idchoppers

idchoppers is a Rust library and command-line tool for parsing and manipulating WAD files and other data associated with classic Doom and Doom-era games.

The idea is to get all this stuff done once and for all in a safe, fast language that everything else can bind to. (Don't @ me with that xkcd strip.) I intend to provide C, C++, and Python bindings eventually.

It is extremely unfinished and a work in progress, unless I get bored with it, in which case it's not. I never finish anything. Sorry. (It does help if people show continued active interest, ahem.)

Roadmap?

No promises. I'm just throwing stuff at the wall here.

The basics

I have a dream that someday SLADE will become a GUI that merely wraps idchoppers, if that gives you a general idea. (I don't actually have buy-in from SLADE's author, but we can cross that bridge later.)

So, that would require:

• Read and write various kinds of archives (WAD, PK3, directories...)
• Read, write, and convert between various image formats, sound formats, etc.
• Load, render, modify (!), and save maps

The intermediates

• Understand all of ZDoom's extra lumps, plus DEHACKED
• Detect which game (Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, etc.) a PWAD is intended for
• Detect which port (Boom, Boom plus MBF sky transfers, ZDoom, GZDoom, Eternity, lord knows what else) a PWAD is intended for
• Heuristically determine whether jumping/ducking are intended
• Distinguish simple map sets from megawads from TCs
• Extract map names, including using "OCR" on title lumps
• Convert between map formats, including porting all of ZDoom's UDMF features to line specials, or "downgrading" a ZDoom map to Boom or vanilla when possible (and explaining why when not)
• Guess at the overall aesthetic of a map by measuring the most-used textures by surface area
• Detect, fix, and avoid a wide variety of mistakes and errors (unreachable secrets, duplicate secrets, missing keys, slime trails, bogus BLOCKMAP, visplane overflows, placement of the MAP02 sargeant, monster-filled hallways straddling a blockmap edge... and that's just vanilla!)

The advanceds

I sort of doubt many of these will happen without some serious third-party interest/assistance, but they're interesting ideas.

• "Compress" resources like cc4tex.wad by using ZDoom features to express translations, rotations, flips, etc.
• A good enough software renderer to generate the opening scene of a map
• Estimate the difficulty of maps, based on monster count vs reachable area vs available resources
• Try to find the intended route through maps
• Decompile ACS to trace how scripts affect map geometry and progression
• Generate a par time automatically
• Find "interesting" vantage points for the sake of wadinfo_txt
• Be useful enough to base something like Oblige on