Wad and Patches - Need help

[jake250]

If there is one thing I never understood about Doom, its how to edit it with XWE, and add simple things like textures. I understand scripting and decorate better than I will ever understand how these things are supposed to be placed so they work fine. Frustration made me post here so I can get care of this problem.

I only and simply want to use Plutonia and TNT's patches into my wads, so that I can use them in Doom Builder and later, people can play them even if they don't have plutonia or TNT.

Anyway, I can easily add the original wads and the textures will show up on doombuilder. I tried making a wad out of plutonia, remove all unnecessary stuff, but at this very point Doom Builder will not see the textures (patches) anymore, even less if I add the TNT textures.


So the big question. What must a wad contain so that Doom or Doom Builder can actually see the textures, and how can I merge plut and tnt's texture to work with another wad? Other than the Patches themselves, P_START, P_END and PNAMES, I found nothing related to that and its a big mystery to me.

[deathbecomesme]

I never use XWE,Wintex is easier to understand in my opinion.

[CrazedImp]

XWE is a buggy mess, and Wintex doesn't even work for most people using any kind of modern computer. SLumpED is probably one of the best lump editors out now.

http://slumped.mancubus.net/

As to editing textures and things, look it up on the Doom Wiki, or look at other WAD's that have custom textures and have a mess around with some trial and error. Best way to learn something if you ask me. I usually just use one of the many custom texture packs out there though, more than enough variety there.

[MR_ROCKET]

First lets understand how textures are made for Doom originally.
When you make a texture for Doom, you really want to base your pwad on how the iwad is contructed..be it a flat or a wall texture, the sizes are 64x64 for a flat, and 64x128 for a wall, and wider, a wall texture can be 64x128, 128x128, and 256x128 and also needs to have the specific Doom color palette and saved as bmp format.
Now Xwe can do the color palette change, but it's still safe to use a Doom.pal. ~ created with a paint program that outputs your doom color palette and format ./color scheme to use.

The sizes for the textures, for the most part, need to be those sizes, and only that tall. ~ we aren’t talking about what a sourceport can do here.
We'r talking about what the original engine code would be more likely to do using its Iwad as a reference..

So as a basic rule we need to remember what the engine can do, and how the Doom wad is packaged as an original reference.

That said and that in mind,
Let’s create that specific texture specifically for Doom.
Let’s make it 64x128 and load the Doom color palette, save it as bmp.
I'm gonna call my texture MYTEXR1.bmp
For Doom, the texture lump name can’t be more than 8 characters long and must be in CAPS.

Now to make our pwad.
Open Xwe, goto the File>New.
Click on the Patches button.
This is where we load our wall texture.
Goto Entry>Load
Select the texture you just made. ~ you will see it showup as the first new texture in the list also as Patch as the Type.
Now click on the All button.
Notice that just by loading your single texture into the new wad Xwe automatically created reference spots for the engine to know what that texture is all about.
PP_START is before your texture and PP_END is after ~ that's the container markers for the texture.
In short TEXTURE1 holds the Patch NAME(s) and dimensions.
PNAMES ~ PATCHNAMES holds the name and its reference number.

Now that’s done, in Xwe goto File>Cleanup>Exit.
Whats really important to us is the Name of the texture. For the texture in your map to work, there needs to be a linedef with the name applied to it.
So we make a map with a small room, make the floor height 0, the ceiling 128 high.
Add 2 vertices to one of the walls, make them 64 units apart. Select the line between the 2 vertices and add the texture MYTEXR1.

Run the map, and have a look at MYTEXR1..:P

That’s the basics, if you want to change a texture this is basically the same thing.
If you change the texture name from MYTEXR1 to something like TP7_2 ~ PIPE4 from Doom2. PIPE4 is also TEXTURE1 name and patchname TP7_1 and 2 in Doom2 so we'l need to name it TP7_1 and 2, it will replace that same texture in Doom2 but from your pwad. the pwad will get loaded last which will also reload the texture name PIPE4 ~ patchname TP7_1 and 2. ~ that carries your different texture image.
It's better to make a habit to load them this way in Xwe, because if you only go about changing the texture name, you will also have to change it in the TEXTURE1 and Pnames list. So it's best to just do things from scratch that way and load it up new.
Flats are similar to wall textures, other than the dimensions of course and they are to be loaded in Floors in Xwe. Why wasn't it called Flats instead of Floors in Xwe I donno.
I guess maybe if a different game resource file gets loaded in Xwe there might be a ceiling button.

Hope that helps. :P

[Aliotroph?]

Er, DOOM has plenty of textures that aren't 128 tall. Some are 72, lots are 64, some are 112, 16, 8, etc. It's not so much a limit except DOOM can't use taller than 128 and can't vertically tile short short textures properly if they have more than one patch in them.

The reason for the TEXTURE1 is many of the textures are composed of more than one patch. That lump tells the engine which patches are for which textures. For example, a texture like LITE5 is the same patch tiled vertically 16 times. Wintex had a nice facility for making custom textures from existing patches. Never tried that with a newer program though. Wintex really is buggy and limited though. It works fine on newer machines as long as you know what DLLs to run, though being 16-bit it won't run on 64-bit versions of Windows.

[MR_ROCKET]

Well of course Alio, I just didn't want to type anymore than I had to
A step for example usually about 8-16 units tall, but I just wanted to make it clear that they shouldn't be taller than 128.

Also I'm thinking another reason other than tiling in TEXTURE1 is when the artists and mappers got together originally it gave them a way to do some quick name conversion without having to change the all the texture names in a map.

I used Wintex for a long time also, i'd imagine it would take a few to get use to for someone that is new to it. ~ well as long as they get past the point where they had to go find some dll's

Jake250, If we talk about all the different sourceports and which you plan to do your game texture reversion with, that's a whole new box of rockets. Now days there's a number of methods but the original method can always be used on any of them.

[Aliotroph?]

I figured reason for the tiling had more to do with putting the game on three floppy disks.

[jake250]

Thanks a lot, your posts helped quite a lot. I figured out how to add the textures properly and use them.

XWE actualy adds the info in TEXTURE1 and PNAMES by itself when you do the whole thing properly. The way you were talking about it, I thought if I wanted 200 new custom textures, I'd have to manually write them in. That would've been a pain. But the process was simple.

I'm not yet into "creating" my own patches or floors, and that part confused me (more so about having the right palette), still that might come in handy.

And I'm stricly a GZDoom user when it comes to mapping, if there are any neat GZDoom tricks regarding patches and flats, I could use them.

Another question, CrazedImp said that he was using Custom Textures Wad. Any more textures I could use would make me crazy happy but I couldn't find them through google. Anyone knows where I can get more custom textures easily?

[CrazedImp]

There are a few on the idgames archives, and also some of the more popular Doom sites may have some other packs as well.

[Mystic]

I just tried that slumped program to add large flats (256 x 256) and a couple of tall textures (256 x 504 and 256 x 384) to one of my texture wads and its messed them up. I managed to get it done properly using XWE as suggested by MR Rocket in another thread. Its actually a really useful tool.

[MR_ROCKET]

Jake, most likely what your looking for as a strict Gzdoom user would be H_START ~ H_END, and "remap", or possibly HIRESTEX.
I'm not sure if things have changed much but browse for those at the Zdoom wiki.
I made a demo for someone not too long ago about that also.
Not sure what I did with it though heh. Think is was called HIRES_ROCKET or something lol..
Anyways it was something like that demo for Johnny baggs but for Gzdoom/zdoom. There were like 2 versions of it using the different texture handlers as mentioned above.

Edit: http://forums.newdoom.com/showthread...hlight=H_START
Unfortunately speedyshare sucks..

[Aliotroph?]

GZDoom lets me use flats and textures interchangeably. That makes me happy.

[jake250]

Erased because it was too old. Heh, can't blame them. You wouldn't want to keep a file on your system for 5 years either if people are going to download them twice only during all that

Originally Posted by Aliotroph?

GZDoom lets me use flats and textures interchangeably. That makes me happy.

Wait, what? How?

[Vermil]

Doom builder's ZDoom config's are set up to display textures in the flat lists and vice versa by default. You just use a texture on a floor/ceiling like you would a flat and vice versa.

[jake250]

Wow.

There was no such feature on my old computer, but I never bothered updating anything. Now I looked, and you are right. Awesome.

I love simplicity.

[jake250]

Nice unexpected results.

Absolutely every of the 3000 new textures I have do not extend vertically when set on a single line. I don't know how to explain it.. lets see.

XXX
XXX
XXX

Thats the texture, now I place on a wall much larger and higher than the texture is. The result is this.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
--------------------
--------------------

The X are where the texture is shown. The - are where nothing is shown. Thats all. I can change its position but there always are blank spots like this.

However, they only do this when I place them on a line out of nowhere, for example, when making a window. Not when its a solid wall with nothing behind it.

..whats up?

[Vermil]

Mid textures do not tile vertically in the Doom engine.

Hence you have to make a custom texture that is the height of the gap.

[jake250]

I.. didn't even know that.

Learn something new everyday.

Thanks. Might be troublesome, though.

[hawkwind2]

For (G)Zdoom, if you are only using lores textures and flats, for textures these can be placed between tx_start and tx_end markers. For flats just place them between f_start and f_end markers. No need for texture1 and pnames lumps.

[Doom-Dork]

Originally Posted by jake250

Another question, CrazedImp said that he was using Custom Textures Wad. Any more textures I could use would make me crazy happy but I couldn't find them through google. Anyone knows where I can get more custom textures easily?

There are a good selection of textures at:


http://www.doomworld.com/afterglow/textures.shtml


I hope this helps.