Some Basic DeHackEd Help

[Patrick]

Well, i feel a bit spoiled playing ZDoom lately, and I want to see what I can accomplish by means of DeHacked. I want to make a weapons mod that works with plain chocolate doom and I have some questions:

What is the most user-friendly DeHacked editing program? I currently have WhackEd2. How Do I replace Doom sprites in chocolate doom? I saw that esselfortium made bullet casings. It would be majorly awesome if someone could help explain how that works to me.

[esselfortium]

WHackEd2 is what I've used for KDiKDiZD's dehacked work. There are a few things I'd like to see added to it, like the ability to sort frames into a custom order so I can keep stuff together even if it's actually spread all across the frame table, but for the most part it's pretty nice.

In order for vanilla Doom to load custom textures or sprites, you needed to use a program such as DeuSF to merge the other IWAD resources into your wad. Chocolate Doom has a parameter that emulates this, which is -merge. Use it instead of -file when you load your wads with custom resources. (I just use it with all the wads I load in choco, to be on the safe side, since it works anyway.)

To make bullet casings, I set the BFG's ammo usage amount to 0 (I think this is in the Miscellaneous window in WHackEd2, IIRC), made the BFG ball affected by gravity, had it do 0 damage, and set it to use one frame that has no codepointer (with the appropriate sprite, of course, and with the length set to how long the casing should stick around before disappearing. Remember vanilla has a limit of 128 sprites it can draw in one frame before stuff starts to disappear).

Once this is done, calling the BFG-firing codepointer from any weapon will make it eject a bullet casing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to prevent bullet casings from putting monsters into their pain state if they're hit, even though they do no damage, so you have to compromise by limiting their speed so that they fall to the ground faster (but not so fast that you can't see them come out, of course).

As there's no way to make the BFG attack codepointer spawn a random object, you can only have one type of bullet casing. I cheated around this by making the 8 angles for KDiKDiZD's bullet casing use 8 different casing sprites (in KDiZD, they were spawned randomly).

Other things to keep in mind are that the player cannot use monsters' attack codepointers, and vice versa. This means that your choices for projectiles are the BFG ball, plasma, and rockets. The rockets fired by the player are the same as the ones fired by the Cyberdemon, so changing them will affect both.

Hope this helps!

[Patrick]

Thanks essel!

these are the guns I have graphics for (from my MaxDoom GZDoom weapons mod) and here's how I want to use them. (1)Baseball Bat / Baretta 9mm (2) Ingram (3) Pump-Action Shotgun (4) Dual Ingram (5) Grenade (6) Sniper Rifle (7)Colt Commando

so, can firing code-pointers be used for all guns? that is, if I wanted all hitscan weapons, could I make them all hit-scan? as for the sniper, could i modify the shotgun so that it has no spread so that it's dead accurate?

[esselfortium]

Yes, you can use any of the player weapon codepointers for any weapon. It will use the ammo type that you've set that weapon to use, 1 ammo per shot (unless it's the BFG codepointer, which is the only one that allows you to specify otherwise).

I don't remember exactly how it needs to work, but making a gun that doesn't lose accuracy involves removing the Refire frame, so that every shot is the "first" one. You can't change the shotgun or ssg spread, though. For KDiKDiZD's rifle, I just have it fire four dead-accurate pistol bullets each time you fire it. It uses 4 ammo per shot, unfortunately, but I don't think there's anything that can be done about that other than placing ammo accordingly. :P

[Mik57]

Patrick Pineda said:
(1)Baseball Bat / Baretta 9mm

... Scout weapons? Either way sounds cool.

[Death-Destiny]

Patrick Pineda said:

(1)Baseball Bat

Hey, didn't Sargeant Cortez from TimeSplitters: Future Perfect have a baseball bat for a weapon in one of the time periods. It was actually pretty good if I remember correctly...

[myk]

esselfortium said:
In order for vanilla Doom to load custom textures or sprites, you needed to use a program such as DeuSF to merge the other IWAD resources into your wad. Chocolate Doom has a parameter that emulates this, which is -merge. Use it instead of -file when you load your wads with custom resources. (I just use it with all the wads I load in choco, to be on the safe side, since it works anyway.)

This is a crappy way to do it if a DeHackEd patch is already being used (I'm saying this because Patrick said he wants to use plain Doom with DeHackEd). Chocolate Doom may have a (new) -merge parameter, but making something for Chocolate Doom equals making something for Doom, which needs to append the complementary sprites to go with any replacement sprites using DeuSF (merging to an IWAD is an older and totally deprecated method).

Instead, give new names to the sprite roots of the things replaced through DeHackEd's F7 (for example, TROO to LULZ), place the new sprites between SS_START and S_END, and Doom will read them without appending or other bullshit.

Custom textures never need DeuSF, although custom flats with new names do unless they are placed between FF_START and F_END. Any Doom compatible WAD should use those markers for them to avoid having to use DeuSF to append the IWAD's patches to the PWAD.

If my post isn't clear, see these links:
http://youfailit.net/pub/idgames/docs/editing/sftechs.txt
http://www.doomworld.com/tutorials/fx2.php