45 degree intervals. These rays stop at the first point intersected.
Pick the ray with the longest length as the viewing direction of the camera. If no ray intersected the world (i.e. way off the map), use the original random rotation.

(This has the approximate effect of picking the longest viewing distance from the given point of view, and is used mainly to prevent the camera from pointing right at a wall.) Then it renders the scene and sends it to your browser. The pictures are 640 by 480, with 16 million colors. All the textures are automatically smoothed. They usually look at least slightly better than the graphics in the game. :-)

The renderer can only handle one request at a time, and will ignore other requests during processing. So far 999 requests have been made, and 999 of those requests were served successfully.

NOTE: server is down (likely permanently). Sorry.

wadtoiv interactive's visual buffer

These are the most recent pictures generated by wadtoiv interactive.

wadtoiv interactive feedback

So, what do you think? Any comments or suggestions? Want your own Doom or Doom II patchwad to show up on this page? Send me feedback, and I'll see what I can do.

Kenneth B. Russell -- kbrussel@media.mit.edu