Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
waverider

Best editor for managing textures?

Recommended Posts

Hello.

I was wondering what editor for adding/removing textures that's recommended? Is there any that's better overall than the others?

And is there any good tutorials available for a good editor?

Would be grateful for help. Made a few searches here at DW without finding anything that I thought matched my questions. I've read about XWE and Slade 3 for instance, not sure how good they are though.

Thanks.

Share this post


Link to post

SLADE3 is still in beta, though it's what I'd recommend at the moment for managing textures.

Note that XWE suffers from a nasty bug which, combined with some carelessness on SLumpEd's part, can destroy texture lumps*. For this reason, I advise to use SLADE3 rather than SLumpEd for texture editing.

The other choices include WadAuthor DeePsea (aging, commercial), WinTex (avoid!), DeuTex (powerful but command-line only)... So yeah, go with SLADE3.

(PS: There's also this which looks promising but it's not publicly available yet.)

* Technical explanation: a texture or patch name is a null-terminated C string, that is to say, a series of characters terminated with a 0 (the value, not the character). It has a maximum length of eight characters (nine, including the terminator), but it can be shorter than that. Let's say it has only four characters, plus NUL. Since the format is static, there are four additional characters that follow. Doom ignores them. Most utilities ignore them as well. XWE, however, does not (possibly because it was not written in C but in Delphi and so its string management routines are different). So what happens is that if these extraneous characters are not all NUL, XWE will "helpfully" make sure that they're part of the name by replacing any preceding NUL by a space. As a result, after a TEXTUREx has been edited by SLumpEd first and XWE second, random garbage characters are inserted all over the PNAMES and TEXTUREx lumps, breaking everything.

Share this post


Link to post
Gez said:

The other choices include WadAuthor (aging, commercial)...

Did you perhaps mean DeepSea? WadAuthor does not have any texture (or wad) management ability, but DeepSea does. [Also note, that while DeepSea is indeed a commercial product, the shareware version allows access to all the wad management features. Plus, it is a very stable wad manager (and map editor, for that matter).

Share this post


Link to post
Gez said:

Note that XWE suffers from a nasty bug which,

Do you also mean the bug which randomly renames a texture with another without undo?

Share this post


Link to post

Gez: Thanks for your help. I've installed SLADE 3 beta 6.

Is the in-program "Online documentation" the tutorial that's recommended for the program, or is there other tutorials available as well?

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×