Animating textures and switches in Slade 3

I am working on WAD and am extensively using custom textures. I want to animate a few switches and textures, but I don't know how to do this. I'm using Slade 3 as my WAD editor.

If anybody can help me with this, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm a complete newbie to Slade, so detailed advice would be very appreciated.

Thanks.

What source port are you targetting. There's different methods depending on the engine you use.

My intention is for the WAD to be vanilla compatible.

There is no vanilla-compatible way to add new switches and animated textures.

A possible workaround is to edit the existing textures to glue more animations to them, and then you have to use offsets. "the skull switch on sladwall is on the SW1LION texture, add 128 to X offset", this kind of thing. You can have examples of that in Final Doom (more precisely, in TNT: Evilution; Plutonia didn't use that trick).

If you're okay with raising your requirements to Boom-compatible, then you have the ANIMATED and SWITCHES lumps. Use Archive->New->ANIMATED or Archive->New-SWITCHES in SLADE3 to insert to your wad a ready-made lump that you can then edit.

Vanilla Doom does support animated switches by the way; all you need to do is put an existing switch texture inside an existing* animation in the texture list, like so:

WFALL1
SW1LION
WFALL4

Only the first and last textures are used to determine if a particular texture is animated; the intervening texture do not need to have the same name as the original animation (this trick wouldn't work otherwise), and you don't even need to have the same number of textures as the original animation.

*Some animations exist that are totally unused in some versions of Doom, allowing you to create a brand new animated texture without breaking anything:
WFALL1-WFALL4 exists in all versions of Doom, but was never actually used (the textures aren't in the IWAD) until Final Doom.
BLODGR1-BLODGR4 and SLADRIP1-SLADRIP3 are used in Doom 1, but not Doom 2.
BFALL1-BFALL4, SFALL1-SFALL4, and DBRAIN1-DBRAIN4 are new for Doom 2, but versions 1.666 and above of Doom 1 will recognise them.

Thanks for the responses.

I have tried the method of stitching other switch textures to the original IWAD textures and using texture offsets to create the switches. In the Doombuilder 2 Visual Mode, everything looks great. When I try testing the map via PrBoom+, the switches only look like the original.

Is there any reason for this?

This may sound silly, but did you remember to load your texture WAD as well as your map WAD when you tested it?

I thought so, but now I'm not sure. Would you be willing to share the procedure for doing this?

I am pretty well versed in making maps via Doombuilder, but this is the first time I've extensively utilized custom textures. This is all a bit new to me.

If your map and your textures are in separate wad files, put them both to PrBoom-plus directory and launch them from the command line:

prboom-plus -file yourmap.wad yourtextures.wad

Ah. I've already added all the relevant textures to my map's WAD. I can load up the WAD in PrBoom+ and have all the textures show up with the exception of the custom switches.

Maybe you didn't delete the original switch texture from TEXTURE1. Open TEXTURE1, and if you find your switch texture twice (having the exact same name), delete the one you don't want.

scifista42 said:

Maybe you didn't delete the original switch texture from TEXTURE1. Open TEXTURE1, and if you find your switch texture twice (having the exact same name), delete the one you don't want.

This fixed it. Thanks a lot!