Turn your Roomba's travels into 'Doom' maps
Of course the needed tool is called 'Doomba.'
Game developer Rich Whitehouse has found a rather unusual way to celebrate Doom's 25th anniversary: make your robot vacuum pay tribute. The industry veteran has developed a script for the game data conversion tool Noesis that translates the floor maps from Roombas to playable maps for the original Doom -- yes, of course it's called Doomba. You'll have to specifically record the robot's journeys for this to work (you can merge files if the run is interrupted), but it can otherwise whip up a hellish version of your home with minimal effort.
You can customize the experience by specifying the quantities of enemies, weapons and pickups you'll accept (within the limits of the game, of course). You can specify what kind of map textures you'd prefer. And if you're particularly adventurous, you can use this to generate maps for other games based on Doom's engine, like Heretic.
At this moment, the only major limitation is hardware support. Whitehouse can only confirm that Doomba works with the Roomba 980 so far. It should work with other floor-mapping Roombas, but he can't vouch for them. If you do have a compatible robovac, though, you're in for a treat. Many early first-person shooter fans have dreamed of making maps based on their homes, but didn't have the know-how or time to do it -- this whittles the process down to a few clicks.
