Doom is one of the few games these days to feature the ability to generate infinite good levels for it. Thanks to random map generators like oblige, it is possible. Now oblige by itself cannot really do great levels, that is not something it can do, but thanks to some unlikely oblige fans, it has an amazing expansion pack called Obaddon, that everyone should check out…
What obaddon brings to the table is downright amazing. Before oblige could only make decent levels at best and could not put in any zdoom features. But with obaddon installed into oblige 7.70, that has all changed. Now oblige makes maps that kill most human made ones. The detail alone in obaddon made maps is through the roof. It’s so good it puts even the best John Romero maps to shame. Thanks to the tons of prefabs added into obaddon by the makers of it, you can now see tons of detail in randomly generated maps, and a lot of new features as well.
The detail is on the level of some of the better maps made for doom. Obaddon has greatly improved this. It also improved the outdoor areas a ton in randomly generated maps. In Normal oblige 7.70 outdoor areas were shitty. Not anymore. Now you get tons of outdoor prefabs not limited to machinery in tech levels, vehicles and streets themselves in urban levels, and really nice cavern sections as well.
It can generate urban levels now with real looking streets, this is a HUGE feature. They look amazing. You have full fledged outdoor areas with streets, alleyways, vehicles on the streets and more. By default these feature is turned off, but you should definitely turn it on when generating levels, it makes urban levels look amazing. The feature is called street mode.
Zdoom features are where obaddon shines though. Almost any zdoom feature you think of can be put in obaddon maps. If making a map a zdoom map, expect to see slopes in the maps and if it is a gzdoom maps, it is possible to generate maps with rooms over rooms and dynamic lights placed under ceiling lights, and they are multicolored dynamic lights as well!
Zdoom features don’t end there. Obaddon can generate maps with skyboxes in them. Skyboxes, sky features created with map architecture and a camera portal that is used to show what the sky will look like (think unreal 1 styled skies), are a feature zdoom supports. Now with it turned on you will see skies with distant buildings in them, and skyscrapers in urban maps. The skyboxes are really configurable. You can have sky fog, the sky can be night, day, etc. You can also make it so the lighting of the sky affects the lighting of outdoor areas.
One new feature obaddon has, is the ability to generate maps with custom textures. This generates HUGE wads filesize wise, but it’s worth it. You get to see tons of new textures in maps with it. A subfeature of this has to do with the caves and outdoor areas the generator makes. It allows you to make maps that have frozen or desert themed caves and outdoor sections. The skybox used changes depending on what theme it is which is nice. It also puts in custom trees for zdoom users. This feature and the custom texture one require you to be playing maps in zdoom for it to work.
Obaddon has also improved the overall look of doom maps by a ton by adding the following features into maps:
-New Hallway types, such as cave and subway halls.
-New locked door types.
-Fans in vents.
-Vending machines.
-Porches and Gazeebos – These are new architectural features added in recently that add in areas with lower floors that have little border areas surrounding them (porches), and outdoor areas with sections that have a sort of gazeebo look. (gazeebos).
Map Difficulty has been expanded a ton in obaddon. Before, the difficulty settings were limited. You could only have so many enemies in a map. There was no real way to do a slaughterfest in oblige. Even if you set it to nuts/crazy, the level would give you a max of 5 hard enemies per room, rather than 30-40, like you wanted. No more is that an issue in obaddon. Now you can create ultra hard levels, and even slaughterfests as well. I have generated a few super hard maps before with this. Even by setting enemy count to evilution and ramp up to average you can make some wads where high counts of revenants and hell knights are used in later levels. The enemy count drop down box now has nice difficulty comparisons for known hard wads such as Hell Revealed, Sunder, Combat Shock 2, etc. Making the level have as many enemies as a wad like that now is doable due to that. However, making a slaughterfest is a bit harder. You need to abuse a feature called procedural gotchas to make one. Procedural gotchas, gigantic arena maps with shit tons of enemies, are something you can set in the obaddon configuration. Setting it to always makes sure each map is a slaughterfest, especially if the procedural gotcha options are set to their worst values.
The people who made this expansion pack, are constantly working on it. Every week, a new version comes out with new prefabs in it. It’s totally worth checking out, especially if you liked oblige.
Here are screenshots of it….
