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jupiter_ex

new - want to help

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Hi, I have been playing Freedoom for some time, I like it, I think it needs some improvements, and I think I can help. I hesitated for very long to offer my help because I thought nothing would happen, but, here I am.
I like very much the initiative, and that's why I think Freedoom still needs some improvement in it's art quality. I have been replaying Hacx and then Freedoom lately, and the difference in polishness leaped before my eyes more that I would have like to think. That's why I came here. I think some enemies AND music could be improved, and I really know I can do it.
I work full time as a professional game developer -for a major company-, I also worked freelance as a musician for soundtracks for over ten years, and I have done pixel art since I was a kid.
Anyway I don't really have time for diving into Doom's engine architecture though I have read a some about its details over the years. What I want to help about is with sprites (not changing any, just polishing) and music (I can certanly give you as many entirely original tunes as you may want).
If you need examples of my work in any field just ask. I would really like to see Freedoom as mature as possible and I think that's just nothing away.
--Sorry that maybe I didn't read too much of the forum but the registration to Doomworld says I should take 30 then substract my age and lurk for those many days but I get a negative number so here I am posting :)--

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Cool initiative,man!I think all of us want to see Freedoom as a finished product,actually.

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jupiter_ex said:

If you need examples of my work in any field just ask.

As you've probably seen on the current resources there is not really any quality enforcement ;) Showing off your work will obviously not hurt. What sprites do you want to improve?

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Speaking of sprites, I found this Flesh Wizard on realm667, and the notes mention it came from Freedoom. Did this get removed at some point? I thought it would make a decent Revenant (better than the skeleton placeholder), although there are some frames missing...

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it looks very good.
I don't know how you are working at the project. Are you borrowing free sprites, or are you creating ad-hoc ones? Some of the enemies in the game look a little basic (those are the ones I'd like to improve) while some look quite good (mancubus, hell knight..).
I would like to improve the imp, the spiders in general (arachnotrons and mastermind), and specially remove all those 'missing frame' texts; that's, doing the missing frames. But I would try to keep the general look. I didn't know if you were too attached to the current designs so I didn't want to change them too much, but I see now that maybe they were not specifically designed for the project.
I also would like to improve some of the tunes which I found quite strange or unfitting (once again, no harm intended). I'm still not sure what version of Freedoom I'm running (I'm not at home now) but I'm sure it's a quite recent one

EDIT: also, there's some polishing to do for the super shotgun.
The idea would be to polish all those things, and, in the future of course 'homogeneize' them all so they look more like related thematically.
But that's away from now. In the meantime, is there any place where I can see all the assets? I've only seen them in-game :P (or -I don't remember- did WAD files open as easily as ID's PAK format?)
From there I could even start testing some things.

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I'm not quite sure of the structure of that repository. So far I've found some sprites that I'm downloading. I hope it wont be necessary to make a git clone of the whole project

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Another idea is to download the latest daily build IWAD, all the current sprites are in there:
http://free.doomers.org/
(either doom.wad.zip or doom2.wad.zip, I don't know how useful those other files are...)

Then you just need a WAD tool like deutex or slade to extract the frames (and you'll need that anyway to test any replacements you make).

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Catoptromancy said:

http://users.coffeenet.org/~cato/public_html/freedoom/maps/FDtest02.wad

Here is a test wad to view all the sprites in-game easily. Look for a teleport.


ok. So far I haven't found how to extract the sprites for edition or adding my own in Slade, and I got Deutex but it's an old DOS command line app that can extract, append sprites, or put together a wad from assets and I'm afraid to screw freedoom.wad with that. Also 2 windows versions of the software are discontinued. I'll keep on checking Slade

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Slade currently only exports sprites and other graphics in PNG format. For individual sprites that option's in the Graphic menu, for a batch of sprites it's in the right mouse button Gfx sub-menu.

Importing is done through the Archive menu or copy/paste from another open wad.

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You don't actually have to edit/modify the Freedoom IWAD. Making a separate PWAD is plenty enough, until the time comes to actually release a new IWAD version.

With deutex you have to set the DOOMWADDIR environment variable so it points to the directory that has the IWAD, then you can extract the sprites:
$ deutex -sprites -xtract

It puts all the sprite images in a subdirectory, and also creates a "wadinfo.txt" file. You don't need to edit that, but it's used to tell deutex which lumps to include when you build a PWAD (after editing some of the sprite PPM files):
$ deutex -make wadinfo.txt foo.wad

If you don't want to deal with PPM files, deutex can also extract to GIF or BMP files, for example:
$ deutex -sprites -bmp -xtract

Testing the sprites:
$ prboom -file foo.wad
$ chocolate-doom -merge foo.wad -warp 1 2
(vanilla engine crashes on some maps)

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ok. I expected to do a more 'platform independant' work, just graphic retouch and so, but it seems I'll have to deal with the ways of working with Doom basic engine and formats, etc. It's okay anyway, it'll only take a little more time before I get to start doing the art changes.
So I'd like to clear some doubts:
- Despite Deutex exporting to gif or bmp I assume there is a color limitation. I'll suppose old gif's (that's 256 colors) would do okay (?). I'll stick to that one.
- I guess I'll have to stick to the size the sprites already have. I don't know how the Doom engine displays images, but I suppose if I take a 25 pix width sprite and make it 100 pix width, the game will display it with 25 pix width making the character look very thin.
- What about adding more frames to animations? Would that corrupt something? For instance: the heavy weapon dude is a reskinning from the doomguy. But it'll definitely need more frames to make it look like he's firing a chaingun. One more at least.

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These links may help a little:
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Sprite
http://www.zen64060.zen.co.uk/dehacked/deh05.html

The first question is easy: yep, vanilla Doom is plain old 8-bit color. There are in fact COLORMAP and PLAYPAL lumps inside the IWAD that define the colors.

I'm not sure about the sprite size. There have been oddities observed with the revenant (in-game size doesn't match its sprite size) and the imp (the tail sticks out behind/past walls sometimtes). It might be safer to not deviate too much from the existing sizes.

I think the animation frames are actually hardcoded in the engine, so adding more might be tricky. But some of the Freedoom monster frames don't appear to even be used. I noticed that the final baron's frames are identical for every rotation angle, so it's probably just a placeholder.

Hopefully someone who knows more about sprites can comment. :)

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The old repository at sourceforge had stuff like the attic (which contained the deprecated resources), hi-res textures, proposed stories etc. which I think was unfortunatly lost in the move to savannah.

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Yeah, that's what I meant. I thought the sf repo was gone, good thing I was wrong. Maybe someone should migrate the missing stuff over to savannah.

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As an example of how to submit a sprite.

Just submitted resized revenant to incoming. There is a skel.wad download from speedyshare in the revenant-resizing thread.


The zip file in incoming contains

skel.txt -- to explain who did it, what sprite, date, how to contact

sprites directory with all the ppm files (one for each frame)

wadinfo.txt -- a formated text file that is input to deutex.
It contains the offsets (in pixels from top left), to the image point
that is placed at floor center (how the engine should offset the image to draw it on sprite floor position).

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excelent. I was using a previous version of Slade in the lazyness to not to download (I'm having a terrible connection) the VS2010 redist just because I already had VS 2005 installed. Now I've got the latest. I'm exporting the graphics, thanks

EDIT: I was thinking in going into this direction for the imp. I don't want to make anything too away from the previous designs. I'm a little bit rusty, but I also moved the tail so it doesn't stand too much on the side

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/6388/previewe.gif

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