Slaughtermap with a Billion or Trillion Monsters possible?

I think I may have created a similar thread like this in the past but I wonder if a Slaughter Map with a billion and even a trillion monsters is even possible to do?

Doom format maps have a limit of 65,535 (or 32,767 in vanilla) lines, sides, vertices and sectors, and I can't imagine this not applying to things too - not to mention the somewhat more arcane restrictions on blockmap size which preclude making a map in which a billion demons actually fit.

The UDMF map format doesn't run into this problem (though it may have some higher limits I'm unaware of), but I also doubt that sourceports that run UDMF maps could actually handle it, given how ZDoom and its derivatives limp at best even with NUTS.WAD's 10k.

you could make a custom enemy with a radius of 1; 2 map units in diameter or an area of 4 map units squared. The max possible map size for a doom map is 65535 squared or 4.294... billion map units squared (although it's not possible to have a map that big, it would have to be at least slightly smaller). If you divide that number by 4 which is how big our custom enemy is then you get 1.073 billion enemies that you could potentially fit into a map. It probably wouldn't be a very good map since you've used most of the space just to fit all those enemies in, who would probably just infight each other to death. Maybe you could make them not infight, but then the player has to kill a billion enemies singlehandedly and it would run so bad i'm not sure if the current most powerful supercomputers could do it, but in theory a billion enemies seems to be possible. I don't know much about vanilla/boom limits though (most limit removing ports like boom and zdoom aren't actually limit removing, they simply increase the limit so high that nobody is going to realisticlly hit it), you might need a specialized source port for this. A million enemies would be a more realistic choice.

With udmf you can also place enemies stacked on top of each other so now you have 65535^3 map units to work with which is 281.462... trillion map units. You could definitely fit at least couple trillion enemies in this case, but zdoom runs really bad at high actor counts so idk about that one...

It's possible...if you don't mind killing your own computer in the process. But hey, it's more of an excuse to look at bigger numbers!

I only play maps with 1 million monsters minimum.

And with brutal doom only.

Maybe playable if god mode (no worrying about placing health things) and using the infinite BFG weapon pickup from other slaughterfest wads (no worrying about ammo things) and not worrying about placing any other things in the map besides monsters (plus the one infinite BFG) plus being fairly basic with linedef usage (no detail in other words). And even then, I would think that DSDA-Doom would still tank somewhat. Apart from it being entirely experimental as well as a standalone wad this hypothetical situation wouldn't be feasible.

6 hours ago, Jannak said:

I think I may have created a similar thread like this in the past

Well, after digging through three threads talking about fighting God/Yaweh as a boss, two threads about jokewads, a thread talking about techbase maps being boring, a thread about DOOM 2 being just an expansion pack, a thread about an Egyptian man naming his daughter Facebook, a thread asking if Doomworld has ever had a spambot attack, and... oh, wait, here it is - the most epic Doomworld screenshot of all time:

2 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

oh, wait, here it is - the most epic Doomworld screenshot of all time:

Oh wow, now that's 7 years of wondering if that many monsters were possible, except that he must've found out that octillion monsters were possible in Doom since he didn't include that in the thread title this time.

I think all the other monsters must've been sent to post hell instead. Where they remain trapped to this day. So sad..

Maybe that Egyptian man can help him summon them all back with the help of his daughter Facebook.

Well...that's certainly one of the reasons I've created this thread because I can't bump up the old one because Doomworld doesn't like that apparently.

I've also just remembered that vanilla Doom has a limit on the size of the WAD you're loading in (which BTSX ran in to), and each thing is 10 bytes in Doom format (and a lot more in UDMF, approx. 160 bytes each, although it varies based on the thing's args because it's written in plaintext). Even without that limit, a map with 1 billion monsters would take up 9.31GB of space in Doom format or 149GB in UDMF. For 1 trillion, you're looking at 9.09TB and 145.5TB, respectively.

For reference, Doom Eternal with all DLC is 88.69 GB, equivalent to a 9.52 billion monster (Doom format) or 595 million monster (UDMF) WAD, and the largest commercial SSD I could find on Google is 100TB so you wouldn't even be able to store your 1 trillion monster UDMF WAD on your device.

And this isn't even taking into account the fact that a significant portion, if not all, of this is in memory during runtime, which sets the bar even lower.

On 2/9/2024 at 8:47 AM, Novaseer said:

Doom format maps have a limit of 65,535 (or 32,767 in vanilla) lines, sides, vertices and sectors, and I can't imagine this not applying to things too - not to mention the somewhat more arcane restrictions on blockmap size which preclude making a map in which a billion demons actually fit.

 

The UDMF map format doesn't run into this problem (though it may have some higher limits I'm unaware of), but I also doubt that sourceports that run UDMF maps could actually handle it, given how ZDoom and its derivatives limp at best even with NUTS.WAD's 10k.

Cosmogenesis MAP05 has 74k monsters in it, and Experiencing Nirvana MAP17 has over 150k zombiemen, so it must be possible one way or another. (Interestingly, I tried dumping map stats for Cosmogenesis using DMMPST a while back and found that it produced inaccurate counts because the thing count overflowed.)

UDMF in theory isn't subject to hardcoded limits but you'll run into practical limits (i.e. whether any computer can actually run the map) before getting anywhere close to billions of monsters. People already have performance issues on the two maps I mentioned above, and a billion monsters would be ten thousand times that.

Assuming each monster took one byte of memory and took one CPU cycle to process, for a billion monsters you'd need 1GB of RAM and a 35GHz CPU to iterate through them all 35 times per second. For a trillion monsters you'd need a terabyte of RAM and a 35THz (terahertz) CPU. Of course, this is a highly simplified model; in reality, each monster is going to need much more than one byte of memory for their position, state, target, and so on, so that 1GB is more like dozens or hundreds of gigabytes, and running an actor's logic is going to take much more than one CPU cycle too.

All that is to say that to have any hope of getting anywhere near a billion, or even a million, monsters, you'd have to fundamentally redesign how the engine works. It'd probably involve selectively loading and de-loading areas as they are used, like how modern games handle their large open worlds. May as well make a Hexen hub. :P

You could probably use scripts in ZDoom to spawn monsters over a period of time, and despawn them when they die or at certain points, to get around engine limits.

But:

If you could kill on average 1000 monsters a second, which would require some kind of absurd nuke-everything-you-see custom weapon but is maybe not impossible, killing one billion monsters would take about 11.5 days of nonstop play.

Most people don't really have a good concept of how big a billion actually is.

To add a bit of flavor to the above: the DSDA Twitch stream has been running continuously for the past four years, and is just about to reach 100 million demons killed.

7 hours ago, Shepardus said:

To add a bit of flavor to the above: the DSDA Twitch stream has been running continuously for the past four years, and is just about to reach 100 million demons killed.

I always found the demon counter there a bit silly really since every time there is a demo of the same wad (and there's been many replays 'till now), the demons in the map essentially reset, so those aren't "new demons" being killed but the same demons killed over and over again every time. Those 100 Million demons that it claims as of now aren't 100 million "unique" demons killed.

So that makes the demon counter a bit less authentic ;) 

When you reset a map it's actually completely different demons (the previous ones are lost forever)

23 hours ago, plums said:

 Most people don't really have a good concept of how big a billion actually is.

A million seconds are roughly 11 days, a billion seconds on the other hand are about 32 years. That should put the numbers in perspective somewhat. A billion is huge.

1 hour ago, ObserverOfTime said:

 

A million seconds are roughly 11 days, a billion seconds on the other hand are about 32 years. That should put the numbers in perspective somewhat. A billion is huge.

Another expression I like: What's the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion.

Anyhow @Jannak I just made this, have fun champ!

Technically speaking the answer is yes. Would it be recommended? Not at all

The primary limiting factor is the Vanilla Doom engine and source code itself, or in some cases limited by what the source port is capable of doing. If you play most of the other modern mega slaughter maps with thousands of monsters or more, you'll notice that in most cases fights generally don't have more than 1,000 monsters active at a time. That's because vanilla and most source ports will slow to an absolute crawl if too many things are active on screen at one time (monsters, projectiles, etc). -SOMETHING-  has to use all the computing and processing power to keep track of everything that's going on. Even when all enemies are inactive or dead, too many of those on screen at once will cause a lot of chugging.

If you want to see what I mean by that, nuts.wad is a good example of why you can't "just cram 5k+ monsters in a huge room" and expect most source ports to even be able to handle it. Having a mod that can remove dead demons from the map after X amount of time can help manage the load as suggested above. Also, huge fights get very old very fast, even when you know how to design slaughter-style fights that are actually good and fun to play and not "Just get out your Rocket Launcher/BFG9000 and hold down the fire button nonstop for an hour while circlestrafing to win".

On 2/12/2024 at 12:36 AM, ObserverOfTime said:

 

A million seconds are roughly 11 days, a billion seconds on the other hand are about 32 years. That should put the numbers in perspective somewhat. A billion is huge.

ObserverOfTime living up to that name

I once made a map (term used loosely) that was just a really enormous arena with like 250,000 SS men crammed into one end of it. It ran like complete shit, as doesn’t really need to be said—can only conclude it’d run at 4x the shit with a full million.

As the above demonstrates about orders of magnitude, a billion is a lot more than a million. A thousand times more.  E1M1’s monster count multiplied by 1000 is equal to almost 3 Nuts.wads. Each extra zero goes a long way, and the human brain usually sucks at visualizing exponents and the curve they take (see that old story about the rice on the chess board) 

Here's a thought experiment, what if someone made a map that has the Earth's entire current population of 8.1 Billion monsters?