A Doom level can be represented by a two-dimensional top-down map, such as that shown on the in-game automap display. Various standalone utilities exist for drawing a map of a Doom level. However no direct utility for creating an SVG map of a Doom level existed, to my knowledge, so I wrote one.
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, the new standard from the W3C for vector graphics on the Internet. SVG ties in with other web standards, so for instance it would be possible to start with a SVG graphic of a Doom level, and create hyperlinked parts of the image to screenshots (wad2svg doesn't make use of any of this cool stuff itself, what you use the images for is down to you).
wad2svg is designed to be easily extensible to allow a wide range of different level components to be drawn, and command line parameters control which are drawn and options to use. Currently it supports:
As and when I come up with other things to draw, they may be added. Of course, if you know some perl programming, you can write more output types yourself.
Incidentally, wad2svg is written in perl, and includes a couple of handy perl modules for reading Doom WADs and levels. These are rather incomplete but may be a good basis for other perl Doom programs.
Note that wad2svg is not a Doom level map viewer. It only creates a map in SVG format, it doesn't give you a way to view SVG files. See the W3C's list of SVG viewer applications. Also, just because it generates an SVG image doesn't mean you can't convert it to a raster image afterwards, there are tools available that can do this.
wad2svg requires perl, and the SVG.pm module installed - either dump it in the directory with wad2svg, or install it on the system in the usual way. On Unix or Linux systems wad2svg should be very easy to get working once you have SVG.pm. Windows systems do not normally come with perl however, so unless you know how to get perl working on your system (or have a Unix shell you can use somewhere), you can't use wad2svg - don't email me asking for help, I have never used perl on Windows either. Use a decent operating system already.
The latest version of wad2svg is currently available from the BSP sourceforge page. This site also carries older versions, bug reports, and such. You can also register to be automatically notified of new releases.
The latest information about wad2svg is available from the wad2svg homepage (which may be where you are reading this file!). There is also a example map for those of you with SVG enabled browsers (or supporting program), and for those of you that don't, a screenshot of a map loaded into an SVG editor.
./wad2svg [ -options ] input.wad > output.svg
The following options are available:
1slines:colour=black;2slines:colour=grey. If you want the nodes
to be displayed, add ;nodeswad2svg is written by Colin Phipps - see the file AUTHORS included in the distribution for more details.
Feedback is welcome. If people write their own output types for wad2svg which could be useful for others, then contributed code is particularly appreciated.