How do I make my wad file work? [with color-edited sprites]

[Videogamer555]

I first did a palette edit on the plasma gun shots in the ORIGINAL Doom.wad. It worked. I could see the new colors in my plasma shot. YAY! Realizing though I can't LEGALLY redistribute this wad file I put the color edited sprites into my own wad file and replaced the altered Doom.wad file with the unedited original. I then used this command line to run it.

doom.exe -file MyHack.wad

I ran it and used the IDFA cheat to get the plasma gun to test it, and switched guns to plasma gun by pressing "6". So far so good. But then I pressed the CTRL key to fire, and BOOM the game crashed, sending me right back to the DOS prompt, and giving this error:
"R_DrawSpriteRange: bad texturecolumn"

What is going on here? Please help me fix this.

[Hellbent]

Try running it using a port like Zdoom?

[Videogamer555]

Many will have an alternate port, but many won't. I want my wad with sprites to work in the original DOS version of Doom made by ID Software. I'm trying to achieve compatibility here. How do I do this? is it even possible?

[Grazza]

If the sprites worked when they were in the iwad, but not when in the pwad, then it sounds like the problem isn't with the sprites or colors themselves.

So, this sounds like it is because the sprites all need to be in the same wad for the original Doom exe to use them. To solve this, you'll need to use deusf (you probably already have it; if not, you can download it). The command line is as follows:

deusf -app MyHack.wad

This needs to be run with the iwad (doom.wad) in the same folder as deusf.exe and MyHack.wad (or whatever you have called your pwad). It does not change the iwad - it adds stuff from it to your pwad.

Then it should work. But note that you shouldn't upload the wad with the sprites appended in this way. Distribute it with deusf.exe included and note in the text-file that this will be needed if you want to use doom.exe. Most port users won't need to bother, while this will be a familiar process to those who use Doom.exe.

[Videogamer555]

Are you sure the deusf command is -app, not -add? The only documented command line param even SIMILAR to -app is actually -append. Does -app work the same way? Well anyway I used -merge (which replaced the sprites in the Iwad with my modified version) and that worked when running doom.exe like regular (basically it makes doom the modded verison when running the bat file).

You can download my "green plasma mod" from here
http://www.mediafire.com/?9652e5guu5agu16

It replaces the blue color associated with the plasma gun with green. The desired sprites were ripped from the doom.wad iwad, and using photoshop were palette swapped then inserted into a separate file a pwad called myhack.wad. Unzip all 3 files into your Doom folder and run modinst.bat to cause deusf to run with the -merge param, which will replace the specific sprites in doom.wad with the the corresponding sprites in myhack.wad

Then just run doom.exe like regular to run the now modded version of the game. use the cheat IDFA to quickly get access to all weapons and press "6" to switch to plasma gun. Notice the shots and explosions are green now, instead of blue.

[Grazza]

Yes, it's -app to append stuff from the iwad to the pwad.

Don't use -merge, as this alters your iwad, which is highly undesirable.

[Videogamer555]

Grazza said:

Yes, it's -app to append stuff from the iwad to the pwad.

Don't use -merge, as this alters your iwad, which is highly undesirable.

Well I always keep a backup copy of my iwad incase the merge fails and corrupts my iwad.

[Videogamer555]

Well I have another problem now
I just realized that doom requires ALL graphics to use the SAME shared palette. I'm using XWE to extract the sprites or other graphics for editing in Photoshop. And when I then try to insert my edited graphics using the "add" or "replace" commands it AUTOMATICALLY converts to the doom palette and performs "nearest color" indexing to try to match the image colors to the doom palette (often making the picture look UGLY!) if the palette I used for the image when saving the BMP file (which I then imported into the WAD using the program XWE) isn't EXACTLY the same as the doom palette.

When I INSTEAD use the option "add (raw)" or "replace (raw)" in XWE it does NOT do any palette conversion, but then Doom crashes when trying to load the graphic! As I said, it seems doom REQUIRES that images use a shared palette and an EXACT shared palette too, the one that Doom was originally programmed with! PLEASE help me find a trick so I can use ANY palette with ANY image in Doom.

[Gez]

Videogamer555 said:

Well I have another problem now
I just realized that doom requires ALL graphics to use the SAME shared palette. I'm using XWE to extract the sprites or other graphics for editing in Photoshop. And when I then try to insert my edited graphics using the "add" or "replace" commands it AUTOMATICALLY converts to the doom palette and performs "nearest color" indexing to try to match the image colors to the doom palette (often making the picture look UGLY!) if the palette I used for the image when saving the BMP file (which I then imported into the WAD using the program XWE) isn't EXACTLY the same as the doom palette.

When I INSTEAD use the option "add (raw)" or "replace (raw)" in XWE it does NOT do any palette inversion, but then Doom crashes when trying to load the graphic!

Serves you right for using XWE instead of SLADE3. :p

Videogamer555 said:

As I said, it seems doom REQUIRES that images use a shared palette and an EXACT shared palette too, the one that Doom was originally programmed with! PLEASE help me find a trick so I can use ANY palette with ANY image in Doom.

Doom does nto require any specific palette, but it uses the same palette for all graphics. The whole renderer was written to work in 256-color mode; you can't add more colors or different palettes.

The only "trick" you can hope to find, therefore, is using a source port with a different renderer, for example GZDoom. You will have to convert your BMP images to PNG, though: BMP do not have offset information, and therefore won't be displayed right. Sprites need to have offsets otherwise the engine won't know where to render them.

SLADE3 can do all that by the way: it can convert to PNG format, it can set offsets, and it keeps offset through conversion.

The reason you need to use a PNG image is so that the image contains its own palette. Doom's built-in image formats (flat and patch) do not contain palette information at all, just which index are used by each pixel. This saves a lot of space and it allows to use special palette effect (the PLAYPAL lump contains 34 different palettes). But as a result, you can't use anything outside of the palette.

(The reason I don't like XWE is that it perpetuates misconceptions by doing everything automatically even when we don't want them to be done, such as the autoconversion to Doom palette unless you use the "import as raw data" option. Among the misconceptions it propagates are that "the Doom image format is BMP" (no it's not) or "index 247 is transparent" (no it's not) or that "cyan is transparent" (no it's not; it's not even in the palette). SLADE3 on the other hand only does what you tell it to do; and it tells you clearly which format is used by an entry. So you can see that "Image (BMP)" is not the same as "Image (Doom Gfx)". You are free to convert if you want, or not. With SLADE3, you are fully in-control of the data lumps.)

[Videogamer555]

Gez said:
SLADE3

http://www.doomworld.com/classicdoom/utils/editors.php does not have Slade3, only Slade2 (which can NOT edit sprites, only maps). Were can I get Slade3?

[tempun]

http://slade.mancubus.net

[Videogamer555]

tempun said:

http://slade.mancubus.net

I don't want to have to install the required MS Visual C++ 2010 runtime. In order to not get unneeded reg entries added at install-time try to AVOID performing installations when possible (i.e. when I could just unzip the needed files). Could someone please zip up the needed DLL files and upload the zip file to Megaupload and post the download link here. Thanks.

[Gez]

You can get the SVN build, they're built with MSVC2005 and therefore don't require the 2010 runtimes.
http://slade-editor.wikia.com/wiki/SLADE_Wiki
http://svn.drdteam.org/slade/

[tempun]

Gez said:

You can get the SVN build, they're built with MSVC2005 and therefore don't require the 2010 runtimes.
http://slade-editor.wikia.com/wiki/SLADE_Wiki
http://svn.drdteam.org/slade/

However they require 2005's runtimes.

[Gez]

Maybe, but chances are you'll have them already installed. Nobody ever reported needing to download a special DLL to use the SVN builds of SLADE3, Eternity, ZDoom or GZDoom.

[Videogamer555]

tempun said:

However they require 2005's runtimes.

AND they require compiling. I'm looking ONLY for precompiled binaries.

[Gez]

Videogamer555 said:

AND they require compiling. I'm looking ONLY for precompiled binaries.

http://svn.drdteam.org/slade/

[Videogamer555]

Gez said:

http://svn.drdteam.org/slade/
spam
spam
spam
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I just figured that out, but couldn't delete my previous post.




And yeah it is more raw showing what's there, and not trying to guess what the user wants, BUT that also means it doesn't properly display color (instead shows color index value 0-255 as actual grayscale 0-255). Please help me.

AND it can't convert to PNG or BMP uppon export of grapics, nor convert standard images to DOOM images on import. AND it automatically nor manually let me add an SS_* marker for sprites. It's basically SO unlike XWE that it is absolutely NOT USER FRIENDLY IN ANY WAY!!!!!!!!!!

[Gez]

You've got a palette chooser in the toolbar.

In the image conversion dialog, you've got a palette chooser below both the source image and the destination image, so you can convert from one palette to another.

You can import then convert. It's not complicated. Likewise with convert then export.

You can add lumps manually. There's a "new entry" button on the tool bar as well. Plus in the Archive menu, too.

[tempun]

Gez said:

You can import then convert. It's not complicated. Likewise with convert then export.

the latter can be problematic in iwads (create a new archive, copy lumps, convert, export)