There's a long-running joke around playing DOOM on strange devices. Fans of the iconic first-person shooter have fired it up on everything from calculators to pregnancy tests since the source code was made freely available online.
Now someone's discovered perhaps the weirdest way to play DOOM yet: in our favourite free 3D app.
Running Doom in a Blender Icon from r/blender
Alex Telford's contribution to the cult of DOOM is to run the game on an icon in Blender using the open-source DOOM Python API Doomviz. Accessing the game this way doesn't exactly look like a fun experience, but it is totally playable.
To make it work, he gave icons a custom scale (12x). Since icons don't draw immediately after they load, he says to "preflight" them by displaying the latest frames under the video as tiny icons. This gives Blender a run-up before drawing the main icon.
The main icon shows one a few frames behind, so it's already been cached. Updates are done with a modal operator on a timer at a set interval and inputs are handled as toggle properties to simulate press/release.
Can you play Doom on Blender's default cube? Of course, you can.
Comment from r/blender
See our roundup of Blender tutorials for ideas of more things to try in the open-source software.
