Can AI Generated Doom Maps be possible?

[Johnny Cruelty]

as I've been in the 2020s, I noticed a trend recently: Artificial Intelligence.

Nowadays AI has been taking a surge in everything!, ai art, ai images, ai characters, ai voices, ai automatrons! 

which makes me wonder... could AI make a doom map the same reasoning it could make a image?

LIke.. closest thing we COULD have is Oblige generated maps, but then again, most of the resources in Oblige is premade, I am talking about a AI that could make maps from sratch, head to toe...

what is your thoughts? I wanna hear your opinion fellas...

[FecalMystAche]

Possible I’m sure, but it would basically be just like Oblige. It would be obvious it’s AI just like AI art and prompts are quite obvious. Personally I’d rather play something made by a person with a vision than generated diarrhea. 

[indigotyrian]

Unsure how good they'd be. Generative models like Midjourney and ChatGPT are trained on billions of images and hundreds of gigabytes of text. idgames in comparison "only" has a few dozen thousand maps. A generative model that spits out Doom maps would be interesting but I don't think its raw output would be particularly playable; it'd be best used by a mapper using the tool to automate the annoying work while focusing on game balance or fine details.

[Kinsie]

It's not impossible - someone (Andrew?) was fiddling around a while back with exporting Doom maps into color-coded PNGs and re-importing them into Doom maps with the goal of seeing what AI image generators could be bent into doing with it. Could be a fun curiosity in the vein of OBLIGE, which is to say, good for generating random maps to play DoomRLA ironman on and probably not much else. Certainly nothing for humans to quiver in fear at, at any rate.

[ShallowB]

I can't wait for every Doom-related space to be overrun with a deluge of AI generated garbage!

[baja blast rd.]

The real fun would not be maps that are designed in their entirety, but designing a highly particular element as a base for further design, or as a particular constituent in an existing map  -- sort of like what scripts (WadC, UDBScript, DBX with Lua) can do but imagine something way better at that.

 

Some people are already doing some really cool things with scripts in that vein -- like flooding a layout with artful midtex decorative spirals, which is a striking effect; or sexy tiling patterns to use as a 'grid' to map with -- so AI might make that a lot more powerful. 

 

Even creating nonsense would be great because you could just take the 1 or 100 that make sense and do human work over that. 

Rather than viewing it as doing what humans can do but better, the effect would be to (and has been to, with the scripting I'm referring to) create new styles of design that would be otherwise pretty impractical to try as a human.

[Turbulent]

1 hour ago, indigotyrian said:

Unsure how good they'd be. Generative models like Midjourney and ChatGPT are trained on billions of images and hundreds of gigabytes of text. idgames in comparison "only" has a few dozen thousand maps. A generative model that spits out Doom maps would be interesting but I don't think its raw output would be particularly playable; it'd be best used by a mapper using the tool to automate the annoying work while focusing on game balance or fine details.

Maybe incorporating something like midjourney into random textures. Could be a niche surreal thing. 

[PeterMoro]

LOL We've had SLIGE since 2001. Oblige makes some pretty decent AI generated wads. Perfect for testing new mods.

A lot of Oblige and Slige is pre-made but I think (as a regular player) Oblige really makes unique maps everytime. I think it's very AI generated. I can't imagine any AI being better than Oblige.

Edited June 29, 2023 by PeterMoro

[Johnny Cruelty]

20 minutes ago, PeterMoro said:

LOL We've had SLIGE since 2001. Oblige makes some pretty decent AI generated wads. Perfect for testing new mods.

A lot of Oblige and Slige is pre-made but I think (as a regular player) Oblige really makes unique maps everytime. I think it's very AI generated. I can't imagine any AI being better than Oblige.

eh I meant like everything ai generated

sure oblige's maps are automatically generated, but most of everything is already premade

I am talking about EVERYTHING ai generated, every linedef and sector!

but yeah slige and oblige are like the closest thing, but yet, I am sorta excited to see what a ai map machine would be like

would it be facinsating? yeah

would the maps be playable? probably not but hey it is ai afterall!

[PeterMoro]

42 minutes ago, Johnny Cruelty said:

eh I meant like everything ai generated

Right, well I think that won't be possible for a very long time. Making Doom is complicated. AI can't really make software but it could design a map. Probably will be a long time until it could build maps. Making fun and playable maps would ultimately resemble Oblige, I suppose.

[Individualised]

1 hour ago, PeterMoro said:

LOL We've had SLIGE since 2001. Oblige makes some pretty decent AI generated wads. Perfect for testing new mods.

A lot of Oblige and Slige is pre-made but I think (as a regular player) Oblige really makes unique maps everytime. I think it's very AI generated. I can't imagine any AI being better than Oblige.

In this context "AI-generated" is referring to machine learning/neural network stuff, not just procedural generation.

[SuyaSSS]

2 hours ago, Turbulent said:

 Maybe incorporating something like midjourney into random textures. Could be a niche surreal thing. 

That has been done by Dannarchy:

 

[Redneckerz]

6 hours ago, Kinsie said:

It's not impossible - someone (Andrew?) was fiddling around a while back with exporting Doom maps into color-coded PNGs and re-importing them into Doom maps with the goal of seeing what AI image generators could be bent into doing with it. Could be a fun curiosity in the vein of OBLIGE, which is to say, good for generating random maps to play DoomRLA ironman on and probably not much else. Certainly nothing for humans to quiver in fear at, at any rate.

There is this: PNG2WAD + Latest release.
 

Plums earlier made a full release of it which now also supported doors and things.

 

And yes - Andrew was also working on something. 

Edited June 29, 2023 by Redneckerz
Wrong link

[LouigiVerona]

It's interesting how folks equate "AI generated" with "garbage". But this doesn't need to be so at all.

 

In fact, for the past 3-4 years now I've been mostly playing Oblige maps and some of the best Doom I've played was generated by Oblige. I believe that many people try the default settings and maybe have preconceived notions that it's "garbage" and look at it as something not so serious.

 

But if you actually play with the settings and get what you like and then take the time to generate some maps, learn how Oblige works and keep the best maps - you can get yourself a pretty awesome collection.

I have fav/good/avg folders. Of course, some maps I delete completely. But in some cases I might do minor editions - change weapon placements and ammo, in some cases remove or add monsters/bonuses, sometimes even change an occasional wall.

While Oblige is based on pre-build structures, the way it weaves them together is the real magic. This has completely transformed Doom playing for me. I enjoy human-made levels, definitely. But Oblige is a great example that shows that AI-generated levels are very possible and can be extremely high quality.

Additionally, people talk about intentionality. Sure, intentionality is great. But the lack of intentionality is pretty awesome too. Look at it this way - a real military base won't have this intentionality. And there is something awesome in playing a map that was not conceived by an author but just exists. It is your goal to make it your own.

But again, for those of you who have never tried Oblige - it's not garbage. In fact, you'll be surprised at how great it could be. Some of my most fav Doom maps of all time are all Oblige maps.

For settings I strongly recommend reducing map size (go for Tiny) and also choose "Few Levels" and ramp up monster difficulty and weapons as high as possible. This will give you 4 maps to check out. The ramping up is important, because without it first maps might be boring or empty. Typically, with max ramp up available in the settings, I skip level 1 and start playing the generated wad from level 2 and upwards to 4.

 

Generating a whole episode is OK, but in my experience it's worse and typically becomes interesting, again, only in the second half. But you never know. Sometimes you get just a total gem.

[Dragonfly]

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

There is this: PNG2WAD

 

Damn, I was curious... But that just links to this thread 😅

Edited June 29, 2023 by Dragonfly

[andrewj]

I'm convinced that "AI" will be able to make levels for Doom, sooner or later.  Doom is probably trickier than Quake (or later games) since it is not truly 3D, making good-looking Doom maps is a real art-form in itself.

 

Currently we have very good (I often think amazing) text-to-image models.

 

I think in a year or two we will have good text-to-video models.  These are naturally much harder than single images, but the raw data exists (the whole of YouTube) and I think the process of creating videos will be similar to how the images are generated. This will be very interesting to follow.

 

There is some work out there on text-to-3D stuff, including things like generating models of a city.  Search around for NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) and you'll find a lot of interesting things happening in that space.  I suspect it is of similar difficulty as creating videos (that extra dimension compared to 2D images), but the creation of 3D levels for games may only be a year or two away.

 

P.S. any mention of Oblige needs to mention a continuation of it called Obsidian, developed mainly by @dasho

Edited June 29, 2023 by andrewj
another typo

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, Dragonfly said:

 

Damn, I was curious... But that just links to this thread 😅

I guess that got mixed up with the Plums link - Which was the correct thread. Is fixed now :)

 

Latest release is here. 

Edited June 29, 2023 by Redneckerz

[QuaketallicA]

That literally already exists. A.I.-generated mapsets have been around forever. They're...decent, but not really very good. Kind of like a.i. at writing essays or giving accurate information or just about anything. It can do it surprisingly decently but not well enough that you'd want to replace a real professional.

[Individualised]

41 minutes ago, QuaketallicA said:

That literally already exists. A.I.-generated mapsets have been around forever. They're...decent, but not really very good. Kind of like a.i. at writing essays or giving accurate information or just about anything. It can do it surprisingly decently but not well enough that you'd want to replace a real professional.

AI in this context isn't referring to just any form of procedural generation though.

[FecalMystAche]

It’s still the same general idea though: Creating something without having to do the work yourself.

As long as it stays that way and doesn’t go into creating something without having to do the work yourself and taking the credit, I don’t think it is a big deal, but I am personally not interested in playing AI generated maps for the same reasons I don’t care to play procedurally generated ones. To each their own. 

[Rudolph]

8 hours ago, ShallowB said:

I can't wait for every Doom-related space to be overrun with a deluge of AI generated garbage!

Eh. Doom is no stranger to shovelwares. It being hand-made rather than algorithmically-generated made little difference.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Rudolph

[EPICALLL]

In order for that to work, it would require different styles of map to be sorted, which in and of itself varies by author. You can only really do it well with authors like Ribbiks or Sandy Petersen who have very distinct qualities to their maps.

[LouigiVerona]

2 hours ago, Individualised said:

AI in this context isn't referring to just any form of procedural generation though.

 

I think that this difference is going to become irrelevant as soon as you begin to carefully define it. Current AI could be thought off as working off of pre-built templates as well and using a "procedure" to generate the end result.

 

If we think of a similar Doom AI, it would end up coming up with "templates" anyway, even if that's not how the tech would be approaching it.

 

I don't disagree that allowing the AI to come up with those would be cool and different to Oblige, but I think that eventually it might arrive at similar results.

[Johnny Cruelty]

8 hours ago, LouigiVerona said:

It's interesting how folks equate "AI generated" with "garbage". But this doesn't need to be so at all.

 

In fact, for the past 3-4 years now I've been mostly playing Oblige maps and some of the best Doom I've played was generated by Oblige. I believe that many people try the default settings and maybe have preconceived notions that it's "garbage" and look at it as something not so serious.

 

But if you actually play with the settings and get what you like and then take the time to generate some maps, learn how Oblige works and keep the best maps - you can get yourself a pretty awesome collection.

I have fav/good/avg folders. Of course, some maps I delete completely. But in some cases I might do minor editions - change weapon placements and ammo, in some cases remove or add monsters/bonuses, sometimes even change an occasional wall.

While Oblige is based on pre-build structures, the way it weaves them together is the real magic. This has completely transformed Doom playing for me. I enjoy human-made levels, definitely. But Oblige is a great example that shows that AI-generated levels are very possible and can be extremely high quality.

Additionally, people talk about intentionality. Sure, intentionality is great. But the lack of intentionality is pretty awesome too. Look at it this way - a real military base won't have this intentionality. And there is something awesome in playing a map that was not conceived by an author but just exists. It is your goal to make it your own.

But again, for those of you who have never tried Oblige - it's not garbage. In fact, you'll be surprised at how great it could be. Some of my most fav Doom maps of all time are all Oblige maps.

For settings I strongly recommend reducing map size (go for Tiny) and also choose "Few Levels" and ramp up monster difficulty and weapons as high as possible. This will give you 4 maps to check out. The ramping up is important, because without it first maps might be boring or empty. Typically, with max ramp up available in the settings, I skip level 1 and start playing the generated wad from level 2 and upwards to 4.

 

Generating a whole episode is OK, but in my experience it's worse and typically becomes interesting, again, only in the second half. But you never know. Sometimes you get just a total gem.

hmmm you got a megawad or a wad with prtailored maps you love? can I try them?

[david_a]

Some Italian researchers already made Doom levels with a GAN about 5 years ago: https://github.com/DanieleLoiacono/DoomGAN

 

It turns the levels into simple images, run a GAN against those, and turn the resulting images back into levels.

 

The results are fairly... crude. Although GANs have come a long way in just five years, the number of Doom levels hasn't grown that much so the data set size would probably still be the biggest limit.

 

I actually attempted to do the same thing with Wolf 3D around the same time frame but didn't even get this far (I was also attempting to learn all this ML stuff from scratch). Wolf 3D should be a better fit for the approach since all the maps are the same size (64x64 tiles) and the map format is far, far simpler. However, the biggest problem I ran into is that GANs produce continuous results but Wolf 3D maps are very discrete - what does it mean if a tile is 50% between "open space" and "wall?" For images this isn't a big deal (you can obviously calculate the a color between two others) but it doesn't fit very well with a level.

 

It feels like there should be some other ML approach for discrete data that would work far better for Wolf 3D maps but I gave up working on it; it was mainly a learning exercise and I feel like I got what I wanted from the project.

[Johnny Cruelty]

1 hour ago, david_a said:

Some Italian researchers already made Doom levels with a GAN about 5 years ago: https://github.com/DanieleLoiacono/DoomGAN

 

It turns the levels into simple images, run a GAN against those, and turn the resulting images back into levels.

 

The results are fairly... crude. Although GANs have come a long way in just five years, the number of Doom levels hasn't grown that much so the data set size would probably still be the biggest limit.

 

I actually attempted to do the same thing with Wolf 3D around the same time frame but didn't even get this far (I was also attempting to learn all this ML stuff from scratch). Wolf 3D should be a better fit for the approach since all the maps are the same size (64x64 tiles) and the map format is far, far simpler. However, the biggest problem I ran into is that GANs produce continuous results but Wolf 3D maps are very discrete - what does it mean if a tile is 50% between "open space" and "wall?" For images this isn't a big deal (you can obviously calculate the a color between two others) but it doesn't fit very well with a level.

 

It feels like there should be some other ML approach for discrete data that would work far better for Wolf 3D maps but I gave up working on it; it was mainly a learning exercise and I feel like I got what I wanted from the project.

wow! that is cool... primitive but a little bit coherant

[LouigiVerona]

3 hours ago, Johnny Cruelty said:

hmmm you got a megawad or a wad with prtailored maps you love? can I try them?

 

Sure.

 

Just keep in mind that the kind of Doom I like might be different to yours. For instance, Oblige has this awesome option called "Procedural Gotcha", which is basically an arena level with increased monster difficulty and bosses (sometimes several). This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I love these kinds of levels and when they turn out right, it's this awesome exercise in cleaning out the bee hive which I really enjoy.

 

Either way, I'll upload something and share with you.

[Johnny Cruelty]

2 minutes ago, LouigiVerona said:

 

Sure.

 

Just keep in mind that the kind of Doom I like might be different to yours. For instance, Oblige has this awesome option called "Procedural Gotcha", which is basically an arena level with increased monster difficulty and bosses (sometimes several). This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I love these kinds of levels and when they turn out right, it's this awesome exercise in cleaning out the bee hive which I really enjoy.

 

Either way, I'll upload something and share with you.

groovy!

[LouigiVerona]

31 minutes ago, Johnny Cruelty said:

groovy!

 

https://we.tl/t-WMFQ0ebWS7

 

I added two wads. Don't mind the names, Oblige generates its own and for some time I would name the wads I like in a way that helps me remember. Later I instead created a gallery of screenshots - if I like a wad and I put it into one of the folders for later, I also take screenshots and save it to the same folder with the name of the generated level. That way if I want to browse the screenshots or I want to find a level - it's easy to do.

 

The two levels should be played at normal difficulty (because that's the way they were balanced; recently I am playing everything at ultra violence, but then this affects how I generate levels and which settings I apply; both of these were generated at the time I played everything at normal).

 

The first file is called will_is_leaving_04_10e_11.wad - The numbers indicate which levels I like. The "e" indicates that the level was edited by me. The underscores mean that the levels can be played separately, with pistol start. I suggest you try out level 11 only, pistol start, normal difficulty. It's one of my favorite procedural gotcha levels. An awesome beehive to clean out.

The second file is called political_caverns.wad - This is a 4-level wad. When there are no numbers means that you can start from level 1 and play all 4 as a set. You'll see the difficulty ramp up. Typically 1st level is not as good, but starting from the 2nd I found myself really enjoying it. Also, atmosphere of the levels means a lot to me.

 

Again, this is not necessarily a representation of Oblige. It's what I configured Oblige to do for me. There are many-many very specific options. For example, I like having a lot of windows and fighting with monsters through the windows. I like crowded areas, semi-slaughter type, so I fill rooms with higher enemy count and variability. But you don't have to make these same choices when using the tool.

 

Anyway, I do hope you like it. These are just two levels. My fav folder contains 34 separate wads. My good folder contains 70 wads. So, my collection is pretty large and pretty varied too. Was difficult to pick just several :)

[Johnny Cruelty]

6 minutes ago, LouigiVerona said:

 

https://we.tl/t-WMFQ0ebWS7

 

I added two wads. Don't mind the names, Oblige generates its own and for some time I would name the wads I like in a way that helps me remember. Later I instead created a gallery of screenshots - if I like a wad and I put it into one of the folders for later, I also take screenshots and save it to the same folder with the name of the generated level. That way if I want to browse the screenshots or I want to find a level - it's easy to do.

 

The two levels should be played at normal difficulty (because that's the way they were balanced; recently I am playing everything at ultra violence, but then this affects how I generate levels and which settings I apply; both of these were generated at the time I played everything at normal).

 

The first file is called will_is_leaving_04_10e_11.wad - The numbers indicate which levels I like. The "e" indicates that the level was edited by me. The underscores mean that the levels can be played separately, with pistol start. I suggest you try out level 11 only, pistol start, normal difficulty. It's one of my favorite procedural gotcha levels. An awesome beehive to clean out.

The second file is called political_caverns.wad - This is a 4-level wad. When there are no numbers means that you can start from level 1 and play all 4 as a set. You'll see the difficulty ramp up. Typically 1st level is not as good, but starting from the 2nd I found myself really enjoying it. Also, atmosphere of the levels means a lot to me.

 

Again, this is not necessarily a representation of Oblige. It's what I configured Oblige to do for me. There are many-many very specific options. For example, I like having a lot of windows and fighting with monsters through the windows. I like crowded areas, semi-slaughter type, so I fill rooms with higher enemy count and variability. But you don't have to make these same choices when using the tool.

 

Anyway, I do hope you like it. These are just two levels. My fav folder contains 34 separate wads. My good folder contains 70 wads. So, my collection is pretty large and pretty varied too. Was difficult to pick just several :)

hmmm lemme giv iy a shot!