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bryant robinson

organizing stuff in a wad

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Hello!


What is the best editor that can organize lumps,music,sfx,graphics,etc so it can look neater.Some of my wads are organized sloppy when i open it up in wintex.The graphics,music and sfx look like they been thrown together pretty bad.

Thanks to anyone for their help!

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There are 2 editors you can use to easily reorganize: DeePsea and XWE.

They do it differently and which one works "better" depends on you (of course) and the number of entries in your PWAD.

In XWE you can drag stuff around or use keyboard commands. Pretty self explanatory. The only thing you need to be aware of is that the changes are made as you do it, so be sure to make a backup of the PWAD before you start. doomworld.com/xwe

In DeePsea, you press F7 and select "PWAD Lump Fixing". This is explicitly made just for moving lumps around. Your PWAD data is shown in the left listbox. Move one or more entries at a time over to the 2nd listbox. You can go back and forth between the 2 lists (and create dummy entries if required in the 2nd list). Also checks for duplicate names. Press Save As to save your changes to any filename you want. sbsoftware.com

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WinTex will organize da stuff if you merge two wads. For example, if you kept all the resources in one wad, and the actual level in another, when you merged it, it would come out organized. This is VERY good, because once you add new flats, patches, and sprites, things mess up if they're not in a certain order.

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Frankly, for this kind of stuff I prefer to use Deutex and a text editor do edit the control file manually. This is a great example of a task that is best done the old fashioned way. (if you don't want some automation, of course) All GUI solutions for this are clumsy and time consuming IMHO.

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For automagic organized WAD merging (Omgifol 0.2):

mergewads.py output.wad wad1 wad2 wad3 ...

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Graf Zahl said:

Frankly, for this kind of stuff I prefer to use Deutex and a text editor do edit the control file manually. This is a great example of a task that is best done the old fashioned way. (if you don't want some automation, of course) All GUI solutions for this are clumsy and time consuming IMHO.

Definitely not true. Even if one has a super memory, it's much faster using a GUI.

In fact, this is a great example of a task best done with a GUI.

I know of more than one very experienced person who put off doing huge reorgs because of the sheer magnitude. No matter how fast you can type or cut/paste, it will not match the speed of just clicking the entries desired. Plus you get to see the entry, making the task of memorizing the names a thing of the past.

All I can think of is that you've never actually tried it the GUI way - since I'm positive the GUI methods can beat anyone hands down in reorganizing a 300+ entry PWAD. In addition, anybody can do it - including PWADS that you didn't make.

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Better yet, you can organize stuff in your favorite file manager, then use a program to compile a WAD of it.

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Better yet, you can organize stuff in your favorite file manager, then use a program to compile a WAD of it.


That would certainly be the best solution - if I had any control in which order the entries were put into the final WAD. For most things it doesn't matter but for animated flats it's critical.

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Fredrik said:

Better yet, you can organize stuff in your favorite file manager, then use a program to compile a WAD of it.

Even if you could kept the sequence correct, why would that be "better"? Can't see this as a faster solution either.

First off, you need a step to create all these entries. Then you have to select the entries (plus make an animations text file, ugh).

Although either XWE or DeePsea could export and import as you suggest(even control the order) - why bother with old school methods. Remember, the question was how to "organize .. look neater" a PWAD according to the preferences of the user. Although there are several ways to do this in either pgm, the fastest methods are the ones I listed.

Clearly eliminating a step is faster (takes less disk space too) and the entries in a GUI are right THERE to see. IOW, anyone can do it (assuming they understand a little about critical name sequences and control names of course).

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deep said:

Even if you could kept the sequence correct, why would that be "better"? Can't see this as a faster solution either.

First off, you need a step to create all these entries. Then you have to select the entries (plus make an animations text file, ugh).

Although either XWE or DeePsea could export and import as you suggest(even control the order) - why bother with old school methods. Remember, the question was how to "organize .. look neater" a PWAD according to the preferences of the user. Although there are several ways to do this in either pgm, the fastest methods are the ones I listed.

Clearly eliminating a step is faster (takes less disk space too) and the entries in a GUI are right THERE to see. IOW, anyone can do it (assuming they understand a little about critical name sequences and control names of course).



I still can't see how a GUI interface can speed this up - most of the time the list windows are too small or don't offer sufficient functionality. Tell me what you want - to edit a list of strings (and that's what this is in the end) the best tool will always be a good old fashioned text editor!

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Graf Zahl said:

I still can't see how a GUI interface can speed this up


Imagine a list of all the items already in a WAD - but not in the order you want (ie a contents list for the WAD you want to organise).

All you have to do is click on the lump you want to appear first in your WAD to move it, then pick the next one, then the next one etc.

No typing and nothing takes any longer than spotting the one you want in an already automatically generated list and clicking on it. Once you have picked, highlighted (or whatever - depending on the specifics of the tool used) all the lumps you want, in the order you want, you save your wad and it's done.

Doing it via a text list, you would have to find some way of generating a list of the lumps in the WAD, cut and paste them around until you had them in the order you wanted and then run the list through your util of choice. I really can't see that being quicker than a GUI where all you have to do is click the lumps you want.

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Why would you need to do that much organizing anyway? Isn't alphabetical order fine enough?

Deep: for someone like me, who does a lot of textures, I find it very convenient to simply keep a directory of the graphics I use, and run a script file to compile a WAD when I need the textures in an editor/Doom.

There's not even any worrying about selecting stuff involved, and I don't think I'll ever use a set of animated graphics that aren't in alphabetical order so Omgifol actually works there for me already :)

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Fredrik said:
Why would you need to do that much organizing anyway? Isn't alphabetical order fine enough?

NO. In fact, that will screw things up.

Deep: for someone like me ... keep a directory of the graphics ... run a script file to compile a WAD when I need the textures in an editor/Doom.

That wasn't the question. This is about ALL the lumps, not just texture patches. Remember you had to make that script file - that counts as time spent. I'm not saying it doesn't work - just that it's NOT faster. As an aside, if you wanted to import in alphabetical order, that's what XWE and DeePsea can do in a heartbeat using the stock Windows API open GUI (which automatically sorts by name). Couldn't get any easier. And it works for any lump.

There's not even any worrying about selecting stuff involved, and I don't think I'll ever use a set of animated graphics that aren't in alphabetical order so Omgifol actually works there for me already :) [/B]

Also not true for the general case (not just you). If it can happen, it will happen. It's not possible to reorganize (per this topic's goal) any PWAD with ALL the varied types of lumps faster than a GUI method.

Enjay summed it up very clearly. No need to repeat - it's as simple as he says. But one has to actually try the new tools to see the difference. ASSuming seems so odd when it's do easy to try either program and see if the GUI is actually as described.

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deep said:

NO. In fact, that will screw things up.

The only thing that gets screwed up is modified texture and flat animations, like I said, and I'm not concerned about those since I never use them.

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When you organize a PWAD for neatness, it's about keeping data types together - which can't be done with a pure alpha sequence. For example, all the sprites together, all the midi's together, all the flats, all the texture patches and so on. Just makes it easier to work with the PWAD resources.

Meaning an alpha sequence would just screw things up - even though that's easy to do as already explained (with no scripting required). It's not about what you do (or don't use), but the general case. The method described can be easily tailored to anyones style taste - including you:)

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Enjay said:

Imagine a list of all the items already in a WAD - but not in the order you want (ie a contents list for the WAD you want to organise).

All you have to do is click on the lump you want to appear first in your WAD to move it, then pick the next one, then the next one etc.

[/B]

That's exactly how I edit my text file that contains the WAD directory!


No typing and nothing takes any longer than spotting the one you want in an already automatically generated list and clicking on it. Once you have picked, highlighted (or whatever - depending on the specifics of the tool used) all the lumps you want, in the order you want, you save your wad and it's done.

Doing it via a text list, you would have to find some way of generating a list of the lumps in the WAD, cut and paste them around until you had them in the order you wanted and then run the list through your util of choice. I really can't see that being quicker than a GUI where all you have to do is click the lumps you want.


Do you really think I type the name of every single WAD entry by hand? I may be a bit old fashioned by not using a GUI tool but I'm not that stupid.

Do you know DeuTex? This is what I use to create my lists (which I can edit afterwards in my text editor of choice) and recompile them into a wad afterwards. No annoying drag&drop, no missing features, just comfortable text editing!
The problem with all those 'neat' tools is that they all lack many options that I have readily available in most text editors.

This is the way I have started editing WADS and, frankly, until now I haven't found ANY tool that could make this process any faster.

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boris said:

http://boris.slipgate.org/media/fragglefreedoom.png

:)


heh, nice.

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boris said:

fragglefreedoom.png

:)

I dont understand why I turn into fredrik in the final frame.

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Graf Zahl said:

Do you know DeuTex? This is what I use to create my lists (which I can edit afterwards in my text editor of choice) and recompile them into a wad afterwards. No annoying drag&drop, no missing features, just comfortable text editing!
The problem with all those 'neat' tools is that they all lack many options that I have readily available in most text editors.

This is the way I have started editing WADS and, frankly, until now I haven't found ANY tool that could make this process any faster.

Yeah, for building large wads (like with freedoom for example) deutex is really the only way to go. I think the key thing is that you're building wads, rather than editing them. For editing small wads its obviously pointless to set up some kind of build system for generating your wads, so a GUI editor makes more sense. When you get into large projects though, it pays off.

In particular, with freedoom theres the requirement to be able to generate multiple wads with different data and different types of data in (for the texture wad, main wad, "shareware" build, deathmatch-only wad(coming soon)). Its great to be able to change only one thing, type "make" and have it automatically update all the wads.

The build system for freedoom runs through several scripts which generate the input files for deutex. I probably spent more time on it than I needed to, but only because I'm a perfectionist.

Only trouble I've found, of course, is that deutex is terribly badly written :P

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recent photographs of the one we call fraggle appear to suggest that recent predictions were in fact, wrong

also he doesn't look like elton john any more. ruined my life's work goddamnit

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fraggle said:

I think the key thing is that you're building wads, rather than editing them. For editing small wads its obviously pointless to set up some kind of build system for generating your wads, so a GUI editor makes more sense. When you get into large projects though, it pays off.

Exactly - more precisely, Deutex is pointless for projects that have a short lifespan from start to finish (even large ones) where the resources change very little.

If the -same- thing is done over and over and over, the time invested pays off for Deutex. For like 99.9% of all PWADS, doing it the Deutex way is way slower and a waste of time (unless one can actually cut/paste as fast as a mouse click - which it appears you can from that cartoon<g>).

Only trouble I've found, of course, is that deutex is terribly badly written :P

No kidding:) No safety checks either (did you ever fix the duplicate names, there were about 13?).

Fred needs to look at your project to understand why pure alpha sequences may not be preferred (even when split by type).

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deep said:

No kidding:) No safety checks either (did you ever fix the duplicate names, there were about 13?).

I actually resorted to binary editing wad files in one case to work around one of deutex's bugs, rather than touching the source :)

I'm kind of vaguely hoping if fredriks project develops far enough I might be able to use it to replace deutex.

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deep said:

Fred needs to look at your project to understand why pure alpha sequences may not be preferred (even when split by type).

Please show some examples of where it fails...

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Jesus Fred, I just did - FREEDOOM. Take a careful look at the order. Remember, it's all about PERSONAL preferences, not just yours.

Btw, if you follow your posts you keep morphing your answers. You clearly meant ALL alpha at first (excluding only animations) and then changed your tune when it became clear that didn't work.

Actually doing a Deutex replacement is pretty simple code. Essentially all it takes is a file parser that then drives the current code that's now driven by the GUI + some code borrowed from the Texture section (to compose textures).

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