Animated textures/flats Boom

[Alice Jameson]

How do you run the program to create the ANIMATED and SWITCHES lumps from a text file. does this even run in windows? Are there certain parameters? I can't figure this out and there's no tutorial or anything that I can find. Please help.

[Quasar]

It's a command-line program which should be capable of running in Windows XP or earlier. It interprets a script which you have to write which defines the switches and animation sequences. I believe the default ANIMATED and SWITCHES scripts are provided with the normal distribution of the BOOM editing tools.

ZDoom has the ability to just use the scripts (in a modified form) directly, and foregoes the compilation crap, so if you're targetting that port, you can forget about using the program altogether. I hope to support the ZDoom method in EE eventually too, because binary lumps suck.

[Alice Jameson]

So how do you run it?

[Gez]

There's some documentation on swantbls on the ZDoom wiki.
http://zdoom.org/wiki/ANIMATED
http://zdoom.org/wiki/SWITCHES
In fact, that information is enough to write your lumps directly with a hex editor, if you really can't figure swantbls out. :)

The modified form Quasar alludes to actually originated from Hexen, though in ZDoom it has been made more flexible and new features were added.
http://zdoom.org/wiki/ANIMDEFS

[Graf Zahl]

Quasar said:

because binary lumps suck.

How true. Why the Boom developers decided to make it binary will probably remain an eternal mystery...

[esselfortium]

The use of binary lumps for switches and animations in Boom was pretty stupid, for sure, but really it would be perfectly usable if SLumpEd or XWE had the ability to view and edit the lumps in a readable form. SLumpEd can display the ANIMATED lump but not edit it (or has some very minimal form of editing it). Of course it's definitely a better solution for modern ports to use a text-based system, but if the Boom lumps could be modified and created directly inside a lump editor it'd make defining Boom-compat animations 1000x less of a hassle.

[Alice Jameson]

That's true. But I figured out what the problem I had with it was. When I made my batch file I put a "-" in front of the file name like the parameters in Doom but it's not supposed to be there which I figured out a while ago.
So instead of having it:
swantbls -defswani.dat

it's supposed to be:
swantbls defswani.dat

I didn't know that. ^^;

[printz]

Quasar said:

I hope to support the ZDoom method in EE eventually too, because binary lumps suck.

By using EDF?

[esselfortium]

printz said:

By using EDF?

No, by using

the ZDoom method

[printz]

I thought every game definition element was included in EDF (like terrain types, which aren't quite different from animations/switches in scope).

[Graf Zahl]

So?

Why is it so bad to be compatible once in a while?

Besides, ANIMDEFS is needed for Hexen anyway.