Floating Water (Heretic)

Hello!
Looking through the Floors and Flats in the Heretic WAD I notice that the floating water and the grey lava is not visible as a normal floor but as a long code of numbers. Why is that so? And is there still a possibility to change the look of the grey lava and the floating Water?
To specify this, I am talking about FLTFLWW1 up to FLTFLWW3 as well as about FLTLAVA1 up to 3.
Thank you very much!

Fenriswolf said:

.... that the floating water and the grey lava is not visible as a normal floor but as a long code of numbers. .....

?

Ummm ....
Where do you see that code ?

Fenriswolf said:

Looking through the Floors and Flats in the Heretic WAD I notice that the floating water and the grey lava is not visible as a normal floor but as a long code of numbers. Why is that so? And is there still a possibility to change the look of the grey lava and the floating Water?

Why do they look like raw hex code? Because you are using to look at the IWAD a tool that you should not be using, namely XWE. (Did I guess right?)

Why does XWE not recognize them as flats? Because they do not have a standard size. Flats are normally 64x64; but those flats are 64x65.

Why the extra row? It was kinda a crutch used by the flat scrolling code in vanilla Heretic.

Is there a possibility to display them correctly? Yes. Use SLADE 3.

Bonus question: Why shouldn't you be using XWE to look at IWADs? Because XWE automatically saves all the changes you make without asking you if you actually want to save them, even accidental changes you might not notice you have done. This can result in corrupted IWADs that will no longer be playable.

Gez said:

Why do they look like raw hex code? Because you are using to look at the IWAD a tool that you should not be using, namely XWE. (Did I guess right?)

Why does XWE not recognize them as flats? Because they do not have a standard size. Flats are normally 64x64; but those flats are 64x65.

Why the extra row? It was kinda a crutch used by the flat scrolling code in vanilla Heretic.

Is there a possibility to display them correctly? Yes. Use SLADE 3.

Bonus question: Why shouldn't you be using XWE to look at IWADs? Because XWE automatically saves all the changes you make without asking you if you actually want to save them, even accidental changes you might not notice you have done. This can result in corrupted IWADs that will no longer be playable.

Please don't get me wrong, but you could work very well into marketing, with all that rhetoric.

Ah, okay, 64x65. So that is why Doombuilder2 or XWE did not recognize them.

Resizing them to 64x64 corrects that.





As to accidently overwriting HERETIC.WAD,
setting it's property, or for that matter all IWADs, to ' Read Only '
should prevent any mishap.

Resizing? The 65th row should be cropped (it's a pixel-perfect copy of the first row).

Also note that Hexen has 64x128 flats, again for the same reason (crutch for the scrolling code). The flats able to scroll in vanilla Hexen are those from X_01 to X_11.

Of course, in modern ports like ZDoom, only the first 64x64 pixels are used since they have a better scrolling code which doesn't need a copy of the pixels. This also allows them to scroll any flat in any direction.

Yeah. This is a result of the scrolling flat code in the Raven codebase being an ugly hack that, instead of advancing the mapping of texture coordinates on the visplane like BOOM's scrolling (ie. the proper way to do it), advances a pointer into the *flat data*. The pointer is wrapped modulus 64, but this means that for the last row, it may run off the end of an ideal 64x64 flat's linear buffer by up to 63 pixels before the pointer wraps back to offset 0.

This is why these scrolling flats have an extra row in Heretic. For Hexen they just got lazy and copypasta'd the entire texture twice, resulting in 64x128. Note that on these flats, everything past the 65th row is effectively unused.