News
Use Your Roomba to Create a ‘DOOM’ Map!
Yep, December’s not out quite yet, and another weird DOOM-related software has shown up to blow your mind. Well, that is if you have a Roomba. You know, those robot vacuums that people buy to freak out the dog? Well, coder Rich Whitehouse has another use for that contraption: Making your own DOOM maps.
Enter DOOMBA, a script for Whitehouse’s Noesis software, which is used for “previewing and converting between hundreds of model, image, and animation formats”. The script tracks and stores your Roomba’s movement data via the robot’s Clean Map reporting system, which can be imported into Noesis and then finally be converted into a DOOM map.
Currently, the script has only been tested with the Roomba 980. Plus, you’ll have to do the work of installing the software, the script itself, as well as figure out your Roomba’s IP. But once that’s done, you simply grab the Roomba’s movement data, throw it into the Noesis application, and you have a DOOM map of your living room/bedroom/kitchen.
Well, part of it. You’ll have to fiddle around with values, and according to Whitehouse, he hasn’t tested it extensively, and that could result in the map attempting to do things that DOOM can’t handle. Still, it’s a neat little something you can try over the holidays if you’re up to the challenge.
Or, you could always wait for John Romero to finish up and release SIGIL, but that’s entirely up to you.
All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
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