SKY Textures

Hello, I am looking for some decent sky textures for a Heretic wad I am working on. I've looked on Google and all I found was nothing but talk about skyboxes and such. I tried using a photo from the internet, inserted it in the wad with correct resolution and nothing but black was the sky.

Then I tried to reduce it to 256 colors, and that made it look even worse. I can't make any good looking skies on my own either, I prefer to use a dark and cloudy sky than a happy blue sky.

Real skies may not look so good converted... You also can't just convert it to 256 colors in general, it likely needs to be converted using Heretic's palette so the picture is using correct color indexes.

hobomaster22 said:

Real skies may not look so good converted... You also can't just convert it to 256 colors in general, it likely needs to be converted using Heretic's palette so the picture is using correct color indexes.

How would I go about converting the picture with Heretic's palette? I'm using ZDoom, does it support higher res pictures? Here's what I'm trying to use.

Well, right off the bat I can say that that isn't going to work well as a sky, because it doesn't tile properly. What I mean is that if you put two copies of it next to itself, it doesn't appear continuous. Unless you or someone else edits it to tile seamlessly, your sky will look like this ingame:

esselfortium said:

Well, right off the bat I can say that that isn't going to work well as a sky, because it doesn't tile properly. What I mean is that if you put two copies of it next to itself, it doesn't appear continuous. Unless you or someone else edits it to tile seamlessly, your sky will look like this ingame:

I got it working and that tiling effect was my result. So I edited the picture to tile better, and ZDoom gives me an error now.

Execution could not continue.

Bad PNAMES and/or texture directory:

PNAMES has 93 entries, but
CRACKLE2 wants to use entry 94.

Okay, if it's for ZDoom, stop using PNAMES/TEXTUREx stuff, it's much better to create your texture in a TEXTURES lump (the text one), this way you can tell it to use a graphic by name instead of by number.

Because you're obviously doing it wrong with the PNAMES/TEXTUREx approach, so you'll have less chances of screwing up this way.

Gez said:

Okay, if it's for ZDoom, stop using PNAMES/TEXTUREx stuff, it's much better to create your texture in a TEXTURES lump (the text one), this way you can tell it to use a graphic by name instead of by number.

Because you're obviously doing it wrong with the PNAMES/TEXTUREx approach, so you'll have less chances of screwing up this way.

How do I go about doing that? All I did was load the SKY1 picture into the Patch directory with XWE, is SKY1 a PNAME? How would I create the TEXTURES lump? I've mapped before but never really did much internal editing with XWE so I don't know too much. I deleted the new SKY1 and I still get the same error.

Deleting SKY1 was definitely a bad idea for future reference. Just start with a clean, unmodified base and add the texture in XWE by saving as a .bmp with a name like "CSKY", going to the "PATCHES" tab on the bottom bar, double clicking and choosing "CSKY.bmp" in the directory. That should place it in your "TEXTURE1" Lump. Save this new wad with a creative name say, "NEWWAD.WAD" From there, in your map editor, there should be an option to add textures from an outside wad (In DB2 this happens at start up). Choose the wad you made in XWE and then in the texture browser it should list "CSKY" as an option.

Or, you have a completely separate issue and my instructions won't help at all. Good luck!

th3malleus said:

Deleting SKY1 was definitely a bad idea for future reference. Just start with a clean, unmodified base and add the texture in XWE by saving as a .bmp with a name like "CSKY", going to the "PATCHES" tab on the bottom bar, double clicking and choosing "CSKY.bmp" in the directory. That should place it in your "TEXTURE1" Lump. Save this new wad with a creative name say, "NEWWAD.WAD" From there, in your map editor, there should be an option to add textures from an outside wad (In DB2 this happens at start up). Choose the wad you made in XWE and then in the texture browser it should list "CSKY" as an option.

Or, you have a completely separate issue and my instructions won't help at all. Good luck!

I deleted the SKY1 in the pwad, but I still have the original. I fixed the problem by deleting TEXTURES1 in the PWAD and had a backup just in case it did something bad. Turns out it solved my problem perfectly, I'll have to be more careful about how I import my stuff from now on. Thanks for all the help anyways.

Also solved the lapping problem by copying the picture, pasting right next to it and flipping it over. After that I edited it to look less like an ink blot.