Chief among them: "How?" and "Why?"
“My favorite kind of magic trick”
When it comes to the "How?" DoomPad coder Sam Chiet told Ars that the hack is "my favorite kind of magic trick," the kind that "seems wild, but it's super simple."
Building off a C# port of the open-sourced Doom source code (and later shifted to Chocolate Doom for public release), Chiet's program first converts every successive frame from the game into ASCII text. That's done using a simple algorithm that figures out the "brightness" of each pixel (by averaging out the RGB color channel data), then converting that to a similarly dark ASCII character using a pre-set lookup table (ranging from "$" and "@" for the darkest pixels to "\" and "." for the lightest).
i got DOOM running inside Notepad at 60fps pic.twitter.com/EQFuRu4N0r
— Samperson (Crime Arc) (@SamNChiet) October 9, 2022
"[The] conversion is super simple and probably 'incorrect,' but it works, and that's what matters," Chiet said. "Magic tricks [like this] are always equal parts disappointing and cool!"
Because "the Notepad font is twice as tall as it is wide," DoomPad initially throws out every other row of generated text to keep the resulting ASCII in the correct proportions. From there, Windows makes it relatively easy to insert that 360×240 array of text into Notepad at whatever font size your window and monitor can handle, Chiet said.
"I'm stealing a reference to the internal textbox and just sticking my memory into it via an operating system 'message' and forcing it to re-draw," he said. As for reading player input, that's "just something you can steal from anywhere in Windows; you don't need your specific program 'open.'"
As it turns out, the Windows Notepad isn't really well-suited to act as a stable, consistent view window for a fast-paced game like Doom. Chiet's 60 fps demo has a lot of noticeable flickering, especially near the bottom of the text box.
"Notepad does not have an offscreen 'buffer' to render on, so everything it draws, you're seeing it draw in real time," Chiet explained. "So it's stuck rendering [about] 86,000 characters per update, and I'm also not timing it to the screen's vsync." Chiet said someone suggested alternating between two Notepad windows every frame as a form of ersatz double buffering, and he thinks that should work.
If that limitation is solved, though, Chiet said that "the sky is the limit for realtime Notepad gameplay." Since "anything else you want to do in a game engine is already possible" with the same basic method, Chiet said he's working on releasing a generic framework for Notepad games in the near future.
Beyond that, Chiet said he's "more excited [about] the things I'm doing to MS Paint," which he's not ready to share with the world just yet. But "if DoomPad was a simple magic trick, what I'm doing to MS Paint is a whole David Blaine episode," he teased.
The DoomPad philosophy
On the one hand, Chiet seemed pretty blasé when asked about why he undertook such a strange coding project, calling it a "total whim." At a base level, the project was just an extension of an ongoing interest "in the realm of hijacking software. But not in a malware way, in a... funny way," Chiet said. DoomPad was just a "two-hour 'wouldn't this be funny' [thing] I kludged together" using underlying code he "stole from some of my other (not yet publicly shown) projects," he said.
On the other hand, Chiet also got a bit philosophical when discussing the wider meaning of his project.
For the 21-year-old hacker, the widespread "Will it run Doom?" question hits differently than it does for those of older generations. "I think there's two parts to the Doom meme," Chiet said. "One is nostalgia. The other is the satisfaction in seeing walls you took for granted be taken down. To me, I didn't grow up with Doom. But the generation I'm a part of has such a giant well of creative rage that memes like this have endured..."
Growing up with "hand-me-downs of hand-me-down computers," Chiet said he got a crash course in the transition from late '90s monolith workstations to present-day magic-black-slate smartphones. That transition has meant that many in his generation view technology not just as a tool but more as "a space you work, a space you socialize, etc." he said.
Chiet comes off as more than a little jaded about that change. "We're not growing up with a space we fully control," he said. "We're growing up with software subscriptions and licensed services. Everything is up for rent, including our attention. The home button on our first 'Windows' experience is showing us ads."
For tech users in his age group, "their creative tools aren't Kid Pix; they're TikTok," Chiet said. "And trying to point this out is like explaining to a fish what water is."
Running Doom in a Notepad window provides a bit of philosophical pushback against that tendency, Chiet said. "It's stupid, and it's shitposty, and I totally own that I probably sound pretentious here, but it fires those neurons that are like, 'Oh, we can do that.' It's a reminder that these spaces are malleable, and that's a really powerful idea to people whose first computer was an iPhone."
"It's also extremely funny," he added. "That's a big part of it, too."
https://ift.tt/WgtMeh7
Technology
No comments:
Post a Comment