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LigH

Printing levels - any recommendable tool?

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Which of the many Doom WAD editors, converters etc. can you recommend for printing or exporting Doom levels in a configurable way?

I'd like to contribute to the Doom Wiki and create map pictures with easily recognisable structures, so I would need e.g. different line widths or even colors to display outer walls and possibly even hidden areas and secret triggers.

For now the "best" I have are still Doom HPGL or some Doom PS Map tools. Wad2PDF is neither configurable nor distinctive, unfortunately.

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You can hit your Print Screen key, then paste it into your favorite image editor and save in whatever format you like...

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This would result in a low quality image, possibly even incomplete (still hidden secrets), depending on the engine used.

I would definitely prefer a dedicated printing or exporting feature.

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Oh, you want to print the in-game map out? I'm confused, as your first post talks about printing from map editors.

Again, I would just open up the map in say Doom Builder, zoom to the bit you want to print (or out to the whole thing), print screen and make it look nice in whatever image program. You can highlight sectors by selecting them, so for example if I wanted secrets to be highlighted in yellow in Doom Builder:

Tools > Preferences > Appearance > Display > Selection
Select the color you want things to be highlighted in, e.g. yellow, then go into sectors mode and select all your secrets, and print screen that.

If you have a monitor made any time in the last decade, it won't be low resolution.

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No, I do *NOT* want to print in-game maps. That's why I replied that this would result in bad quality and incomplete content. Of course I would prefer a print from a map editor, or at least a "map printer/exporter/converter".

Unfortunately I can't use Doom Builder. For some reason, it doesn't recognise the WAD file I want to open with it, it provides me no loadable maps - just an empty list (and I tried 3 different versions of Doom Builder 64 on both the EX and the TC WAD).

The best display I got so far is from SLADE, quite well configurable, although I can only take screenshots; but they are at least anti-aliased.

The search goes on. But maybe I will write my own map printer in the meantime. The WAD specs are well documented. And some output to a portable vector format should be possible too. With a bit luck I might even be able to process the DOOM64.WAD of Doom 64 EX -- a crazy modification, being a concatenation of several IWADs instead of one whole (let's see if it contains more surprises).

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LigH said:

The best display I got so far is from SLADE, quite well configurable, although I can only take screenshots; but they are at least anti-aliased.

You mean the SLADE3 map preview? I don't think there is anything else than it and DB2 64 that can show the Doom64 EX maps.

I was thinking about a button to generate a PNG file from the canvas image...

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@ Mancubus II:

Reading the starting post again reminds:

LigH said:

Wad2PDF is neither configurable nor distinctive, unfortunately.


The project is closed and doesn't accept new requests. And it is written in a language I don't know good enough to continue from there.
__

@ Gez:

So far I only used SLADE 2.00b1 and its CAD view with a custom palette; I must have missed SLADE3.
__

P.S.: SLADE 3 is not yet customizable like SLADE 2, not yet even a map editor again... early beta. I'll stay with SLADE 2 for now.

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LigH said:

P.S.: SLADE 3 is not yet customizable like SLADE 2, not yet even a map editor again... early beta. I'll stay with SLADE 2 for now.


I know; I'm just surprised that you can view the maps at all in SLADE 2. Since the Doom64 EX format is different from both the Doom format and the Hexen format, and I had to code the functions to get the map preview to work with it at all.

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I can load the maps of Doom 64 TC: Absolution.

Not those of Doom 64 EX - that WAD format is not compliant to the official specs how a WAD file should be made: It does not contain one directory for several maps, but is a binary concatenation of many WADs, each with a single map, instead.

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Not really a concatenation; it's just that maps are embedded wads. Kaiser did it so that all lump names would be unique. You can take any wad tool and extract them, and then open these maps in traditional editors, and notice how they won't work for other reasons than the wad format.

And yeah, at the moment, only SLADE3 (which has no problems with embedded archives) and of course DB2 64 can view these maps. Even if SLADE3 is limited to a linedefs-only preview at the moment.

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You are right - "embedded" matches the structure better.

I believe my efforts were rather successful already... on to the next steps.

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spicyjack said:

Have you seen wad2svg yet?


I should have tested before I opened my yap, it only draws two lines at the moment :(

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Yes ... that's about the kind of result I'm looking for. Go on, looks promising.

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No, the size of the map isn't the reason. I've found why it does that. I'll see how I can try to fix it.

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Printing maps with Deepsea gives the options of printing to printer or printing to file as an XPS document. And depending on which mode, things - linedef - sector, is selected, it prints that screen.

The example, it's full screen size, is of things in graphical mode.

http://i56.tinypic.com/icssg7.png

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Gez said:

No, the size of the map isn't the reason. I've found why it does that. I'll see how I can try to fix it.

"Fixed".


Anybody knows about a simple and working method to render an image larger than the viewport? I tried this, it didn't work. I tried moving the viewport around and redrawing, it didn't work either. I tried using glTranslated calls instead of moving the viewport, and it still didn't work (though at least there was a visible effect this time).

In the meantime, here's this.

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No, I did not get lost. If at all, then in my job...

I am still working on my tool, just with little time for a while. Finally found that ID10T error and advanced a good step. Still need to learn about telling apart subsectors, but it already shows something recognisable. Hopefully. Not yet correct, but not far from it either.



The "red sector" is a sample of the possible customization (here for sector type 9 = "secret sector"). Lines already have many more ways prepared (colors, widths, styles), are just not yet printed out ... first I will need to overhaul the whole system already.

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I'm just surprised its taken as long as it has for a WAD to SVG tool to be realized. I mean, its just so obviously useful.

@Gez
The easiest approach would likely be a direct render to texture.

My personal opinion is that an SVG is much more useful than a bitmap. Plus there are libraries out there for loading and rendering them using OpenGL.

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Just wishful thinking.



Would be great though if any map would be rendered like this out of the box, just by clicking 'print'. :-)

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GhostlyDeath said:

SVG would be the best, although you can't print textures reliably on it you can represent the lines super easy.

If said hypothetical WAD2SVG app wrapped a GL nodebuilder like glBSP and used the GL nodes, then it would be much easier to apply textures when rendering the SVGs built from it.

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Oh good, I wasn't talking out of my ass after all. Click on the images below for larger versions.

MAP01 & E1M1


Run with:

perl wad2svg -m MAP01 /path/to/DOOM2.WAD > map01.svg
perl wad2svg -m E1M1 /path/to/doom.wad > e1m1.svg
wad2svg requires the SVG Perl module. Most Linux distros should have it available via a package of some sort, and if not, you can install it directly from CPAN.

The size of the output image is controlled at the top of the main wad2svg script, I've replaced the author's defaults (250x250) with:
my ($xsize,$ysize) = (1000,1000);
Converted to PNG via Inkscape. Google Chrome and I think Firefox will render SVG files now without a plugin.

The website for wad2svg is http://doombsp.sourceforge.net/wad2svg/

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I had little time in the last months, but the project is not yet abandoned.

The more I work at it, the more I get confused what it takes to be able to display sectors correctly. It appears to me that to avoid floodfill desasters I will need to draw subsectors. But it is not at all trivial to gather all required information about them. They may be surrounded partially by segments, but also partially by node split lines. And collecting all subsectors which are part of the same sector is a hell of backtracking.

So I fear I will have to overhaul my code a few more times before I can paint filled polygons correctly.

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