"raise stairs" tag

Greetings.

I have been trying to more effectively use the "raise stairs" line def tag (between 8 and 16) and have had some difficulty in setting the target for the raising area... It seems that when i set the targets the sector that contains the stairs gets raised as well, resulting in a bunch of height/texture offset issues.

I just want to be able to narrow down the target to say, a set of 8 steps within a sector. How can I achieve this the best way? Thank you all in advance.

Use one floor texture for the stairs, and something different for any other sectors which border the stairs.

andrewj said:

Use one floor texture for the stairs, and something different for any other sectors which border the stairs.

This isn't necessary (though it is necessary for the steps themselves to all use the same texture). When searching for the next step in a staircase, Doom only considers sectors that have a two-sided line with its right (front) side facing the previous step. So all you have to do flip all the two-sided lines surrounding your staircase so they face outwards, with only the front of each step facing the starting step. Like this:

       |
  +---------+
  |         |    <-- TOP STEP 
--|         |--      All 2-sided lines face outwards
  |         |
  +---------+
  |    |    |
--|         |--
  |         |    <-- MIDDLE STEPS
  +---------+        All 2-sided lines face outwards
  |    |    |    <-- except for the next step in the sequence
--|         |--
  |         |
  +---------+
  |    |    |    <-- FIRST STEP
--|         |--      Exactly the same as the middle steps
  |         |        except this is the one you tag
  +---------+        (don't tag the other steps)
       |

Note that this only applies to two-sided lines. One-sided lines bordering the staircase do not affect its functioning. Obviously, you mustn't flip those!

pls say "flat", don't say "floor texture". that makes my brain explode (so is it for a wall or for the floor wtf)

Floor flat. Floort.

Speaking about "floor textures" and "ceiling textures" isn't incorrect, though; floors and ceilings are texture-mapped (contrarily to Wolf3D).

Besides, when you work on an OpenGL engine for a while (like andrewj did), you end up considering every graphic is a texture, even sprites, menu pictures, and font characters.

Memfis said:

pls say "flat", don't say "floor texture". that makes my brain explode (so is it for a wall or for the floor wtf)

When the context is clear, it's a texture. Most modern ports don't even distinguish between wall textures and flats, and neither does DoomBuilder itself (I once corrupted a vanilla map by doing a search and replace on wall textures, which (unbeknownst to me) also replaced all flats of the same name. I didn't know what had gone wrong until I loaded the map in an old DOS editor (EdMap, to be specific), whose error checker helpfully informed me that there's no such flat as STEP6 >.< The same editor was able to repair the damage without reverting the wall textures, as its search and replace function does distinguish between flats and textures.)

Gez said:

every graphic is a texture, even sprites, menu pictures, and font characters.

Of course, that's more or less true of vanilla too: any non-flat graphic can be added to PNAMES and then used in a wall texture. See TRINITY.WAD.

Foxpup's layout says it all.

Would it help if we called them 'floor sidedefs,' Memfis? >:-D

Thank you all, this has helped greatly