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spaztacus

Making animated textures

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Hello Doom Community,
I am trying to make a animated texture. What I want to do is make SFALL upside down, i.e. flowing upward.

I've made new textures with the correct flow, named them different, loaded them into XWE and put it in my map. But the texture does not animate. I've looked at some other wads (scythe 2) which has a WFALL and it does not look like I have done anything wrong.

What am I missing?

Thanks

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Super Jamie said:

For Vanilla, replace the original animated textures. I use DBRAIN for this as it's pretty much nowhere except MAP30.
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Animated_flat
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Animated_wall


It's possible to add new flat and wall animation without replacing any, but it's very tricky to do and i don't know how to do that.
And they can also have more that 4 frames.

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TomoAlien said:

It's possible to add new flat and wall animation without replacing any

No. Any vanilla-compatible attempt to add new animations will necessarily require modification of the animations in the existing "slots".

Well, you could recreate the animation through a series of texture and use scrolling. It would require making 1-unit-wide linedefs... Oh, and there's a limit on the amount of scrollers in vanilla, isn't it? Well, then, forget about it.

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Gez said:

No. Any vanilla-compatible attempt to add new animations will necessarily require modification of the animations in the existing "slots".


Yes, but you can make more "textures" by putting them next to each other in the textures lump.

So instead of one animated texture that is at a total of 64x128, you make 4 64x128 in the same texture that is at a total of 256x128.

You can also give the textures and flats animations more frames by simply adding extra names in between like this.

DBRAIN1
DBRAIN2A
DBRAIN2B
DBRAIN2C
DBRAIN3
DBRAIN4

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Gez said:

No. Any vanilla-compatible attempt to add new animations will necessarily require modification of the animations in the existing "slots".

Not necessarily, the BLODGR, SLADRIP and WFALL texture names are available for use in Doom 2.

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GreyGhost said:

Not necessarily, the BLODGR, SLADRIP and WFALL texture names are available for use in Doom 2.

And inversely the textures used in Doom 2 but not Doom 1 are likewise available in Doom 1... That's still using existing slots. (As for WFALL, it's a leftover and used in neither.)

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Plutonia? Never heard of it. ;)

Gez said:

And inversely the textures used in Doom 2 but not Doom 1 are likewise available in Doom 1... That's still using existing slots. (As for WFALL, it's a leftover and used in neither.)

We appear to arguing at cross-purposes. What I'm suggesting is that Spaztacus use an animation slot that's not required by the IWAD.

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Gez said:

Well, you could recreate the animation through a series of texture and use scrolling. It would require making 1-unit-wide linedefs... Oh, and there's a limit on the amount of scrollers in vanilla, isn't it? Well, then, forget about it.


That's a crazy idea, do you know of any wads that do that?

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40oz said:

That's a crazy idea, do you know of any wads that do that?

The "Doomonstration" or "Demonstration game" wad might have used something like this. I'm not sure. It has used scrollers to do crazy stuff.

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kristus said:

Yes, but you can make more "textures" by putting them next to each other in the textures lump.

So instead of one animated texture that is at a total of 64x128, you make 4 64x128 in the same texture that is at a total of 256x128.

You can also give the textures and flats animations more frames by simply adding extra names in between like this.

DBRAIN1
DBRAIN2A
DBRAIN2B
DBRAIN2C
DBRAIN3
DBRAIN4

Is there a way to make an animation with less frames in Vanilla? I'd like to convert DBRAIN to just three frames.

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I dunno. Maybe it's possible to remove Dbrain2 or 3. But I kinda doubt it. You can just give it 6 frames though and play it twice. Or play each frame two times.

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kristus said:

You can just give it 6 frames though and play it twice.

*facepalm* So obvious, why didn't I think of that. Thanks for the tip!

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Super Jamie said:

Is there a way to make an animation with less frames in Vanilla? I'd like to convert DBRAIN to just three frames.


You can remove all the textures from an original animation other than the first and last textures (i.e. DBRAIN1 and DBRAIN4) as this is all the engine checks.

The engine looks for DBRAIN1 and then cycles through every texture listed after it in the TEXTURE lump until it reaches DBRAIN4 at which point it loops back to DBRAIN1.

Hence, you just have to position the textures DBRAIN1 and DBRAIN4 in your wad's TEXTURE lump so there is nothing between them.

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Vermil said:

You can remove all the textures from an original animation other than the first and last textures (i.e. DBRAIN1 and DBRAIN4) as this is all the engine checks.

The engine looks for DBRAIN1 and then cycles through every texture listed after it in the TEXTURE lump until it reaches DBRAIN4 at which point it loops back to DBRAIN1.

Hence, you just have to position the textures DBRAIN1 and DBRAIN4 in your wad's TEXTURE lump so there is nothing between them.

Right you are! I'd tried to do this before but messed it up somehow, probably left the extra DBRAIN frame in the TEXTURE lump.

Cheers for the help :)

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Bumping this as I feel it is relevant to anyone who might run into the same problem after reading this topic... I've looked up the ANIMATED page on ZDoom wiki and downloaded the SWANTBLS tool, but all I'm getting when I actually run it is a MS-DOS window (or whatever it is, pardon my ignorance when it comes to computers) that immediately closes.

What am I supposed to do with it ?

Edit : Also looked that thread and while it is exactly my problem, everything explained in there is outside of my comprehension.

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SWANTBLS is a command line tool. 99% of the case, when a program just shows a command line window for a fragment of a second and exits immediately, it simply means that it's meant to be used in a command window and given parameters through the command line. It exits immediately because it has nothing to do and quits, and the window is closed once it quits, which is immediately.

Open a command window in the relevant folder and use the command line as explained by the SWANTBLS documentation.

Alternatively, ditch ANIMATED and use an ANIMDEFS lump.

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You need to open a command prompt and enter the parameters on the command line - just in the good old DOS days.

Unfortunately I don't recall the precise parameters so you'd have to wait for someone else if you can't figure it out yourself.

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Open a command window in the relevant folder


Already outside of what I know, but I guess I could look it up on the Internet and probably fail for a few hours. ;)

and use the command line as explained by the SWANTBLS documentation.


The only documentation I've found related to SWANTBLS in that "editutil.zip" was this tidbit in defswani.dat : "This file is input for SWANTBLS.EXE, it specifies the switchnames
# and animated textures and flats usable with BOOM. The output of
# SWANTBLS is two lumps, SWITCHES.LMP and ANIMATED.LMP that should
# be inserted in the PWAD as lumps.
#"

If it is telling me how to use the command line, I'm afraid I simply don't get it.

Thanks anyway, I appreciate your help but all that stuff is way too complicated for me.

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