Oh, I hope you don't take this as me being upset. I'm super happy and totally get the motivation. I a fan of the adage "better to do something half assed than no assed" (not that this is half-assed). Just wanted to make the comment to help drive motivation and let you know there's a demand. Releasing the sources could really help too just so people don't have to work with the mesh.
But on the rat part, that is super interesting! I was suspecting they might not like Doom because shooting a gun might be such a foreign concept to them that it breaks immersion. But it seems like you say they like running around in the simulated environment? (Time for Cheeze-Doom? lol)
Again, super cool and thank for releasing things! This is that crazy stuff I just love to see people exploring.
Thank you! <3 On shooting: exactly that, it is so foreign to them, I doubt they could grasp the concept, but they can understand the loop of: pull lever -> audiovisual feedback of shooting with monster disappearing -> reward. Biting or scratching a surface as a form of attack may work better, but the audiovisual + reward response should help them to understand at what visual signals to pull the lever to make it go boom.
They missed a real opportunity for "Omelette Doom Fromage" there
But yeah, I'd wager too subtle. I'm also questioning now how much rats use smell for navigating their environments. I notice that my cat is a lot more smell oriented than I initially thought and I think it makes a big difference. Hard to tell though.
Humans are /extremely/ visual compared to other animals: this tends to make us underestimate the intelligence of other animals (when we use visual intelligence as a proxy for general intelligence) and miss out on smart uses of other senses entirely.
Rats are well-known for thwarting maze studies using things like fine sensitivity to slope, directional orientation using smell gradients across a room, or detecting the direction of researchers outside the maze based on micro-vibrations.
(Good book on the general topic of measuring animal intelligence: "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal)
But on the rat part, that is super interesting! I was suspecting they might not like Doom because shooting a gun might be such a foreign concept to them that it breaks immersion. But it seems like you say they like running around in the simulated environment? (Time for Cheeze-Doom? lol)
Again, super cool and thank for releasing things! This is that crazy stuff I just love to see people exploring.