What's everyone's opinion of SLADE?

[creaky]

I've recently started making maps and the tutorial I followed recommended SLADE, and I absolutely love it. But I saw a little hate for it when randomly browsing these forums, and I'd like to know what everyone's opinion on it is, before my habits get set in stone and make it hard for me to switch.

 

(I know one issue some people have is all the hotkeys, but I honestly love that. Once you get used to it you can work really fast.)

[Test Tickle]

Slade is THE go-to editor for its category nuff said

[Misty]

Slade is more texture, music and other important lumps editor for me, I only used that for mapping at my early early days when I searched what's the best for me. Gzdoom builder - bugfix or Doom builder x are more suitable for mapping and they are not so hard to get used and there are plenty of tutorials from older Doom builder 2 days, which still apply on newer mentioned versions above. Slade as mapping tool and eureka only used if you work on linux or any other non windows os or you're stubborn enough to stay here. 

[Barry Burton]

I have a love/hate relationship with Slade. It has a tendency to just flat out not work. I used to work strictly out of a .pk3, but more often than not, Slade would never save my changes, or at least not all of them, so I'd end up fixing things for no reason. Now, I work out of a folder, then build to a .pk3 when I'm ready.

 

One example was a graphic on the HUD I imported into Dreadnought. I had resized the HUD and made higher res images to replace the lower res ones, then imported them into Slade. The next day, my armor meter would not work. My SBARINFO code was correct, the image was in the .pk3... It just kept showing a blank image whenever I got armor. What was wrong?

 

It turns out the graphic I imported earlier and saved, never actually saved, so the old graphic was still there. If you do a DrawBar command in SBARINFO, it expects two images that are the same exact size, and I had a new graphic for the "full" bar and the original graphic for the "empty" bar. Very frustrating. I thought I had made some erroneous change somewhere and didn't know where the root cause was, and it turned out to be a graphic the whole time.

[Solmyr]

Slade is a fantastic program, much better than XWE, however i don't use it for mapping, only for texture editing, importing graphics, music, writing SNDINFO, DECORATE, ZSCRIPT, ZMAPINFO entries. 

[Liberation]

I use Slade for mapping and have done for 3 years or so. It's perfectly good to use, however does lack a few features that GZDoom builder has which can be annoying, curve tool, stair builder and grid rotation as a few examples. But generally it's pretty good and seems pretty stable.

 

The only time it really falls down is when making fancy UDMF maps with 3d bits and bobs. 3d slopes are a no go and a lack of 3d floors in the 3d mode makes life difficult when compared to GZBD.

 

I prefer using it over GZDB, but it does have it's shortcomings.

 

9 hours ago, Misty said:

 you're stubborn enough to stay here. 

 

Oi! :-P

[inkoalawetrust]

It crashes all the time for me even by something as simple as trying to close it so i avoid using it and instead use pk3 files, because i can edit those with something like WinRAR which doesn't constantly crash.  But when there's something like a doom format graphic or audio file i can only really use SLADE to see it. Plus i obviouly still need SLADE if i want to look into or extract something from a .wad but besides that i avoid using it.

[Doomkid]

Man I freaking love SLADE for the most part. Converting stupid old MUS files into MIDI with ease, converting GIFs or PNGs to Doom's native sprite format, easily moving lumps between WADs.. All this shit that used to require me to draw a big pentagram on my floor in goats blood, learn an ancient chant and summon some mythical demon of Doom modding.. now I can just do it in a matter of clicks. The UI and general functionality is similar enough to XWE so that making the switch wasn't too hard.

 

The only thing I still use XWE for is exporting sprites/patches as BMPs. SLADE seems to be limited to Doom's image format or PNG. Since everyone seems to use PNG these days, I assume I'm the only one on the planet who cares, so I haven't bothered requesting it.

 

XWE also has rudimentary ENDOOM editing capabilities, but there are better ENDOOM/ASCII editors out there. It's pointless nowadays, but XWE also acts as a frontend for MIDI2MUS and MUS2MID, but between SLADE and Midi3Mus, that feature is entirely depreciated.

 

So uh yeah, SLADE is great. IDK how it is for mapping, I use the Doom Builder family for that, but it is the best lump manager for Doom ever made, bar none.

[Maximum Matt]

Never liked that band.