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Lutz

Iron Lich Sprite Replacement

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(BTW, this is going to make me look dumb, but oh well.)

I'm trying to replace the Iron Lich sprites with some different ones, and having no luck at all. Using WinTEX, I added S_START and S_END to my graphics .WAD file, then imported HEADA1...HEADI0 from saved bitmaps. However, when I run with this wad (in ZDoom), I see no changes to the sprites at all. I've removed the S_START and S_END (as well as the other entries in my graphics .WAD), but I still do not see a change. What am I doing wrong?

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Interesting, I just noticed that Doom and Heretic both use the same sprite names for the Cacodemon and Iron Lich. I bet if you summoned a Cacodemon, it would use the sprites. I'm not sure how you would go about specifying which monster the sprites belong to.

You failed to mention though, are you trying to use Iron Liches in Doom, or are you making a Heretic mod?

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EarthQuake said:

or are you making a Heretic mod?



More importantly, is this mod ZDoom only? If no, you have to add a GAMEINFO lump with a line 'nospriterename = true'.

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Graf Zahl said:

More importantly, is this mod ZDoom only? If no, you have to add a GAMEINFO lump with a line 'nospriterename = true'.

It shouldn't need to be ZDoom only. So, I assume this lump (or any random lump with which an engine is unfamiliar) is ignored by other engines?

Next question: if I expand the animation frames (i.e. add more frames to the shooting or death sequences), I will need to play around with Dehacked to get them to function correctly, right? As I understand it, the engine may do some things automatically (sprite rotations?) but needs to know what frames to associate with the various states, correct?

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Lutz said:

Next question: if I expand the animation frames (i.e. add more frames to the shooting or death sequences), I will need to play around with Dehacked to get them to function correctly, right?

Wrong! :p

Dehacked is for Doom stuff. The iron lich is a Heretic mobj, so you'd need Hehacked. But! The only port that supports Hehacked patches at all is Chocolate Heretic; so it wouldn't work with any other Heretic port like Doomsday or ZDoom.

(There are good reasons why hehacked support is not as commonplace as dehacked support. First, it was much less used, so support is less important. Secondly, the mobj table was modified between versions of Heretic, so a hehacked patch for 1.0 will not work with Heretic 1.3 for example. And there is no way of automatically guessing from the content of the patch which version it is meant for.)

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So basically, what started as a "Gee, I've always thought that floating skull thing looked like a giant bag of ass -- I wonder if I could quickly replace the graphics" has turned out to be way more work than I thought. I'll play around with the GAMEINFO lump when I get home tonight (I want to disable jumping, anyway) and see where that gets me.

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Gez said:

See this.

The upshot of this is that if you want to include custom Iron Lich graphics, you will now use the new sprite, LICH*, rather than HEAD*. If you then wanted to include Cacodemon graphics, you could safely add HEAD* graphics and there will be no conflicts.


That is horrible, treating PWADs differently than IWADs, and making Heretic a second class citizen.

These mappings should have been game specific, for Doom you must use LICH and for Heretic you must use CACO (etc etc).

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That decision was made 6 years ago. And yes, I agree it should have been opt-in instead of opt-out. But it was before my time.

The best I could do now was to add the GAMEINFO option to disable it. With DECORATE as it is not the feature is pointless anyway but there are WADs both for Heretic and Hexen out there that depend on it.

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There was a graphic patch on Wizard Works H!Zone that included custom graphic for the Iron Lich; some sort of snake like sentient pillar of water.

But certainly, another answer to the original question, if the author isn't making a ZDOOM specific wad, is to duplicate the graphics as both HEAD and LICH. That way ZDoom will use the LICH graphics and everything else will use the HEAD graphics.

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No, the proper way is to add a GAMEINFO lump that disables the sprite renaming. No need to duplicate the resources.

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Vermil said:

But certainly, another answer to the original question, if the author isn't making a ZDOOM specific wad, is to duplicate the graphics as both HEAD and LICH. That way ZDoom will use the LICH graphics and everything else will use the HEAD graphics.

This is what I ended up doing, mostly because I don't want to update my version of ZDoom to a version that supports the 'nospriterename' field.

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