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Lycaon

Difference between patches and textures?

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I think i know what it is. Patches are supposed to be pieces of textures and textures are a combination of patches. Is it? And if so, how do they work? By looking at the textures/patches lump at slade3 i cannot figure out a way to use this feature.

Also, what happens if a .pk3 file containing multiple texture packs does not have a texture/patches definition list? cause I made one like that and it seems to display patches just fine when ingame. When will I encounter problems?

Thanks!

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The only actual wall artwork that a normal Doom WAD stores is patch data. A designer then takes the patches and assembles textures out of them. The idea was so you could construct various similar but slightly different textures out of the same pieces, or swap out bits to use in certain circumstances, etc. The WAD would then store the texture definition as a list of all the component patches and their positions. Nowadays, though, most people just make each new texture be one patch and that's it.

I am assuming you're using ZDoom, which has expanded how textures work so you can use individual patches or even plain image files directly on the walls, without having to define a texture for them first.

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The TEXTURE1 and TEXTURE2 lumps define each texture as a list of which patches compose it and how they are aligned, eg, the texture "BFALL1" has a single patch, patch 6, at offsets (0, 0). The PNAMES lump lists the name of of the graphic lump to be used for each patch. In this example, patch 6 is the lump named "BFALL1" (there is no problem with patches having the same name as textures). Graphics must be in the standard Doom graphic format (ie, not flats).

To create a new texture from new patches, you must first add the patches to be used to the PNAMES list. The easiest way to do this is SLADE is to right-click on the graphic lumps and selecting "Add to PNAMES" (you can also edit the PNAMES lump directly, but that takes slightly more effort). Only then will you able to select the new patches in the texture editor and use them to compose new textures.

This only applies to textures defined in TEXTURE1 and TEXTURE2. The TEXTURES format used by ZDoom works differently. It does not require patches to be listed in PNAMES, and in fact does not use PNAMES at all. It also allows flats to be used as patches. Also unlike TEXTURE1 and TEXTURE2, multiple TEXTURES lumps can be used without problems.

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So i don't need to define patches if i'm not to use textures at all? I can just throw in any loosened texture from another wad and it will work allright?

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Lycaon said:

So i don't need to define patches if i'm not to use textures at all? I can just throw in any loosened texture from another wad and it will work allright?


If you are using G/ZDoom, then all you need to do is import your images in between TX_START and TX_END markers.
But make sure that your images are in one of the supported formats.
http://zdoom.org/wiki/Image_format




As to loading multiple texture packs, yes you can do that. If there are multiple images with the same name,
the last one will overwrite a previous one.

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