Doom 2 sprites issue

Hi folks! I'm into building my first map and am well into the fifth month doing so. I'm building in the zdoom/hexen configuration. FYI, I'm using DeePsea, Xwe and Paint Shop Pro. Most of the textures and flats in this map have been enhanced to display better color-depth and richness, many are custom and not that of the iwad. I have a sprites issue here... a serious one! Using Xwe, I extracted all the sprites to a folder on my hard drive, so I could do the same enhancements as I did for my textures and flats, otherwise they look like $h!t in my map. 1,381 sprites total. There are 8 sprites with the [VILE\] (backslash) name and Windows will not allow the [\] in naming any file. If I can't rectify this problem, then I can't make a sprites wad and combine it to my map, because the engine won't recognise them and not to mention the possible errors that will happen. Does anyone know how I can get around this problem, so I can make a sprites wad that the engine will use? I'd sure appreciate any advise here!
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If I posted this in the wrong area, please accept my apology.

Disregard the above post, but I do have a xwe question...
When I load a sprite into a pwad, do I add it to texture or anything of this nature? And, is it recommended to convert the format from .bmp to .png before proceeding?

When I load a sprite into a pwad, do I add it to texture or anything of this nature? And, is it recommended to convert the format from .bmp to .png before proceeding?

No, you don't add it to texture or anything. You just put it between the SS_START and SS_END lumps. If don't want to put it in a separate directory to put it in another wad, you can just put the lumps on the clipboard, close that wad and open the other wad and paste it.

Oh, and I DON'T recommend converting it. It makes absolutely no difference by converting them.

I finished constructing my sprites wad, but there's an issue.
When I loaded the wad into my map using DeePsea's "group" option and tested the map to see how well my sprites turned out... The Players hand and weapon was in the upper left corner. Otherwise, the sprites looked great, but I think that there's an issue with the sprites alignment. Don't know if it's something I failed to do or if it's Xwe itself. I was informed that it was Xwe! Any takers???

Post the WAD somewhere perhaps, from your description I have no idea what it could be.

Weapons should have negative X, Y coordinates. Open up the Doom2 WAD and take a look at how the weapons are aligned. (They should be appearing in a box in XWE, indicating the screen size and the status bar.) As long as you save your own weapons like that, you should be fine.

Yup...

Your right... I just learned something new! Thanks :-)