prefab?

can someone please define prefab please? thanks.

Prefabrication.
Something that's already made, ready-to-go. Usually in level editing this refers to some piece of architecture that is already built and made easy to insert into the map. It's difficult to make prefabs for Doom because the sector heights and floor/ceiling textures will have to be adjusted depending where you place it.

This probably should go in Questions or Editing.

Sorry for the delay in seeing this.

There are 2 kinds of prefabs:

1. Those premade by someone else and stored in an external file.

2. Those created by the tools of an editor. Some simple ones are rectangle and polygon. Beyond that you get into doors, sloped objects and so forth. These prefabs adopt the parent floor height, but the rest is variable.

For type 1, the heights can be adjusted automatically by the editor. DeePsea does this and I think DB copied that.

So yea, prefabs can be quite useful. For DS type 1 prefabs are just any PWAD level. IOW, this can even be used to copy/paste levels together. Probably the same for DB's unique format prefabs.

The autotexture thingy is an interesting variation. That would be fairly easy to also do - however, some prefabs could be troublesome since it could ruin the whole look. So it would have to be another damn option :)

EarthQuake said:

Prefabrication.
Something that's already made, ready-to-go. Usually in level editing this refers to some piece of architecture that is already built and made easy to insert into the map. It's difficult to make prefabs for Doom because the sector heights and floor/ceiling textures will have to be adjusted depending where you place it.

This probably should go in Questions or Editing.

still, it's easier to modify it to fit than make it from scratch for some complex structures.