What's up with Obsidian Level Generator?

[Trigsy]

I'm wondering what insight Doomworld offers into the Obsidian tool. My understanding is that it's not exactly popular, so I haven't bothered using it, but I'm still curious to know more about how it's regarded. Even if procedural generation pales in comparison to levels directly designed by humans, the concepts behind it are pretty cool, and I think I'd be interested in trying to help refine it in the future if I have the skills. (Big if right now, but we're all still learning.) Here's what I already know.

• it procedurally generates custom levels for classic Doom/II, as well as Hexen, Strife, and some other games, and it's not the only procedural map generator for Doom, but it's the newest one
• there's been a problem with people submitting Oblige outputs as their own original work, which I imagine to be a continuing problem with Obsidian, but I'm still pretty limited in knowledge of the mapping community, and I'm not sure how easily-distinguishable Obsidian levels are... or, necessarily, what the hell I'm talking about

 

What do you think about Obsidian, the level generator? Should I try it out?

[kalensar]

You know how AI has issues making images and sometimes nails it good in 5% of the time? Its like that. 

 

Its cool for generating random stuff for personal play but its not very good for sharing 95% of the time just due to how wonky the generation can be. 

[Monocled]

I like it for use with rogue-like style mods, like DRLA. Its really cool if you're looking for randomness, But in terms of actually good level design its not even close to what an actual mapper can make

Its also has a bunch of cool features like adding a randomized boss every couple levels, And the levels are very customizable

Edited May 5, 2024 by Monocled

[Baron T. Mueriach]

I just downloaded it and start messing around. I have never used it before, and so far I'm confused as hell. It's super laggy and it uses strange liquid textures, plus random custom textures that aren't in the original Doom. It also only exports levels as a .pk3 for the ZDoom family engines. Very strange, I'd like to know how to use this tool properly though

[Shepardus]

There's nothing inherently wrong with it, as long as you're not trying to pass off the generated levels as your own creations. I already have far more WADs to play than I will realistically ever get to, so I've never felt a need to generate even more levels.

[VICE]

I got it to generate some decent levels a few times.

There's a slider in there somewhere that makes it keep a consistent design theme and if you crank it up to 50-60 (higher than that and it starts crashing during levelgen) and allow liberal use of prefabs.

With those settings it will generate level sets that sort-of look like they belong in the same WAD and were made with a particular theme in mind. Otherwise quite often it can end up with a clustefukked mess that only an AI can achieve.

 

I regard it as a good piece of software that can make some levels for you to play if you're bored or want a set of maps with particular features, but honestly, there are so many good megawads out there at this point that you're just better off playing those.

 

If you want to contribute to it I think making more prefabs is probably a good start, that's where the program shines.

[Wahrnehmungskrieg]

53 minutes ago, Trigsy said:

• [...] I'm not sure how easily-distinguishable Obsidian levels are [...]

You'll still be able to tell. Keep generating levels and you'll notice it.

[Devalaous]

I do love whipping Obsidian into making levels for me. You'd think he'd charge money, but no!

[dasho]

I think some problems are more or less intractable, such as a finite set of handmade prefabs being able to only make so many permutations before 'sameness' sets in. I also think it has a lot of problems with cohesiveness in the transition between room/area themes within a single level. I wish level themes were more like "biomes" in a sense that they would have a very tightly controlled set of walls and flats and a very specific set of prefabs for that theme that aren't used in other themes. 

 

Another thing that I would think would be neat is to lower the bar to entry for being able to make custom shape grammars. The grammar system is very powerful, and with a lot of massaging can make levels with very specific layouts, but it is not really an intuitive thing to write and takes quite a bit of trial and error to get right.

 

Sometimes I wonder if moving to whole-room fabs might help (similar to how Warframe or other games shuffle tiles for their levels), but that would again require a lot of handmade prefabs to even have a chance at giving enough variety.

 

Trying to think of other ideas, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to try to bake in some light gameplay modifications to give the whole thing more of a roguelike feel (randomized monster/weapons stats via Dehacked or port-appropriate measures).

Edited May 5, 2024 by dasho

[dasho]

41 minutes ago, Baron T. Mueriach said:

I just downloaded it and start messing around. I have never used it before, and so far I'm confused as hell. It's super laggy and it uses strange liquid textures, plus random custom textures that aren't in the original Doom. It also only exports levels as a .pk3 for the ZDoom family engines. Very strange, I'd like to know how to use this tool properly though

 

If you are using the stable version of Obsidian, there should have been a first-run tutorial to show you the basics of using the program. This can be accessed again by the Help->Tutorial option, although for the next version I have removed it because nobody bothered viewing it.

 

Additionally, PK3 output is optional for ports that support it (ZDoom has it on by default but can be disabled by unchecking "PK3 Output"). Ports that do not support archives will only output WADs. The custom textures you are mentioning can be removed by disabling the "Obsidian Epic Resource Pack" module.

[Craneo]

In my completely unbiased opinion as a contributor AND an addon maker for Obsidian


It's just for when u wanna shoot stuff pew pew without thinking about overly-complex level design (plus goes very well with random weapons/enemies mods)

[andrewj]

1 hour ago, dasho said:

Sometimes I wonder if moving to whole-room fabs might help (similar to how Warframe or other games shuffle tiles for their levels), but that would again require a lot of handmade prefabs to even have a chance at giving enough variety.

It's something I tried (in V5) and it is just doesn't work, you hit that "sameness" quality much much quicker than in V7 (or even V3/V6).

 

Producing levels better than Obsidian is going to require maching learning I think.  Though it is hard to imagine how it might work, e.g. I doubt a 3D version of Stable Diffusion would "know" enough to produce fully working levels.  Be a lot of fun to try it -- just need a few billion dollars....

[Obsidian]

3 hours ago, Devalaous said:

I do love whipping Obsidian into making levels for me. You'd think he'd charge money, but no!

 

JUST KEEP WHIPPING, DAMMIT

[BeachThunder]

It's pretty fun to mess around with. I had a great time using it with this:

But, yeah, if you play enough levels, you really start to see how samey they are. You are going to see sooooo many tiny alcoves with a few steps leading up to a single item.

[Trigsy]

11 hours ago, dasho said:

If you are using the stable version of Obsidian, there should have been a first-run tutorial to show you the basics of using the program. This can be accessed again by the Help->Tutorial option, although for the next version I have removed it because nobody bothered viewing it.

Oh! I didn't realize who you were. Thanks for your work on Obsidian, it's a very impressive tool.

 

I think you're onto something with larger prefabs, but I'll try to elaborate when I've spent more time poking around in Obsidian. The tutorial did show up for me on first launch, and I found it helpful.

[roadworx]

18 hours ago, Trigsy said:

there's been a problem with people submitting Oblige outputs as their own original work, which I imagine to be a continuing problem with Obsidian, but I'm still pretty limited in knowledge of the mapping community, and I'm not sure how easily-distinguishable Obsidian levels are... or, necessarily, what the hell I'm talking about

afaik this isn't actually much of an issue anymore. in the past three years i think i can only remember maybe one person who used it to make their wad, and even then they didn't realize that they had done anything wrong until called out for it. maybe it's still an issue on moddb, but doomworld and /idgames doesn't have issues with it these days

[Doom-X-Machina]

16 hours ago, Obsidian said:

 

JUST KEEP WHIPPING, DAMMIT

WHIP IT GOOD!!
 

 

[Xim]

I'm a fan of Obsidian/Oblidge it's great for personal use, and just playing around and 'ignoring rules' like jumping around to get secrets or skip areas and not feel like 'you're cheating'. The obsidian levels look pretty cool too, great for TC gameplay mods.

 

But I do agree with most of the criticisms, the levels don't turn out that great gameplay wise most of the time. I remember in the early days most levels were completely unplayable do to difficult monsters in early areas or bad geometry.

 

I don't think people releasing them as original levels is good thing to do, but fortunately I haven't seen that very often. If they are released the author is usually upfront about it and they're mostly used as placeholders. But yeah it's kinda boring playing someone else's generated levels I'll admit.

Edited May 7, 2024 by Xim