Makeing a new main wad

[cyber-menace]

I have some maps that I made for Doom 2 and a couple made for Zdoom. I tried putting them all into a main Wad with WinDEU, but Zdoom crashes when I try to play the level made for Zdoom. Can I put files of two different kinds into a wad? If so HOW? and would I need a different program than WinDEU to do it?

[Biffy]

I doubt you can have zdoom-specific and vanilla doom maps combined in a single wad. You should be able to run your vanilla doom maps through zwadconv.exe and then merge them with the other zdoom wads. I never used WinDEU, it may be able to do this job, but so can Wintex, XWE and DeePsea.

[Epyo]

How to merge wads: With special guest, XWE.exe
1. download it from this site
2. open your wad
3. click file => Merge
4. pick your wad you want to merge with this wad, and
5. Your done!

[ReX]

Epyo said:

How to merge wads: With special guest, XWE.exe

I didn't realize that XWE would automatically convert the lindef, sector, and other specials from vanilla DooM to ZDooM when merging DooM/2.exe and ZDooM.exe wad files. (I thought only Zwadconv.exe could be used for that.) If that's the case, then Csabo is indeed powerful.

[Epyo]

Did I say that? Heh, you gotta go through zwadconv first I meant. Yeah.

[Csabo]

Actually XWE does that. You can change a map from 'regular' style to 'zdoom' style while in the Map Editor. (Use Map | Doom Format or ZDoom format) With just one little problem: when you change to ZDooM format, a new extra entry (BEHAVIOR of course) needs to be written after the other map entries, and XWE just overwrites whatever entry is there... It's not a problem if the map is at the end, or what you can do as a workaround is add a new untitled entry and move it up after the map. Deep has pointed this out so long ago, but I still haven't fixed it. I'll try to fix it for the next version.

But you can definitely merge doom/zdoom format maps into one WAD, and XWE will edit all maps. This is something the annoyed me to no end in WadAuthor: it always complained about wrong project format and whatnot. So when I wrote XWE I made sure to have a 'just-open-and-edit-without-all-the-bs' approach. You can change the format on the fly, and you can change the configuration on the fly as well.

[cyber-menace]

I didn't know you had to convert all of the old maps first! This would have been HELPFUL information from the begginning. So I have to convert the 13 older maps with zwadconv for map 14 to work. Ok sounds easy enough. I'll give it a try!

[cyber-menace]

Deepsea really told me why the game was crashing! When WinDEU merged the maps it would delete the BEHAVIOUR causing the map to take a horrible new form! XWE solved this problem and now my maps work perfectly! Thanks for all of your help everybody!

[ReX]

Csabo said:

You can change a map from 'regular' style to 'zdoom' style while in the Map Editor.

I knew that you could change map formats on the fly while within XWE. The question is what happens when you merge DooM/ZDooM format maps into a single wad? Read on ....

But you can definitely merge doom/zdoom format maps into one WAD, and XWE will edit all maps.

Does this mean that when you merge a DooM wad into a ZDooM wad, it automatically creates one or more BEHAVIOR lumps for the DooM maps? (Because it sounded to me like it creates this only when changing the format of a DooM map that's already opened, not when such a map is merged with a ZDooM one. Just clarifying.)
If there is more than one DooM map, does XWE create BEHAVIOR lumps for each map or only one lump for the last map? If that's the case, what happens if a multi-map DooM map is merged with a ZDooM map?

Please clarify. Thanks.

[Csabo]

ReX: It doesn't create a BEHAVIOR lump for doom maps automatically. That would 'mess up' that map. When the BEHAVIOR lump is present, the format of the map is assumed to be ZDoom - and since the format is not converted during the merge, adding it would cause a problem.

When you merge WADs, all the maps stay as they were. If you want, you can change the Doom format maps to ZDoom after the merge. Although it's not a problem for XWE or ZDoom to have different format maps within the WAD.

[deathz0r]

Biffy said:

I doubt you can have zdoom-specific and vanilla doom maps combined in a single wad.

The Mock 2 wad has vanilla and zdoom-specific maps in it, so it is definitely possible to have both formats in the same wad, but I wouldn't recommend trying to run it in doom2.exe.