Large flats and textures

From Doom Legacy Wiki

Editing Tutorials

Mapping Simple 3D floors 3D water 3D colored lighting Colormaps Moving 3D platforms and lifts Boom Reference Hexen Features WAD Editing Using Heretic data Large flats and textures ANIMATED FraggleScript FraggleScript Basics Triggering scripts Spawning things Changing sector heights Modifying light levels Dynamic lights and coronae Triggering Console Commands HUD effects and messages Ambient sounds Camera controls Startscript codepointers Jump Pads List of all FS functions ACS ACS Basics

Contents 1 Large flats and textures. 2 Large flats and textures resources. 3 Size limits. 4 Embedding large flats and textures in a wad. 5 Using large flats and textures in a map.

Large flats and textures.

Legacy supports wall textures and flats larger than the usual Doom values. While this may not seem very attractive when thinking about horizontal walls it does become a pretty powerful feature regarding wall textures much higher than 128 pixels or flats larger than 64x64.

The usage of this feature heavily relies on a powerful lump management tool like XWE.

Large flats and textures resources.

To create large flats and textures for Legacy you´ll need a graphics program capable of creating images fitting the Legacy texture specs. As of v1.42 Legacy supports 8 bit, 256 colour (Doom Palette) images in bmp format. Other Hi-res image formats are expected in Legacy v2.0.

Depending on the target video mode the images should into values that are power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256...) as software mode tends to corrupt textures of odd sizes.

Size limits.

There are limitations regarding the size of large flats and textures. These limitations are somewhat different in OpenGL and software mode (as of Legacy v1.42).

Flats larger than 256x256 are not supported in software mode and flats smaller than 64x64 will be automatically resized (but not scaled) by the lump manager. Sizes that are not power of 2 (like 96, for example) won´t work with XWE.

Walls higher than 128 will display glitches in software mode but will appear without problems in OpenGl.

Embedding large flats and textures in a wad.

To put large textures and flats in a wad we´ll use XWE, a wad managing tool. The process is actually very easy and requires a couple of different steps depending on the kind of resource added (flat or wall texture).

Both methods assume you have your resources set up correctly (size, image format...).

-Wall textures:

Load your wad into XWE, if they don´t already exist create two entries with the names P_START and P_END. Load your resources (Entry->Load) into the wad, select them and move them between the P_START and P_END markers (use ctrl+u or ctrl+d to move the entries up and down). With the entries selected hit the right mouse button to bring a secondary menu. Click on "Add to patch names".

Your large patches are added to the wad and ready to be used on any texture. To instantly convert the patches into textures hit the right mouse button and click on "Add to textures". Alternatively, you can use the texture builder.

-Flats:

Load your wad into XWE, it they don´t already exist create entries with the names of F_START and F_END to hold your flats. Load your resources (Entry->Load in the menu) into the wad and move them between the F_START and F_END markers as seen before. When done, select each of your flats and hit "mage->Save as Doom Flat" in the menu. When the process is over all large flats will be usable.

Keep in mind that the images may appear warped, enlarged or repeated in XWE (or even may be exported in odd ways, which is very uncomfortable) but will perfectly work in Legacy. This may be a bug in XWE.

Using large flats and textures in a map.

Large textures and flats can be normally used in map editors.