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Current status and FAQ
Ok so the “F” in FAQ is at this point an exaggeration, since only four people aside from myself even know of Wadzilla’s existence, (thanks HN folks for the love, comments, and GH Issues (and stars!) There have been many thousand unique visitors in less than 24 hours from there) but these are actual questions asked via SMS when just a handful of people other than myself knew of wadzilla's birth, and they caused me to realize that the answers will be important to anyone who may find this project and, like 3/4 of the people who presently know of Wadzilla, are excited by the prospect and immediately want to play.
***thanks to a helpful HN user I learned that "outputs ZIL" has been a lie for a while now, possibly the entire time it has been on GitHub. D'oh! That's embarassing. But anyway, quoting from my comment in the HN thread:
@quuxplusone and all I fixed my dunderheaded debug output commit that meant the "outputs ZIL" was a lie. This temporarily puts us back to a state where the Things have no locations in the ZIL, but I am working on that. I just wanted to show that it is back on track. Thanks Q+1! https://github.com/scottvr/wadzilla/commit/b92f90070726088ba...
Wadzilla is currently a PoC. Although in theory it “works”, it does not create an entertaining experience as a game, although to me it is quite fun just too see it output ZIL for all of the rooms in a DOOM WAD, with all of the objects in all of their correct locations by their plain English names, along with the 8-character names for the textures of the walls, floors, and ceilings in their relative positions in the room. Part of that enjoyment of course comes from knowing what it entails just to get that far, so the amount of entertainment you derive from that may be far less. In fact, I suspect that for most people at this point the most amusing thing about Wadzilla will be the very concept of its existence - and of course the name, which I will take credit for while also acknowledging how fortuitous it is that the project practically named itself. “What should I name a tool that converts WAD to ZIL? Oh yeah, right. Of course. Wadzilla.”
There is a wadzilla wiki here where I explain the motivation for n more detail and give some history of Zork and DOOM; their histories and legacies also account for some impetus for the project.
I’ve copy-pasted (with a couple of minor edits) questions and comments from a few different conversations here (in an order to appear as a single coherent conversation). Hopefully presenting these will prevent Wadzilla from inducing despair among eager users by avoiding setting expectations too high.
Heh no. There’s still work to be done. Right now it’s more of a proof of concept and would not be very entertaining. I can read the text that would be displayed if you were to be in a certain room, and I can verify that the coordinates work and that the objects found inside of the room level appear in the correct rooms, but doing anything with them or earning points etc wouldn’t work.
It’s kind of in “funny Easter egg you can embed inside of a playable Zork or Zork-like game” state right now.
That’s exactly the functionality it has now. You can generate a stand-alone ZIL file, or give my tool an existing ZIL file and tell it to throw a Doom teleporter disk on the floor, where you would then enter the Martian hell of doom’s E1M1 map’s first room.
If you look at this piece of code, here’s what it adds to a room in Zork. (“A mysterious atmosphere fills the room. A glowing green disc appears on the floor.") The rest of Zork stays the same. Then you would “stand green disk” or “use teleporter” and the game would say something like “you are standing in a room with green walls and a blue floor” (or whatever that first room looks like) “around you are shotgun shells and a medpak” (or whatever) and then you would be exploring the Doom world inside of the Zork game.
def adjust_coordinates(self, existing_zil_map):
# Calculate offset to align room 0's starting location with existing ZIL map
# and adjust coordinates of all rooms accordingly
portal_room_id = len(existing_zil_map)
portal_coordinates = (x, y)
existing_zil_map[portal_room_id] = f"ROOM {portal_room_id}: A mysterious atmosphere fills the room. " \
f"A glowing green disc appears on the floor."
self.rooms[0].add_portal(portal_coordinates)Right now, because it works without changing anything in the Doom world and because I thought it is funny, you would be sorta trapped in doom hell until you complete the level, when you would then end up back in the Zork room where you teleported. I could easily have it add a teleporter in the first room of Doom so you could go back and forth, but like I said, for leaving the doom map unchanged and the humor of having to explore to the end of the map to exit, I haven’t done this.
I suppose once I make the conversion include attacks from the monsters and such, you could just allow yourself to die in any fashion, but as it is now you would sorta just be exploring the doom level “looking” at stuff.
Cyanide tablet might be a good way to get there too. Or perhaps as a punishment for trying to save and exit, you are branded a quitter and sent to Martian Hell
Well, I am adding the ability to specify which room in the Zork map to add the portal to doom, so I could also make it easy for the user of my tool to specify the entrance and exit requirements, with the current “teleporter disk appears” text just as the default.
As it is now, it just appends the doom map via a teleporter disk onto the last room in the Zork map.
With a small amount of work on my part. The code is there and whatever doom wad file you give it, all the maps and objects are loaded but first because I just didn’t think of the fact I would need to append each additional map/level to the exit of the previous one, and then not doing that work because the shareware doom only comes with the first level, I haven’t done that yet. But all the heavy lifting code is there where it’s only a small amount of work to enable the other maps.
It should also work fine with doom 2, heretic, hexen, and all patch wad mods that work with any doom engine games
“Dude I’m intrigued - [my brother] and I grew up as hardcore infocom nerds! (Played almost every title from their golden era - right up through Spellbreaker I think. A few after.)”
Right. Your questions and comments are good ones and cause me to realize I should probably use the answers to put up a sort of faq about the current state of it on the project page since if people start finding it before it is feature complete, these are exactly the sorts of things they’ll want to know.
When it is at a state where it might actually be more than a PoC, I’ll also make it more plug and play to be able to actually play. Right now there is still a high level of fairly involved stuff the user would have to do to even have a playable Zork, just due to the nature of running actual original Zork on a modern computer.
I did write up an article on wadzilla’s wiki that explains the motivation, history of doom and Zork, and technical challenges and stuff, if you’re interested in that.
“It’s so funny as a concept tho - seems sure to get some attention if you put it out there. There’s that sweet spot of Gen Xers who rode that Infocom wave right thru to the Ultimas and to doom and quake. Easy to see them finding the very notion hilarious.”
I certainly found the very notion hilarious, prompting me to stay up all night making it. :-)
[heart emoji] Thank you!
…because of course you should be able to play Doom in Zork.