DOOM Launched on an Orbiting Satellite
The franchise has quite literally reached cosmic heights.
Programmer Ólafur Waage successfully ran the shooter DOOM beyond Earth by leveraging an orbiting satellite.
This time the gaming platform was OPS-SAT — a “flying laboratory” operated by the European Space Agency.
The satellite had no dedicated graphics hardware (no GPU or monitor), so all visuals were produced programmatically.
DOOM was executed in demo mode: the shooter wasn’t under player control and output data was sent back to Earth. The programmer explained:
“The idea was to run as many demos as possible, comparing outputs from space with those from the ground. We generated a huge table of random numbers (a PRNG) and tested whether particular events could influence gameplay. In simulation — yes; in space, unfortunately, no. But that was the real purpose of the project: experiments sometimes fail, and that’s exactly why OPS-SAT exists.”
The in-game sky texture was replaced with imagery captured by the satellite’s camera.
Source: iXBT.games
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