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.”<p>I share it in this early stage because I suspect many in this audience may enjoy just reading about it, and many others might be excited by it and want to contribute to the effort, and also because I welcome feedback here and contributions by way of GitHub issues and PRs.
+1 to what vijayr02 said: you really need at least screenshots, and ideally just post the .z5 file with a link to iplayif so people can play it directly and see what you're talking about. Like this:<p><pre><code> https://iplayif.com/?story=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Quuxplusone/Advent/gh-pages/advent.z8
</code></pre>
I tried and failed to create the .z5 locally myself. It'd be easy if your script generated Inform code, but you generate ZIL, and the only tool I was able to find to compile ZIL is ZILF/ZAPF, which needs Windows. Here's how to create the "output.zil" file using your script...<p><pre><code> git clone https://github.com/scottvr/wadzilla
cd wadzilla
curl -O "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dabignerd/doom-wads/master/zips/Doom%20(v1.9).zip"
unzip "Doom%20(v1.9).zip"
pip install bs4
python wadzilla.py --basewad DOOM.WAD
</code></pre>
But then you need a ZIL compiler to proceed any farther. You can get a compiled ZILF.EXE (for Windows) here:<p><pre><code> curl -O "https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/compilers/zilf/zilf-0.8.zip"
</code></pre>
Or the C# source code and MSVC project files here (seems to use hg, not git, for version control):<p><pre><code> https://foss.heptapod.net/zilf/zilf
</code></pre>
But since I'm on Apple Silicon, both of those avenues seem to be dead ends. I verified that ZILF.EXE "cannot be run in DOS mode" as far as DosBox is concerned. There's a thing called WineskinServer that's allegedly supposed to let you run Windows code on Macs, but it didn't help me; I think it's trying to tell me that it needs some proprietary bits (the Windows-system-library equivalent of a disk image or a ROM) in order to do anything useful with an EXE file.
No screenshots? ;p<p>Also - IMNSHO the obvious name for this project is Zoom - but that's been taken by a similar game where you slay your coworkers by talking too much.<p>The next obvious candidate therefore is Dork :)
There was an old joke floating around the internet about text-adventure Doom. It went something like:<p><pre><code> There is a demon here.
> shoot demon
The demon is dead.
There is another demon here.
</code></pre>
When jokes like that turn into serious projects... that's pure hack value.
Have you considered an Inform 7 version at some point? (<a href="https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/" rel="nofollow">https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/</a>)
This seems interesting to me in the context of ML research <i>(not that I know anything about that)</i>. We have generative AI and this is sort-of the reverse doing compression like turning an interactive movie into an interactive book. I know it's reading the code of the graphics, but that could serve as labelled data for training image to text generation. Image to text isn't new, but if the sequences of images to text could tell a coherent story that could be interesting. Perhaps we need many people playing Doom with running commentary on the evolving story for data.<p>Or we could do the same for an adventure game which has more story than Doom.
Ha this is amazing! Seeing BeautifulSoup in the list of dependencies confused me for a second. Had to look through the code to see that had code to scrape the type information directly from the wiki!
@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!<p><a href="https://github.com/scottvr/wadzilla/commit/b92f90070726088ba3f8c0998b68005afff0bae5">https://github.com/scottvr/wadzilla/commit/b92f90070726088ba...</a>
Is this entirely text based? This may sound like a stupid question, but there were later Zork games had supported rudimentary graphics. There need to be some screenshots to show what it actually looks like.
Relevant xkcd (and personal favorite of mine) since no one else posted it yet: <a href="https://xkcd.com/91/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/91/</a> :)
Yeah, and I know that it would be far easier and probably immensely more playable and practical to just craft a good prompt for an LLM, presto! Play Doom in Zork with ChatGPT. The ludicrous technical implementation is actually the point though in this case.