You really need to familiarise yourself with Eviternity for Doom 2, probably one of the greatest set of maps for that game ever made. 

Step 2: Eviternity 

Doom 2's "campaign" has aged like total milk. You might be better off just going straight into Eviternity on one of the lower skill levels, it should be a very good entry drug. 

ionous prompted me for a progress update on his stream, so I thought I may as well post here, even though it's disappointing - this will be on hold until October. 

I dig the Eviternity Doom 2 megawad, thanks for tip, nice HD textures. OT: playing it using STRG WEP mod https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/74791-struggle-antaresian-legacy-now-available-in-idgames/?page=7 (hammer/drill/uzis...) 

It turns my out my pipeline had a major error I hadn't anticipated, because of my complete lack of knowledge of Doom's inner workings.

The wad I had prepared back in August had two major problems. One of them being that across the 3.8K files extracted, there was no trace of a single wall texture, and lots of 64px tall "stripes" of bricks instead. Which is why the test map had to do this:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/292234299896365056/639474892609290240/unknown.png

Awful, right? I was already bracing for weeks of manually photoshopping the stripes together into solid surfaces like a simpleton (hence my earlier comment about the next step being "lots of optimization"...)

The second problem were the completely undecipherable texture names:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/639477405827989508/639477487746678814/unknown.png

I didn't think too much of it at first (other than being completely aghast), since Doom has understandably harsher texture name limitations. But then I figured out that that's bullshit, since I remembered this passage from the OTEX website:

What do the names mean?
Most of the 4 letter sequences can be figured out, while others are more far fetched. BRCK is obviously brick, but BNKR meaning bunker is less clear perhaps, and I’ve honestly forgotten some of the names.

I went to ask Ukiro himself about the above, and came out with a lucky solution - to problems that my own ignorance caused.

The way Doom stores textures is, in short, some fucky shit. What I had initially extracted from the OTEX wad wasn't "textures" per se, but patches, which is what textures are made of.

Ukiro's instruction was to try extracting the images directly from the "TEXTURE2 lump". I still have a very vague understanding what that means, but a brief search revealed that Slade is a Doom editor capable of extracting the textures that way.

With that done, I could reapply the process as before, i.e. batch convert the PNGs to TGA and also create a .wad for the editor.

Interestingly, though this resulted in a total of 2356 textures (a 40% decrease from the original 3892), the .wad filesize has actually increased to 87.7 MB! Is this somehow a fault of how mip textures are compressed? I can only guess.

At any matter, the original problems were resolved, and now (relatively) clear brushwork can commence. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/639477405827989508/639489561256263731/unknown.png

There's still work to be done with the wad though - I have to figure out switches, liquids, transparent textures, and more. So, until next time! 

Good stuff. Keep at it. 

Interestingly, though this resulted in a total of 2356 textures (a 40% decrease from the original 3892), the .wad filesize has actually increased to 87.7 MB! Is this somehow a fault of how mip textures are compressed? I can only guess.

Composing textures out of patches is probably a type of optimization, where the patch can be unique art which is shared by many textures and only stored once. Now they are baked into the textures so you have a lot of duplicate runs of pixels (e.g. 3 different panels with only a different stripe at the bottom.) 

Curious why that wouldn't have been a factor for Quake in 1996 though. 

well it was 3 years later, maybe the increase in available memory made it not worth the trouble. 

When it comes to buttons, OTEX has a huge variety of symbols and colors to choose from: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/639477405827989508/645751458347614223/unknown.png

Unfortunately, Doom does not support animated buttons out of the box the way Quake does, and as such, they are not provided in the original WAD.

However, there's nothing a little Photoshopping won't fix:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/556168182822338574/645686141802250250/Untitled-2.gif

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/556168182822338574/645736273356783619/Untitled-3.gif

So, proper Quake-style animated switches are now in! 

...to make up the otherwise low-on-content previous one.

I plan on getting this pack up and running by December 1st.

Most of the heavy lifting is done, what's left is still a whole lot of small nitpicky stuff that's simultaneously easy, and also time consuming, but will leave the wad feeling fatally unpolished if it was to be left out.

To-do:

- liquids (easy)
- animated textures that aren't buttons (this will be tricky)
- fence textures (no idea if this will even work with external TGAs)
- some actual example maps (argh!!!)

The next two weeks should prove quite productive, hopefully.

Until next time! 

External fence TGAs use alpha channel for transparency. 

 

Looking forward to combing through these suckers.


HIJACK:

@Chedap - please tell me you are making more maps. Your Halloween map was stellar. 

External textures can't have fullbrights, right? :( 

You use a separate texture with "_luma" suffix. I think every engine that supports external textures follows this naming scheme, but I haven't checked all of them.

Keep in mind that most engines (QS included) use "additive" luma rather than "masked". This means the values of _luma texture get added to the underlying base. This, in turn, means that to get correct behavior you'll want to "cut out" any fullbright areas on the original texture by painting them black.

Example:
aztec_skey.tga
aztec_skey_luma.tga

Additive is compatible with masked but not the other way around.
Full range of colors can be used.


@dumptruck: that's the plan 

This explains a whole lot.

Thanks! 

Despite sharing a lot of the id DNA, the fact remains that Doom is a different game than Quake, and their engines do many things differently. (Moreso for Doom's wide bench of source ports.)

The sad consequence of this is that porting a modern Doom wad to Quake can't be done on a 1:1 basis.

One of the most notable omissions in the Quake version of OTEX will be the animated assets used to denote teleports, i.e. animated telepads and animated "slipgates".

The reasons behind this are:

1) Quake's texture animation speed is a fixed 5 frames per second. This is much too slow for the vast majority of animations provides in OTEX. While there is a way of circumventing this limitation, having the wad rely on them would create yet another barrier of entry in a texture pack already more complex than usual.

2) There are several such animated textures in OTEX, and they have a considerable number of animation frames. Because of Quake's texture format, this would mean that there would be multiple animations at the very top of the wad "obstructing" the view to the rest of the wad. I find it quite frustrating even in wads with relatively few animations, and I'm deciding to spare myself from the extra aggravation ;-)

3) The way I see it, making these textures animated was a way of drawing the player's attention to important progression points. Quake has better tools of achieving that goal than a small spinning heptagram - including actual rotation of 3D geometry!

4) Possibly the most subjective reason - the anims simply don't fit in Quake the way they do in Doom. The latter, whie not really Keen or Wolf3D anymore, still has a more "video game-y" feel than the solemn, edgy favorite of ours.

With all of the above in mind, I've decided to cut out most of such animations. What will be remaining is:

- Two opposite-facing frames of each heptagram, since it's a cool graphic and it would suck to see it go entirely,
- One frame per each of the "slipgate" exits, to be used as liquid textures in typical Quake fashion. It's a mediocre compromise but it's better than nothing.

While it does feel sad to have to make decisions such as these, I can already feel a great load gone off my chest (no, not yours, Shambler) - not having to worry about these animations has given me more time and brainpower to tackle the remaining problems.

Hopefully by next week I will be able to provide proper screens of proper maps! 

Another big omission will be the skyboxes. Sorry, but the sky textures in Doom are just completely irreconcilable with how Quake does things.

Luckily, Quake has no shortage of skyboxes or custom skies, so this should be a very minor, of not almost irrelevant, issue... 

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/348561852990488579/647547155677970465/unknown.png 

I converted a few textures myself as "design tests" but converting everything is an insane and thankless task.
This might spark a slew of new and interesting maps/jams :) 

We've needed new wads for quite some time. This is gonna be crazy. 

That's pretty much a "no" for a Sunday release. 

Looking forward to this.