Some WadAuthor Help

On WadAuthor ...

And I'm trying to make a teleporter for my joke wad in progress ... I do everything the tutorial says, but then i get "back back side-def: side-def is one-sided, but has a back that refers to a sector" what am I supposed to do? make it two-sided?

And say I try to get a bed up against the wall. I will do that, join the vertex and linedefs (maybe that's what I'm doing wrong) and I check for errors and it says "sectors one and two are incomplete". I can't make them both complete without making certain linedefs and vertexes count for more than one sector. (I'm trying to make myhouse.wad here!)

And what is the difference bewteen W1e and WRe (teleporter labels), and all the other different weird labels for doors, etc.?

WADAuthor kinda has its own way of processing sidedef sectors... so I'd recommend you check the linedefs that give the errors, and change the sector numbers manually.

There's a legenda for the numbers and lettres in one of the .wcf files. For instance, 1 means an effect that works only once, and R means repeatedly. W means the effect is activated when you walk over it.

You cant join an 'interor' sector (which i assume the bed is) to the outside wall of another sector (which i assume the room is), instead, make an "indent" in the wall, make the bed OUTSIDE the room, then do lots of sidedef joining to 'stretch' the room 'around' the bed, and it will be fine

thanks guys, I'm gonna go check those things out now :D

ok - now I'm confused kinda ... when you say indent, do you mean the wall goes IN TO THE MIDDLE of the room, or away from the edges?

Make a room like this:

____      _______
|   |    |      |
|   |____|      |
|               |
|               |
|               |
|               |
|_______________|

and create your bed inside the indent (which is still outside the room), and then join all the vertices of the indent and the bed.

You can easily fix these types of problems if you understand sector refrencing... that's something I didn't learn for months after I got WadAuthor, and I could never figure out how to fix any type of open-sector error. In linedef properties, look for "sector" (not to be confused with sector tag) and see what it says. If a line is one-sided it'll always have -1 on the back... if you have a one-sided line in the middle of a sector like that, you should probably MAKE it two-sided. To do that you have to give it a sector to refrence on the back, not -1... figure out what sector its backside SHOULD point to and put that in the "sector" box.

I dunno why it isn't joining the bed to the wall, but it may depend on how you're joining the objects. In a situation like this, just moving one line on the other may cause problems... even if it doesn't look that way. It may join the vertices but not the line itself, or something like that. Moving one line onto another one in a situation where it should theoretically join two lines at the same time would procude this (example: creating a door between existing rooms and then hooking it up). Problem is, you can't see a duplicate line at first, but you can if you move one of its vertices around a bit (you can just tell if something's wrong). Either way, you probably won't go wrong by joining the vertices instead of the whole lines.

Like I said, I didn't figure this out myself for several months, but... hey, it beats deleting and redoing everything. Plus knowing this lets you do things like multi-part sectors, as well as a few cool vanilla tricks.

EDIT : By not joining the sides, and only joining the vertex where the side of the bed and the headboard join, I can then change the certain sidedef references (bed's backsides) and now make my map playable! Now all I have to do is finish the house ... I could even upload my newly completed room if ya want :P

DOUBLE-EDIT: My bed's graphics don't show up, but I walk higher (like I'm on the bed) when I walk onto the sector and when I walk off, the hight change is extended all the way in each direction until a wall is hit ... sorta like an invisible bridge effect ...

I think I'm gonna upload the level and see if anyone can open it up in WadAuthor ('Coz that's what I use) and tell me why the 'bed-sector' is making my whole room weird. Also, open it up in ZDoom ('Coz that's what I use) and see the weird effect for yourself.

I'll have to post a link to the zip file on geocities ...

It's at http://www.geocities.com/adledled/myhouse.zip

PS : You start out on the bed ... so strafe to the right and then marvel in wonder at how you magically fall out of thin air 16 pixels!

deldelda said:

On WadAuthor ...

And I'm trying to make a teleporter for my joke wad in progress ... I do everything the tutorial says, but then i get "back back side-def: side-def is one-sided, but has a back that refers to a sector" what am I supposed to do? make it two-sided?

And say I try to get a bed up against the wall. I will do that, join the vertex and linedefs (maybe that's what I'm doing wrong) and I check for errors and it says "sectors one and two are incomplete". I can't make them both complete without making certain linedefs and vertexes count for more than one sector. (I'm trying to make myhouse.wad here!)

And what is the difference bewteen W1e and WRe (teleporter labels), and all the other different weird labels for doors, etc.?

All you need to do is click on Fix for those, as it will simply make the back of the linedef reference to -1. (which it should for one-sided linedefs)

For the incomplete sectors, you need to make sure their linedefs are all referencing it (as someone else said). Moving the cursor over the sector can help, as if the references are wrong, not all sides of it will light up. (although this doesn't work if the problem is being caused by a two-sided linedef with it's references the wrong way round)

n = no sector tag required (the sector the back of the line is facing is the one affected)
1 = one-off trigger
R = repeatable trigger
e = enemies can trigger it
W = walk activated
S = switch activated
G = gun activated
L = floor/ceiling effect is permanent (unless altered by another trigger)

And I thank you for that list. I'm sure to use it. Especially with lifts.

The invisible bridge thing, I'm told, happens sometimes when you have the backsides facing the main sector (meaning the linedef itself is "facing in"). I've made a habit of always having the linedefs with above/below textures on them face out except in special situations; I haven't had one of those bugs since. Just flip the bed lines, as I'm guessing they're facing "in."

heh, you're right; they're facing in!

EDIT: I flip them out, but nothing happens. If anyone can help, please do.

PS: I've edited the zip fle on my site, so now it shows the level with the linedefs facing out.

Did you save? And when you did, did it rebuild the nodes?

EDIT: Or perhaps it's something else in the room?

You have lines on top of lines. The overlaying "short" lines are also 2-sided and they should be 1-sided to have a chance of "working" - however, you really need to delete the short lines and split the long line to take it's place. WA will not automatically fix this error - doesn't even know there's a problem :)

so i make them one-sided and face IN TO THE BED or OUT TO THE ROOM?

and I'm not sure what nodes are ... I must be a hardcore n00b huh :D

EDIT: Oops, I gues I'll have to make them facing in to the room, otherwise the front sidedefs will have nothing to reference ...

DOUBLE-EDIT: Really big whatthefock!? Now the whole room is weird ... please, someone just download it from the link I posted earlier and make it better ... ugh.

Sounds to me like you keep deleting stuff you shouldn't be deleting. :-P

Maybe I'll take a look at that a bit later...

Well I'm only doing what has been asked of me by you guys ... so if anything's wrong, it YOUR FAULT :D

You also could always try another editor. :P

Yup, and it sure was easy learning to use WadAuthor in the first place ... :rolleyes:

Regardless of the editor, one needs to learn how DOOM levels work. What happens is somewhat like the "imprinting" for ducks (you know, a bit after they are born, whatever they see is their "mother"). So what you do is get very frustrated and finally figure it all out. Then whatever editor you are using will be "your" editor since you used it to figure out the details.

To fix this in WA you need to change the sector references which you do in raw edit mode. Other editors have similar raw modes that let you change sector assignments in sidedefs. It's a required tool in all editors. If all this is meaningless - start at the beginning of this post :)

That doesn't require raw edit mode, you can change that in WA's line properties... as I said a few posts up.

True enough, but he needs to know about he "raw" stuff too:)

All this time I've never bothered to look, but this particular problem is a bit easier to fix if you could change sidedef values (not just sector references). I just noticed that you can't change sidedef values directly - really a "must have" since it makes fixes easier. Or did I miss it?

(btw, what happened here is a very common problem in many levels - the authors are usually unaware of the mistake since usually they luck out).

OK, I have the bed made in my room but the floor is glitchy and the ceiling is a null texture, even though I assigned one. In Jenni's room next door, the bed is perfectly fine, but again, the ceiling is screwy.

Any help.

PS The zip kit is at my site -

http://www.geocities.com/adledled/myhouse.zip

EDIT: I guess a glitchy bed is better than no bed at all!

The bed still has 2-sided walls. You need to remove side2 from lines 6, 30, 22 and 33. That's what I was talking about above.

Interestingly RISEN3D happens to play this map OK.

Ah, for a minute there I thought he meant the lines facing into the room. Duh...

Deldelda: Yeah, you need to turn those lines deep mentioned into one-sided lines. However, WadAuthor should give you errors upon doing this, saying they have bad back side sectors... even if you put -1 in the right box, WadAuthor won't accept it. So just let the error checker find them and tell it to fix all four of them (it'll change them back to -1 for you).

netnomad312 said:

Deldelda: Yeah, you need to turn those lines deep mentioned into one-sided lines. However, WadAuthor should give you errors upon doing this, saying they have bad back side sectors... even if you put -1 in the right box, WadAuthor won't accept it. So just let the error checker find them and tell it to fix all four of them (it'll change them back to -1 for you).

No it won't - as I said earlier, WA (error checker) thinks everything is fine :)

No, it picks up such things. I just did it to his wad and it caught that error. What I wish it WOULDN'T pick up are the "high ceiling problem" and textures like legacy's colormap lines (something you usually have to put up with when making legacy levels)

And of course ZDoom's ##RRGGBB lines for Transfer_Heights and anything to do with the new texture system. (which I was able to reduce partly by having a special version of my wad with all the flats included as textures)

Still, you get used to it. (and unfortunately it's the price to pay for using an easier editor but is never updated)

netnomad312 said:

No, it picks up such things. I just did it to his wad and it caught that error. What I wish it WOULDN'T pick up are the "high ceiling problem" and textures like legacy's colormap lines (something you usually have to put up with when making legacy levels)

Unless he just changed the level, it did not pick up anything wrong at all. You really don't think I'd say that if I didn't run it do you? Besides, I've seen that problem before, especially lines on top of lines - it plain ole won't detect the problem.

Both the 1st version and the 2nd version of the level were exactly the same messages: "map has no exit" and "no deathmatch starts".

I know what you're saying. What WA does not detect are self-refrencing lines... his bed lines were pointing to sector 1 on both front and back. This can be considered a problem, but it also saves me some grief when I want to make rising gates, laser bars and 3d bridges, so I'm not complaining about that.

I meant, once I fixed the problem of two-sided lines, changing them to one-sided, THEN it came up with that. And telling it to fix them set their backsides to -1 like they should be.