Drawing in WadAuthor?

I there any way to draw sectors in wadauthor like in Deepsea. I only know how to add new sectors by using the new sector command. If I can't draw sectors, could I at least draw and connect verticies like in WinDEU and ZETH? This could really speed up my map's progress.

No and no.

Hiya.

Why not use both DeepSea and WadAuthor? I do. I mainly use WadAuthor (I find it easier, faster to use, and it's "less cluttered looking"). It 'feels smooth' to work in.

I use DeepSea for somethings; mainly when I need to rough out a cavern complex, or maybe a wierd shapped natural pool of water/nukeage/lava. Then I save it, and reopen in WA to continue on.

If WA had the ability to draw via lines, that would be a nice feature, but as it is, WA is still pretty damn fast once you get into it.

I use WA for everything except sometimes I do advanced error checking with DeePsea. Can you tell me something? DeePsea always bitches about none of my one-sided linedefs having the "impassible" tag. Why does it matter??

netnomad312 said:

Why does it matter??

The game should treat all one sided lines as impassible by default. In saying that, it is correct to flag them as impassible, and incorrect to have them as not impassible.

DeePsea "bitching" is actually the error checker pointing out an error that WA tends to do by default, and fixing that error in DeePsea is as easy as clicking a single button. It doesn't actually matter, but strictly speaking it is wrong to leave them not flagged as impassible.

In fact, its an almost sure fire way of finding out if an author uses WA. Run the map through DeePsea's error checker and if you get that error, chances are they use WA. Of course, you could just read the text, but meh!

Cybermenace: Just makes a sector and then click on one of it's linedefs in WA and press x to split it into two. Once you get used to that method it's almost as quick as line drawing (for me anyway) - you just press x everytime you want another vertex and linedef. You've still got to split intersecting lines yourself though.

And also, WA lets you customize the sectors better then you might think. You can delete linedefs, but you can still join vertexes together and close the sector again. I recently learned how to clone a sector without adding a second one. You take a square sector (doesn't have to be though), split two of its sides into three pieces each, then delete the two middle linedefs. Join the vertexes on either side and you have two triangles. Then split the sloped sides and drag the new vertexes out into the right places to make two rectanges. It's one sector with no errors.

Yeah, pretty basic. But until recently I never figured WA could do it.

I intended XWE to be like WinTEX + WadAuthor + Line drawing. The map editor's layout, functions and keys are very much like WadAuthor. But on top of that you can just draw lines, with line crosses etc. Plus now you can run scripts - with a customizable toolbar feature this could be very powerful: doors, stairs, whatever.

It's just so hard to get people interested in your editor. Sooo many people are crying out for a new version of WadAuthor. I would love that too, BTW, but I think it hasn't been updated in 7 years? The latest (1.30) is marked 7/26/96 in the helpfile. On the other hand, when someone comes along with a new editor, there's almost no feedback. XWE and WHY are the only two free WAD editors coded from scratch in the past two years, but so few people care. Perhaps when XWE dies (or goes on a seven year hiatus), the community will be interested? :-)

netnomad312 said:

I recently learned how to clone a sector without adding a second one.....

A much easier way to do it is to start with your square sector, which has a sector reference number of, say, 25. (I.e., it is the 26th sector you have created in your map -- the first sector always starts with a sector reference number of 0.) Insert another sector in the appropriate location (which then has sector reference number 26), select it, and in the Map Object Properties window go to the Linedef/Sidedef tab. Replace the number 26 with the number 25 in the space labeled 'Sector'. Voila! A cloned sector.

I try not to mess with the sector refrences unless I have to. And I split and join linedefs for other reasons, too; it's just become second nature.

I don't know if I should tell you this, but... there may be an update to WA soon. Last time I asked the author about the annoying problem with no Y offsets after creating stairs, he asked if I wanted to beta-test a version which fixed this problem. But I haven't heard anything else, yet...

Csabo said:

It's just so hard to get people interested in your editor... so few people care.

That just ain't true Csabo. Still, I think you should probably fire your publicist. XWE ought to be getting a lot more exposure, for being so versatile, free, and did I mention ..... free?

Btw, what happened to your plans to release a new version on Friday?

Netnomad: With DeepSea you can just select as many sectors as you like and merge them.

Rex: I think wadauthor can have problems if you delete a sector by removing all references to it. It fucked up all of my tags quite a few times when I tried to do that. To be honest, when I got into really high detail it fucked parts of my Rust maps quite a good number of times.

Csabo: As far as I can tell the map editor part of XWE doesn't have an undo function - as I'm an extremely indecisive mapper this renders it almost unusable for me. Apart from that it seems decent, easily used given the interface's similarity to WA. Linesplitting is really useful, and I like the triple split option too. The scripting sounds good as well, except it'll be a while before I check that out because I'm getting familiar with WHY's scripting at the moment.

Hiya.


(This is all constructive criticism. Please don't take it as an "attack" or "flame").

With regards to XWA...here are the things keeping me from giving it a serious "look":


(1) No Undo. (To get around this, run the map often. This compiles and saves the map. If something goes wrong, just don't save.)

No undo? C'mon, can't be that hard to code...you coded the whole thing from scratch, so you know what your're doing. Problem here.


(2)No texture browser.

"Hmm...I want that texture that is kinda brown and lumpy, with a bit of green on it. What was that called?" ... ;)

This will pretty much guarantee that no newbies will use it. And many experienced mappers will just be annoyed. XWE gives a quick and easy means of loading your own textures. Can you imagine the problem when you need to use a dozen new textures that the texture artist on the team just did for you? MAJOR problem here.

(3)Join linedefs messes up half the time.

So when I'm mapping, it will only do what I need half the time? MAJOR MAJOR problem.


Those three things pretty much delegate it to the "Maybe when it's done" bin. It's like releasing a wad, and saying "This wad works with either DOOM or DOOM 2...but it changes each time you play it. Textures are only listed as blank white panels with the name written on it. Oh, and half the time two sided linedefs get flagged as 'impassible' when you start the level." ;)

From the sound of it, and the simple screenies I saw, it does have a WA "flavour" to it. Get the mapping part down pat, and I'm guessing you might just have a stampead of WA users breaking down your internet door. :)

ToXiCFLUFF said:

Rex: I think wadauthor can have problems if you delete a sector by removing all references to it. It fucked up all of my tags quite a few times when I tried to do that.

Indeed, removing sector references is not the preferred method of deleting a sector. (Btw, if you were referring to my reply to netnomad312's post on "cloning" sectors, you'll note that I was talking about adding sectors, not deleting them. However, I imagine you were simply making an observation about WA, rather than responding to my post.)

To be honest, when I got into really high detail it fucked parts of my Rust maps quite a good number of times.

I have made my fair share of large and detailed maps, and I don't recall WA fucking up simply because of the map's size or detail. It will, however, mess up if one is not careful with sector re-referencing, deletion, moving, etc. After having created 46 maps with WA, many of which were large and detailed, I have learned what to do and more importantly what not to do when mapping. [Of course, this doesn't help newbies much, does it? :)]

netnomad312 said:

I try not to mess with the sector refrences unless I have to. And I split and join linedefs for other reasons, too; it's just become second nature.

To each his own. For the past year I have been extensively used sector re-referencing to reduce the number of sectors in a map. (Admittedly this takes time, and has marginal advantages in terms of reducing wad size and improving frame rate, but I've gotten used to it, so I keep at it. My current map for the CC project has only 348 sectors so far, but has 4118 linedefs.)

... there may be an update to WA soon.

Sounds promising.

pming: I don't mind any kind of feedback (better than nothing). The latest version (which as ReX mentioned I was going to release last Friday), already has a texture browser and the join linedefs was also fixed. Plus tons of other bugfixes and improvements (e.g. I added zoom to the texture editor). Still no undo. It's harder than you think if you want to do it right.

I'll be the first one to admit that XWE is not perfect, far from it. It has some bugs. But it's still usable! WadAuthor, WinTEX both have bugs, but people still use it and stick with it.

What a project like XWE and WHY needs is for people to stick with it too. Keep using it, and keep asking the author for more things, or to tailor things to your needs. Like DeepSea has Enjay, he is definitely part of DeepSea's success.

About the scripting: people always seem to misunderstand my intentions with it, so I'll try to clarify. I'm really not expecting too many people to write their own scripts. WadAuthor has stairs and doors, right? But both of those are hard-coded into it. In XWE (if I can 'package' it right) you will have both of those, plus a whole bunch of other things. It's more powerful, and very easy to extend it.

As it happens, today I just got an extra real-life assignment, so I will have a lot less time for XWE's development. I'll try to finish up with version 1.12 and release it.

Edit: woo-hoo, I just became a "Junior Member". Not bad after 3 years.

pming said:

Join linedefs messes up half the time.

I believe that problem has been fixed in a new version.

EDIT: Didn't realize that Csabo had already responded to that post.

ReX said:

Indeed, removing sector references is not the preferred method of deleting a sector. (Btw, if you were referring to my reply to netnomad312's post on "cloning" sectors, you'll note that I was talking about adding sectors, not deleting them.

Yeah, but by renaming sector 26 to 25 you are deleting a sector. And sorry, I didn't mean to imply that anyone here doesn't make detailed maps (although that isn't an intrinsically good thing anyway). What I mean when I say high detail is very small scale stuff, not linedef numbers. E.g. in Rust there is a few areas where there is up to 90 lines in a 96x96 block (not crappy fake slopes though) with many of them being 2 units apart - fine detail would probably be a better term.


Actually I didn't outline the problems I've had, so maybe you can help me out with whats causing them here. There's two kinds of fuck-ups I've had with WA: Sometimes all my floor and ceil heights would go to screwy numbers like 10427 and the tags would all be crazy too. And secondly my tags sometimes just go screwy (like they just get renumbered and applied to random sectors).


Csabo: People just tend to run away when they heard the word "scripting" in context with a map editor don't they? Like you said, nobody is expected to write scripts but it adds easy extendability and distribution of scripts is very simple because of the tiny file-sizes involved. All you need is one script and you can do away with repetetive tasks like creating control sectors etc, and save yourself a lot of time. Anyway, do you reckon you may have undo in XWE's map editor in the near future? I just can't use it until then, which is a shame, because I use it for pretty much everything else :D

I've been using XWE a bit recently as a lump editor instead of wintex, the problem is that I've been using wintex for years and thus I have all it's quirks and bugs figured out (such as how to trick it into putting non standard lumps like midis and mods and text lumps into a wad). It's a slow process to get me to switch editors (I only started using wauthor because my old editor won't run on win2k), but I think it'll happen eventually.

The map editor I haven't even looked at though, and the one thing that really keeps me from trying it is it's lack of an undo feature, because I tend to mess up a lot and I like to go back and stuff. Line drawing is something I've been missing a lot tho as I really only use wauth because it's the best avaliable option for me.

Enjay: Doom treats all 1s linedefs as impassible regardless of them being flagged impassible or not, so really an editor flagging them impassible is redundant since it doesn't matter. Most editors that I've seen (if not all) flag them impassible for whatever reason but it's not necessary. It doesn't effect the map either way.

But that's so easy in XWE (adding lumps): just go to Entry | Load and load anything into your WAD! The Map/Undo thing seems to be a biggie... I better implement that.

Cyb said:

Most editors that I've seen (if not all) flag them impassible

You may have noticed that WadAuthor does not flag 1-sided linedefs as impassable. But you're right that it doesn't affect the map either way.

ToXiCFLUFF said:

Yeah, but by renaming sector 26 to 25 you are deleting a sector.

You are quite correct. I hadn't seen that.

There's two kinds of fuck-ups I've had with WA: Sometimes all my floor and ceil heights would go to screwy numbers like 10427 and the tags would all be crazy too. And secondly my tags sometimes just go screwy (like they just get renumbered and applied to random sectors).

That sounds like an incorrect sector re-referencing problem. It sometimes happens when multiple linedefs in different sectors are selected and changes are made to the sidedef attributes (e.g., textures) both on the front sidedef and the back sidedef during the same operation. WadAuthor seems to incorrectly re-assign the sector reference numbers to the back sidedef, and when the map is saved the program is thoroughly confused. It generates sector floor/ceiling heights to match those of the sectors referenced. If the sector reference is new it seems to generate random heights.

ToXiCFLUFF said:

Actually I didn't outline the problems I've had, so maybe you can help me out with whats causing them here. There's two kinds of fuck-ups I've had with WA: Sometimes all my floor and ceil heights would go to screwy numbers like 10427 and the tags would all be crazy too. And secondly my tags sometimes just go screwy (like they just get renumbered and applied to random sectors).

This happens when you delete a sector by changing the sector references on all it's linedefs to another sector (hence removing all references to that sector). WA doesn't recognise that the sector has been deleted when you save it (even though the stats box says it has) and when the map is saved, each sector with a higher number than the one 'deleted' takes the properties (including tags, damage etc.) of the sector with the number before it, hence giving the impression that it's randomly screwed up the sectors.

To get around this when merging sectors, keep one linedef that refers to the original sector (splitting a linedef in two if necessary), change the references on all the others and then delete this linedef (hence deleting the sector properly).

Alternatively, use a different nodebuilder (as this is a problem with WA's internal one).

Ultimate DooMer said:

This happens when you delete a sector by changing the sector references on all it's linedefs to another sector (hence removing all references to that sector).

Doesn't happen to me. I've been routinely re-referencing sectors for the past year (some as recently as yesterday) and, when properly done, has not caused me any problems. Now if the sector that is being re-referenced shares one or more linedefs with adjacent sectors, and the front-back orientation of these linedefs varies with respect to the sector being re-referenced, then one must take care to correctly re-reference the fronts and backs of those linedefs. Otherwise you'll get the screw-ups we've been discussing.

I've figured out a good way to make it "seem" like your drawing lines in wadauthor. I always predraw my maps so all I need to do is count the amount of verticies on my drawing and then make a poligonal sector with the same number of verticies. This makes things quite easy for making sectors. Would anyone want me to put a demo of my new map in a post? You need the newest version of Zdoom for it so don't try an old one. I could just add a direct link to it. That can solve some problems.

Cyb said:

Enjay: Doom treats all 1s linedefs as impassible regardless of them being flagged impassible or not, so really an editor flagging them impassible is redundant since it doesn't matter... It doesn't effect the map either way.

I thought I said that

Enjay said:

The game should treat all one sided lines as impassible by default...

It doesn't actually matter, but strictly speaking it is wrong to leave them not flagged as impassible.

Yup, I did say that. :-)

Csabo: Stacks!!@%^@

hehe, and I didn't mean to say it wasn't easy in XWE, in fact it's quite the opposite, it's just hard to teach an old dog that uses wintex to use a better lump editor hehe

---

ReX: well yeah, I use wauth, but I meant all editors aside from it heh.

--

Enjay: whoopsie hehe

To Cyber-Menace: If you still don't get it, here's a drawing of how to make a free linedef inside a sector.



If that doesn't load, open this in a new window:
http://geocities.com/netnomad312/linedraw.jpg

Netnomad: You can just use copy and paste for lindefs in WA.

Of course... but I try to stay away from pasting one-sided linedefs into existing sectors. With the method in my picture, you get one linedef that was originally made in that sector, but you can move it and split it freely. Although I've rarely had a need for something like that...