Notes

This Article is Literally About Doom

We've covered a variety of Doom ports here, from Minecraft to McDonald's cash registers, but this could be the most bizarre. Someone has managed to get the FPS game running in gif format and you can watch it in action down below.



The way it works is simple The way it works is simple - on this page, you'll see a constantly evolving image of Doom, with a set of controls that you can click on below. Much like the Twitch plays a series of crowd-controlled play-throughs, each input that's clicked by anyone with the webpage open goes into a queue, and the server then runs through them in order, sending back the latest images. This can make the gif itself a bit unstable, due to the continuous loading, and sheer pressure on the server by people who want to view the gif.



Software developer Andrew Sillers is the man behind the magic. benga wan He spoke about the actual process that takes place at BangBangCon. When websites load an image, it's doing it through a piece of code that's requesting the image. With gifs, because they begin loading before each frame is received, you can create a cycle where new frames are constantly added, making them into an animated flow rather than a looping animation. With this basic concept, and some commands, you can play a videogame, like a narrative adventure game, or a roguelike game or Doom.



Here's the Doom GIF, driving away - the Ao3 link above will give you access to all the controls and you may have to refresh in order for it to load properly:



This build is Freedoom, a free alternative made from Doom's source code. You can learn more about it here.



Sillers" talk is here:



There are more details, as well as the WAD files for this version of Doom on GitHub. Where will Doom be next? drone controllers, digital cameras and gifs


Homepage: https://bengawan.org/