???Sprites and textures of other games???

Does anyone know how to extract sprites or textures from other games like Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior and Blood? Or maybe other similar first person shooters with sprites or textures. I don’t care about strife.

XWE might be just what you are looking for. It's a great program with extracting abilities for heaps and heaps of games.

Yes, as a matter of fact XWE is just the thing for extacting graphics and sprites from Build-based games. There's another utility called Wally, that was primarily designed for the Quake games, but can also be used for Duke3D

I found a few Build game demos I had never heard of here:

http://jonof.edgenetwk.com/build/

and was able to extract all sorts of interesting graphics from them. I also found a little command line util that could extract all the graphics very quickly and convert them to tga files. Damned if I can find it now though. It was called art2tga.exe if that helps in a search.

You had to extract the ART files (or sometimes just rename the extentions for the game files to art for some of the games found on the site above). You also had to extract the palette. Although to be fair, I think most of the games above had the files already seperate (ie not in a grp file). Then just run the util from the command line and you'd find a whole load of tga's in the game dir, extracted in a few seconds.

Enjay said:

I found a few Build game demos I had never heard of here:

http://jonof.edgenetwk.com/build/

Hey thanks Enjay! That was the most interesting site I've seen in ages!

/me starts warming up XWE...

this might be a bit off the subject but if you need to convert your newly aquired textures to the doom pallete, Paint Shop Pro has a built in option that helps alot. openup the images you want to convert (i opend about 300 at one time) select color, load pallete,select the pallet to use.

save and exet the first image, now gust hit ctrl+y then save and close for each additional image. :)

Cyrez said:

this might be a bit off the subject but if you need to convert your newly aquired textures to the doom pallete, Paint Shop Pro has a built in option that helps alot. openup the images you want to convert (i opend about 300 at one time) select color, load pallete,select the pallet to use.

save and exet the first image, now gust hit ctrl+y then save and close for each additional image. :)

He he! I've been opening a doom pic with windows paint and then opening the pic I want with photo shop and copying it from there and pasting it over the doom pic and then saving it. Actually I don’t even have paint shop pro but I used it in school and I like photo shop much more. Thnx for the advice. Oh ya and if you are lazy than you can just put the pic into your doom wad and it will use the doom pallet. Whenever you extract that pic from the wad, it will automatically have the doom pallet. Thank you again.

mmnpsrsoskl said:

XWE might be just what you are looking for. It's a great program with extracting abilities for heaps and heaps of games.

WXE is pretty cool and it works well with all the games it says it does. Thank you mutch.

Cyrez said:

this might be a bit off the subject but if you need to convert your newly aquired textures to the doom pallete, Paint Shop Pro has a built in option that helps alot. openup the images you want to convert (i opend about 300 at one time) select color, load pallete,select the pallet to use.

save and exet the first image, now gust hit ctrl+y then save and close for each additional image. :)

Damn!!! I've been doing this all the hard way. (i got PSP too) I got the pallete saved, I do it the long way. load pallete save close. I didn't know nuthin bout this hotkey. Thanx!

Really old versions of PSP used to be able to automate a number of the tasks that PSP does, but they moved that out into a seperate prog (Image Robot). Unfortunately, the demo version is very limited, and the full version is pretty expensive.

Image Robot is very good, however. It lets you put a string of PSP tasks together and then perform them on a large number of files with a single click.

Graphics Workshop Pro also has a batch processing function of some sort, but I can't comment on how well it works.

Might be worth checking GWS Pro.

http://www.mindworkshop.com

Well I'm using the full version of PSP 5. Didn't they come out with PSP 8 already? My other comp has ver.7 on it, but the mouse accuracy leaves out something to be desired.

Edit: Helluva lotta bugs in it, but 5 suits my tastes.

I think the latest PSP is ver 7.04. There was a nasty bug in 5 that made me glad to move on. If you used the undo button to undo deselection of an area, and then pressed the undo button again before the selection box had finished drawing it's little animated selection dashed line - crash. I kept pressing undo too quickly and lost loads of work that way.

I think it was way back about version 2 that they had a whole load of batch processing tools incorporated. Nowadays there are only limited file format conversions as part of PSP.

Does WXE work for any other games than the ones listed in the program. None of the games graphics gave me any inspiration for my TC but I don’t want to give up on it just yet.

Archaeo said:

Does WXE work for any other games than the ones listed in the program.

I'd say the answer to that is no. However, the author of XWE (Csabo) has accommodated many requests to support additional games. If there's a game you wish to work with, ask Csabo and he may include support in XWE.

ReX said:

I'd say the answer to that is no. However, the author of XWE (Csabo) has accommodated many requests to support additional games. If there's a game you wish to work with, ask Csabo and he may include support in XWE.

Hey thanks. I’ll take you up on your advice.

Archaeo said:

Does anyone know how to extract sprites or textures from other games like Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior and Blood? Or maybe other similar first person shooters with sprites or textures. I don’t care about strife.

Look in one of it's dirs for EDITART.EXE (same dir as BUILD.EXE), you can extract any texture or sprite from the game that way and place it in a GIF-file. Maybe a late answer, but better late than... dead... or something

http://jonof.edgenetwk.com/build/games.php

I own Duke Nukem 3d, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage, Blood, WWII G.I., Nam and have played Powerslave. So, all in all, I'm pretty rounded in the build engine. BTW, WinTex is good for rippage of sprites and stuff from Duke 3d.

bigbadgangsta said:

BTW, WinTex is good for rippage of sprites and stuff from Duke 3d.

I had no idea that WinTex could be used to open Build files.

Wintex only opens .Grp files, not .Art ones, which I always found odd.

Strange but true.

XWE will open both .GRP and .ART. and can extract files from both.

scorpion said:

Look in one of it's dirs for EDITART.EXE (same dir as BUILD.EXE), you can extract any texture or sprite from the game that way and place it in a GIF-file. Maybe a late answer, but better late than... dead... or something

Good point! It is better late than dead.

bigbadgangsta said:

WinTex is good for rippage of sprites and stuff from Duke 3d.

I'll have to try that. I knew you could browse .grp files, but I never thought of extracting the textures from them, I just took screenshots instead.

BTW, does anyone have trouble with the colours screwing up on Duke textures? This always happens when saving the screenshot as a bitmap in PSP, but it doesn't affect the black-grey-white colour range (so the vents are ok, but the green and brown crates are not). Is there any way to avoid this happening?

If you're trying to get textures from .grp or .art files for games like Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, etc. you're going to find that the textures will seem to conform to the palette that's being used at the time (maybe), which fouls up the colors. Why it's doing that in Paintshop Pro, I have no idea, unless the same sort of thing is happening there somehow. The best way to extract textures from those games (and even Blood and ROTT) is to use XWE.

The only difference I've found in the Duke3D pallette and the DooM pallette is the use of the colors for "transparent" areas. DooM uses cyan and Duke3D uses dark pink. All other colors come out fine.

(On a related note, Dark Forces uses a very dark grey for transparent areas. Otherwise the colors are the same as in DooM.)

Magenta.

And I always thought the Doom and Duke 3D palettes were quite different.

Cyan being used to mark transparent areas in Doom is actually a convention found in editing programs, not doom itself.

Graphics in the Doom format can have areas that have no colour. A lot of programs use the convention of turning any area of a graphic (GIF, BMP, PCX etc) marked with cyan into transparent areas. They will not actually remain as cyan in the doom format. When such tools export graphics, they put cyan in the transparent areas. So it should be possible to use any colour as the "transparent" colour if you write a Doom graphics tool (watching out for colours that clash with those actually used in the game). DeePsea uses magenta by default (but can be configured to cyan - or any other colour), the later versions of DEUTex had the option of using a muddy sort of green IIRC.

As far as the palettes of Duke and Dark Forces go, there are a few differences between them and Doom. Many of the Duke graphics import into the Doom palette quite nicely, but you can easily see differences in colours such as the subtle blues or the flesh colours on the hands of the weapon hud sprites. Dark forces will again import quite well, but once again, some colours are quite different. I think DF may also use different palettes on some of the levels. When exporting the graphics, some textures need to be exported using a different palette as the reference, otherwise they come out looking very odd.

ReX said:

The only difference I've found in the Duke3D pallette and the DooM pallette is the use of the colors for "transparent" areas. DooM uses cyan and Duke3D uses dark pink. All other colors come out fine.

No, there are differences in the palette. For example, those green crates have yellow markings on them in Duke, but when I put them in DooM, they go orange. Also, the brown wooden crates appear yellow/golden brown in DooM. (unless I'm missing something, as I just extract the textures and then load them into my pwad without doing anything else)

Anyway, I tried it with Wintex and it works fine. The textures are still not perfect, but they're a lot better than they were before. (the green crates were all dark and ugly, now the only thing wrong with them is the orange markings instead of yellow, but that's ok here)

To Ultimate: I think Rex meant that conversions came out ok? He's done enough of them:))

Some games are hard coded for an ACTUAL transparent color. Duke3D is such a game. I'd guess that probably most paletted games have an actual transparent color. IOW, the color selected depends on the game.

As Enjay explained - DOOM is unique. They came up with a graphic scheme that has NO data where there is transparency. So programs that export DOOM graphics to another format (eg BMP) use a substitute color to fill in the void. The color should not duplicate any color used in the actual graphic if one is going to go back to the DOOM format again. For going the other way (BMP->DOOM) the transparent color is literally discarded to recreate the void areas.

Wintex has poor color conversion because it just uses a simple "difference" algo. It makes various mistakes. If the color exists in the DOOM palette (or very close to it), conversion should pick up the color. Yellow is in the DOOM palette. Haven't looked at Duke3D for a long time to compare, I'm assuming the yellow is yellow.