Example map with tuneables on the right

Example map with tuneables on the right

WadC — the procedural programming environment for generating Doom maps — version 3.1 has been released. The majority of this was done a long time ago, but I've dragged my feet in releasing it. I've said this before, but this is intended to be the last release I do of WadC.

The headline feature for this release is the introduction of a tuning concept I had for the UI. It occurred to me that a beginner to WadC might want to load up an example program which is potentially very complex and hard to unpick to figure out how it works. If the author could mark certain variables as "tuneable", the UI could provide an easy way for someone to tweak parameters and then see what happened.

I had in mind the walls of patch panels and knobs you see with analog synthesizers: tweak this thing over here and see what happens over there.

I think this kind of feature would be useful in other, similar programming environments, like OpenSCAD: I don't think they do yet, but I could be wrong.

Kayvan and Me, riding horse statues, somewhere in Germany, in the 1990s

This release of WadC is dedicated to the memory of Kayvan Walker (1983-2022). Kayvan was a childhood friend who committed suicide in March this year. Back in the nineties, Kayvan was responsible for introducing me to Doom in the first place: I used to visit his house on the way home to mine, as it was on the walk back from School. His mum works in IT and always encouraged us into it. Doom was so far ahead, in technical terms, of any other computer game I'd ever seen, and was the closest thing we had to virtual reality: we could create our own worlds. It's in no small part thanks to Kayvan — and his Mum — that I'm still creating worlds, nearly thirty years later. I owe my career and most of my hobbies to those pivotal moments. Thank you both.

Kayvan did a lot more for me than just introduce me to Doom, or computing. He was one of a set of friends that I had every confidence that, no matter what, we would always be friends, through thick and thin. I miss him terribly.

Please, if you reading this, are suffering, talk to someone. In the UK you can talk to Samaritans on 116 123.