Show HN: I Turned DOOM into a Transformer

(github.com)

122 points | by falperc 23 hours ago

19 comments

  • frankling_ 11 hours ago
    I wonder what the implementation actually adds over the idea itself. At least part of the appeal of these kinds of projects used to be "wow, someone was actually crazy/eccentric/obsessive enough to go through the effort to do this".

    If the idea is clearly feasible, and it's just a question of putting in the work, then what is the point of having an LLM actually do it?

    I feel it ends up being no better than a post saying "imagine if...", to the mild amusement of the reader, so essentially it ends up as an instance of "just show me the prompt".

    • falperc 2 hours ago
      I think that this is a fair point, for the general plethora of hobby projects present as well! However, I'd like to think I put a lot of effort into this, and this also isn't my first DOOM oriented project. Ever since I've been aware of the trend of running DOOM on unconvential things (around 10-12 years ago, when I first started coding) I've engaged in tens of these projects throughout my development journey. I've ran DOOM on toothbrushes, old chips, broken down TV's etc. not that any of this is especially impressive for the context of the challenge. I've also been an avid contributor of some OS repositories revolving around this, e.g. ViZDoom

      Regarding this project, throughout the 3 weeks I've been working on it, the entirety of the design has been mine, the initial backbone coding was mine, essentially everything that wasn't a doc was mine. After I started scaling up, I naturally dispatched a lot of this work to LLMs, and I see no issue in this. I am not unemployed, I do not have the absurd free time in my hands to handwrite docs or code (for the scaling-up) for a hobby project. If you and any other people believe that they could create something more impressive, please, by all means. If you have more time in your hands, and handwrite everything about your hobby projects, I think thats incredible! But I will not accept the meaningless burden of limiting myself and my projects just to prove that I'm "crazy" and wrote the code myself.

  • andai 21 hours ago
    Awesome

    >a handwritten digit takes 163 seconds of real-time DOOM in one map at the default schedule and 8 seconds at --opt 3.

    What does this refer to? What does schedule mean here, and what are these opt levels?

    Edit: oh sweet Jesus

    https://github.com/mottopanikeiku/doomformer/blob/main/docs/...

    • fwip 20 hours ago
      Oh, it's AI word-vomit.
      • autoexec 17 hours ago
        Does that mean the title should have been "AI Turned DOOM into a Transformer"?
        • falperc 16 hours ago
          It helped me write my docs!
          • Sharlin 12 hours ago
            There’s no use in writing docs at all if they contain near-zero density of information that can actually be deciphered. LLM word salad is not documentation, it’s only useful if all you care about is checking the box "[ ] write documentation".
      • MarsZebra 17 hours ago
        I pity the AI agent that had to work on this
      • falperc 19 hours ago
        theres no pleasing you people do you expect me to write all my docs and disclaimers by hand
        • jacquesm 16 hours ago
          You won't like the answer to that question ;)
        • nnnnico 8 hours ago
          The code is human written?
        • fwip 19 hours ago
          It just means there's no sense trying to read the docs.
          • falperc 16 hours ago
            That’s entirely fair. I’ll certainly work on editing the docs and making them more legible over time.
        • tnms 16 hours ago
          Yes. Don't be lazy.
  • mg794613 14 hours ago
    Was there even a human involved at all, or was this a "no mistakes" prompt outcome?

    Nothing on this page looks made by a human, its _all_ generated, not a tiny bit of it, _all_ of it.

    Guess having the word "doom" and "transformer"in your publication is enough today.

    • jordigh 9 hours ago
      God, I can't even with the two-eyed cacodemons, what sort of abomination is this.
      • krapp 9 hours ago
        This is the future, and Hacker News tells me it's beautiful.
  • bjconlan 18 hours ago
    Came for the "doomformer" based snow lyric puns... Left with a feeling my people are on slashdot.
  • slowin 22 hours ago
    This is absolutely incredible. I feel like this could help visualize a neural network, but you have to know a lot about DOOM to really understand it.
    • falperc 22 hours ago
      you have to know a lot about lots and lots of DOOMs, in parallel
  • whycombilater 12 hours ago
    Just how clever can an infinite recursion of someone disappearing up their own backside be?
  • stmonty 22 hours ago
    Self-plug I have a very similar blog post title but a very different approach. Honestly, I like your idea more than my own idea. https://nostalgia.dev/posts/running-doom-inside-a-transforme...
    • falperc 22 hours ago
      what if you run doom on doomformer?

      I havent fully recursed but what I have done with this is use a DOOMformer to generate a level, have python compile it, have DOOMformer generate the name of the level, and use a DOOMformer brain to complete said level. I have also trained said DOOMformer (you can see the levels "weights" updating as it trains) to aim better lol

  • mattmcal 19 hours ago
    I think it might be more interesting to target Boom/Boom-compatible, if possible, rather than ZDoom. ZDoom already has so many advanced features, you could implement the entire thing trivially in ACS. At least a table of required engine features would be nice to see; some are likely already supported in other source ports.
    • falperc 16 hours ago
      the backbone implementation using ZDoom certainly wasnt difficult, but some aspects of scaling up were tricky. I definitely want to make it at least Boom compatible eventually
  • nnevatie 13 hours ago
    > I turned ...

    You mean Claude turned?

    • nullify88 10 hours ago
      If Claude wrote the readme, technically its correct.
  • kuberwastaken 14 hours ago
    As a fellow doom-weird-places-fitter, this is art. Congratulations :)
  • nico 15 hours ago
    This is so trippy, very cool, love it

    I made a classifier play doom[0]. But you turned the whole network into Doom! Amazing

    0: https://playground.jeffyclassify.com/#doom

  • ReptileMan 14 hours ago
    Next step - take the cpu implemented in transformers implement it here and make it play doom. The compute needed still won't be able run Crysis well though.
    • falperc 14 hours ago
      oh my god i thought the crysis thing was a Turkish joke i didnt know it was international
  • tnms 16 hours ago
    More AI slop. No thank you.
  • kenferry 22 hours ago
    amazing
  • kamisori-daijin 20 hours ago
    Wow!
  • saucesaft 23 hours ago
    now everything can run on DOOM ?
    • falperc 22 hours ago
      you can theoretically build fable on doom
  • pawnandqueen 15 hours ago
    [flagged]