Developer renders full-color Doom frames with SQL database project
Ars Technica reports that Lukas Vogel's SQLDoom project uses a Python client and CedarDB tables to generate full-color 640x480 Doom frames, with about 1,300 lines of SQL queries handling game logic.
Behind that client, a series of CedarDB tables tracks the game geometry and state, according to Ars Technica. About 1,300 lines of SQL queries spread across 89 common table expressions implement the game logic and generate 35 bitmap framebuffers per second.
In a lengthy blog post, Vogel writes that "rendering Doom in a database is obviously a bad idea." The Ars Technica article adds that this shorthand description is not entirely accurate, given the role of the Python client.
SQLDoom is a major improvement over Vogel's previous DoomQL project, which last year set out to build "a multiplayer Doom-like shooter entirely in SQL," Ars Technica reports. That effort ended up with raycasting-based, grayscale ASCII graphics that were more akin to the simplistic 90-degree-angled maps of Wolfenstein 3D. The newer SQLDoom, by contrast, generates full-color 640x480 frames that look like they could have come from the original Doom executable.