Doom, everywhere, all the time: you can play it in a PDF now – News

While we get excited like mites at the carpet show while we wait DOOM : The Dark Agescertain aesthetes perpetuate the legacy of the cult DOOM by adapting it to all possible and imaginable media.

And because life is a filth that takes great pleasure in reminding you that you could have used your free time as a teenager on things much more constructive than exchanging Pokémon cards, know that a young, passionate high school student programmer, known under the pseudonym ading2210, has achieved the feat of making the very venerable Doom playable within a PDF file. His project leverages JavaScript support in PDF files, which allows playing directly from Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera…) and supports custom WAD files. Of course, you will need to have the WAD Doom original to make this all work.

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To overcome technical limitations, ading2210 used an ingenious method: each line on the screen is represented by a single text field displaying ASCII characters. A small subtlety that allows it to generate a monochrome image in six shades of gray, and allows it to obtain sufficient resolution to make the game relatively readable and playable. That said, due to the update time required to display each frame, the game runs at a rate of approximately 12 frames per second.

On the GitHub page dedicated to the project, ading2210 gave a little more detail on the method used: “Previous interactive PDF projects I’ve seen use individual text fields that are toggled on/off to create individual pixels. However, Doom’s resolution is 320×200, which means thousands of text fields would have to be activated every frame, which is infeasible. Instead, this port uses a separate text field for each line on the screen, and then sets their contents to various ASCII characters. I managed to get 6-color monochrome output this way, which is enough to make things readable in-game.”

And since you now have your fingers in the magic of WAD, we can only highly recommend that you get your hands on MyHouse.wad, a rereading of Doom which will drive you crazy. It was nothing.

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