The Wadinator is a cross-platform command line application designed to choose a random WAD from a given path and to analyze a WAD to determine the most appropriate complevel for it. The randomization is optional, as giving the Wadinator the path to a WAD (rather than a directory) will cause it to skip the random draw and simply analyze the file.
Only the Doom WAD format is supported at this time.
The Wadinator requires a single parameter—the path to the WAD file or
directory—and supports an optional recursion (-r) parameter. If the program
is used with Heretic WADs, the -heretic parameter must be specified.
The recursion function only works if a path is passed. This causes the Wadinator to scan the path and its subdirectories rather than just the base path.
To build the Wadinator, you will need to install .NET 6 or newer on your system. This can be downloaded from here.
After downloading and installing the .NET SDK, go into a command prompt or some other sort of terminal and do the following:
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/Spectere/Wadinator - Change into the directory of the newly-cloned repo:
cd Wadinator - Run
dotnet build
This will build a binary that can be found in the Wadinator/bin/Debug/net6.0
directory, relative to where you cloned the repository.
If you plan to modify the Wadinator, it's highly recommended that you use an IDE in order to streamline the development process. A few options include:
- JetBrains Rider (commercial, Windows / macOS / Linux)
- Visual Studio (free, Windows / macOS)
- Visual Studio Code (free, Windows / macOS / Linux)
- MonoDevelop (free, Windows / macOS / Linux)
If a path is given to the Wadinator, a running list of picked WADs will be
created and saved into the wadinator_data.json file. When all of the files
in the directory have been picked, the program will throw an error.
To reset the random pool, you can modify the wadinator_data.json file and
remove all of the WADs from the SelectedWads section (that is, replace it
with an empty array).
The Wadinator analyzes the following lumps within a WAD file:
- DEHACKED
- LINEDEFS
- SECTORS
- THINGS
In addition, it also checks the map names and some map features. Note that complevel detection will not be performed for Heretic WADs.
The DeHackEd parser in the Wadinator is very primitive and currently only checks for MBF21 features (bits, groups, and code pointers, to name a few).
The Wadinator searches these lumps for types and flags specific to a given complevel. These are used to determine whether Boom, MBF, or MBF21 features are used.
Note: The checks in this section are only performed if the compatibility level is below Boom.
If Doom II map names are detected, the base complevel will be 2 (Doom v1.9).
If only Doom maps are found, the complevel will typically be 3 (Ultimate Doom v1.9). The only time this will be downgraded to 2 is if all of the following conditions are true:
- The WAD contains a lump for E1M8.
- E1M8 contains a Cyberdemon or Spider Mastermind.
- E1M8 contains a sector with tag 666.
While there's no way to be sure of the exact behavior programatically, some classic WADs (such as UAC_DEAD.WAD) rely on the legacy boss death behavior in complevel 0-2 in order to function correctly. This detection attempts to ensure that those WADs will be fully playable.
The Wadinator has the ability to pick music from a random pool. This is useful if you just can't bear to hear D_E1M1 and/or D_RUNNIN while sifting through random WADs.
To use this feature, music lumps must be imported into the Wadinator. To do so,
the -import-music parameter must be used, with the path or file name
corresponding to the music directory or file that should be imported. This
command honors the RecurseDirectories configuration option, and can also
be controlled by the -recurse and -no-recurse command line parameters.
If you wish to delete the music database, use the -clear-music parameter.
The Wadinator can also display which song was picked for each map slot. In
order for this to be accurate, track information must be populated. To do
this, create a manifest.json file in the directory that contains your
music. Here is an example of a manifest.json file:
{
"Entries": {
"MyMusic.mid": {
"Title": "My Cool Song",
"Artist": "CoolDude1986"
},
"SMB.mid": {
"Title": "Shuper Marius Bros Theme",
"Artist": "ShuperSoft",
"Sequencer": "SeqKing"
}
}
}The Title and Artist fields are fairly self-explanatory. The Sequencer
should be used in cases where a music file was converted from another source,
such as when someone makes a MIDI conversion of a song from another video
game. Any of these fields can be omitted.
The Wadinator's complevel detection behaves as expected, both against a fairly healthy test suite as well after considerable real-world testing and refinement, though there is still likely some room for improvement.
The Wadinator currently only returns complevels 2, 3, 9, 11, and 21. Most of the others are difficult to determine with any degree of certainty.
There are a number of quirks with older DOS level editors that may cause unexpected results. While some of these have been worked around, it's possible that more may crop up as the sample size increases. If you run into something like this, please open a GitHub issue and let us know! However, please note that invalid data produced by these editors (particularly garbage data in unused bits, likely due to uninitialized memory) can be impossible to distinguish from legitmate Boom/MBF tags. This sort of error is far more common on very old WAD files.
The Wadinator makes no attempt to detect Heretic (or other) WAD files. A command line parameter must be specified in order for it to handle these gracefully. Autodetection support may be provided at a future date.
Contributions of any kind are welcome! If you have any ideas on how to improve the Wadinator, please open an issue and I'll take a look. If you know your way around an IDE, pull requests are welcome.