Are the editors becoming unsupported software?

For years i've been using various computers and operating systems. I've almost always had an issue with various editors, namely DeePsea with the system crashing. And now i have Vista, which is the trashiest thing i've tried.

I have issues with all the Doom editors that i downloaded in the past few months- Doom Builder 1 and 2, XWE, etc. The support for DB is crappy- they haven't replied to my forum post about not being able to run various versions which is related to the installation of .NET framework. XWE doesn't seem to work properly. I loaded my doom.wad and it simply said "0 selected 0 total, Opened DOOM.WAD 0 entries" and there's nothing in the box area. I don't have a problem with WinTex, i just don't know how to use it to extract textures to a folder.

All i want to do is get back into the world of Doom, but I can't do that if i can't use a level editor or texture extractor.

Strange, Doom Builder 2 works fine on my Vista install. What is your problem exactly? (The actual error message)

http://doombuilder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=483&sid=71d3e1f3f153c2e364d17fd5d70d287f

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=28225&p=551366#p551260
Try this.

How do I uninstall SlimDX? I don't see it in the uninstall list.

Kracov said:

How do I uninstall SlimDX? I don't see it in the uninstall list.

If you do not see it listed, it is not installed.
I replied to your post on the Doombuilder forum.

Kracov said:

The support for DB is crappy- they haven't replied to my forum post about not being able to run various versions which is related to the installation of .NET framework.

How dare they! If I were you I'd demand a refund of the purchase price!

Kracov said:

XWE doesn't seem to work properly. I loaded my doom.wad and it simply said "0 selected 0 total, Opened DOOM.WAD 0 entries" and there's nothing in the box area. I don't have a problem with WinTex, i just don't know how to use it to extract textures to a folder.

All i want to do is get back into the world of Doom, but I can't do that if i can't use a level editor or texture extractor.

Try this instead of XWE.

Gez, I ran an old version of Slige but it doesn't seem to work. I can't create lines, sectors, etc. and I don't know how to extract textures, if it has that feature.

SLADE and SLIGE are completely different things. SLIGE is an old random level generator.

The current version of SLADE is also very different from its predecessors, since SLADE 1 and SLADE 2 are map editors while SLADE 3 is a resource manager. (It will be a map editor eventually, but that's not implemented yet.) SLADE 3 is intended to become an all-in-one Doom modding suite, but the priority was put on resource management since DB2 is a very serviceable map editor.

So, get SLADE 3.0.1 from its website and you should be able to view textures and sprites and all that stuff.

If you want a random level generator, by the way, you should rather look at OBLIGE. It's much better. The only problem is that its author keep restarting from scratch every time the current iteration reaches halfway to feature completion. :p

Sorry Gez, i confused them with each other. I meant that I downloaded the link you provided. Anyway, Slade doesn't seem to work. The only reason why I got an old version of Slade is because I'm not sure if i have VB 2010. I'm just tired of having to download extra stuff that may not work or corrupt my system. It's not even my computer.

The VC2010 runtimes won't break your computer I'm pretty sure :P It just installs a couple of dll files.

the only version of VB i could find is Visual Basic 2010 Express, which is a trial program. It says it ends after 30 days.

Unless I'm really confused as to what you're trying to do, you don't need VB. VB is a programming IDE.

What you need is the one of the Visual C++ Runtimes linked at the bottom of this page.

Install the latest version of SLADE 3, and install this.

Kracov said:

I don't have a problem with WinTex, i just don't know how to use it to extract textures to a folder.

I don't know how to do that either, but you can extract the patch graphics that make up the textures by opening a WAD file, clicking on Select | Patches, then clicking one of the entries in the bar on the left-hand side, then Edit | Save Entries to File. Then you can save that patch as a .BMP file.

You don't need to install Visual Basic (SLADE 3 isn't written in Basic anyway) or Visual C++; you just need the runtime DLL. They're not trial or whatever, they're just .dll files that will sit there and be quiet; only being used when a program specifically calls them.

Thanks Gez. I installed the visual c files and got slade 3 running. I didn't know what to do though, so i went to the wiki. It mentions that it is for Alpha Doom files to be converted to Doom 1/2 games (or others). It makes me ashamed that I know virtually nothing about the Doom editors. But then again, I haven't used much of them over the years since i just used Deepsea and Doom Builder.

Kracov said:

It mentions that it is for Alpha Doom files to be converted to Doom 1/2 games (or others).

It's just an example.

I tried it all myself by opening doom.wad- "error opening ...doom.wad. unsupported or invalid archive format"
I've clicked on all the buttons- new wad archive, etc
nothing happens when i click on most of the buttons.

Kracov, I share your pain; I am relatively new to Doom editing and the computer world as a whole has moved on from me. XWE worked ok on my Vista laptop last year, although I did find certain things frustrating, but it doesn't work at all now and the XWE download links all seem to be dead.

I managed to install Slade 3 thanks to the advice in this thread and I'm going to tinker with it now... but I guess that learning this stuff is a long and painful process, and we are in the company of people who have been Doom mapping for a decade or more.

You gotta get yourself a copy of DEU 5.21, man. It's the shit and blows all the other stuff away. Plus, it'll teach you so much that you'll soon be able to instantly diagnose and fix crashing bugs the quick & easy way: by simply opening your map in a hex editor, so you don't even have to rebuild nodes, etc. And that's how real men made Doom levels back in the day before DEU existed, or the really poor dudes who only had Hercules graphics cards and played text-mode Doom.

hex11 said:

And that's how real men made Doom levels back in the day before DEU existed, or the really poor dudes who only had Hercules graphics cards and played text-mode Doom.

Those of us who couldn't afford computers had to settle for drawing and playing on graph paper with paper-mache monsters.

@MajorRawne - this link still works.