Texturing and Things questions

[foul_owl]

Do flats have offsets?

Can Upper and Lower offsets be changed individually?

Can I define new Things in my levels? For example, create a new hanging corpse rather than just modify an existing one? Basically just interested in decorations for now.

Thanks!

[jdagenet]

UDMF can do the first two and as for the corpse, you'll need to know DECORATE but, since you're just wanting to create a corpse (which isn't hard to do), you can probably look at the original DooM corpse's and just copy some of the properties.

[Tango]

indeed, you can't manually align flats regularly, unless you are using a zdoom-based port and you can align it via script. second one is also a no (except UDMF apparently), but if you aren't already aware of the upper/lower unpegged settings, those may help you out, depending on what it is you want to do.

[foul_owl]

No big deal for the first two, just wondering how vanilla doom handled those things. Interesting engine limitations, but not without workarounds. (could just use a texture that has the bitmap offset if needed)

For the last one, I will check out DECORATE. That looks promising, thanks!

[foul_owl]

Wait, is decorate only for Zdoom? My target engine is vanilla/chocolate doom. I would like to be able to add new decorations without modifying the engine.

[Olympus]

Yes, DECORATE is for zdoom and zdoom-based ports, such as skulltag. To add a "new" corpse in vanilla doom, you will have to use Dehacked, and you can only replace things, as far as I know. That's about as much info as I can give, I'm a noob when it comes to this stuff :P

[Kappes Buur]

With Doombuilder r1486 it is possible to align flats visually when the UDMF format is used.

[jdagenet]

foul_owl said:

Wait, is decorate only for Zdoom? My target engine is vanilla/chocolate doom. I would like to be able to add new decorations without modifying the engine.

Yeah, you're probably out of luck then if you're using vanilla or chocolate.

[Gez]

foul_owl said:

I would like to be able to add new decorations without modifying the engine.

If it were possible, DECORATE and its equivalents wouldn't have been created.

And no, DeHackEd patches do not count. First, they modify the engine; secondly, they merely allow you to change how existing stuff behaves, not to add anything new.


Your choices are:
1. Forget about adding new decorations.
2. Sacrifice a number of existing mobj types equal to the amount of new decorations you want to add and wrap your brain around dehacked.
3. Use DECORATE, EDF, DDF, etc. to make your new decorations compatible with as many ports as possible; knowing that vanilla/Chocolate and PrBoom+ will be out.


For the offset stuff, you'll need either ACS or UDMF, which means ZDoom again. Alternatively, you can cheat by adding new flats and textures where you've set the offsets directly in the image.

[HXCpr0n]

foul_owl said:

Can Upper and Lower offsets be changed individually?

I was actually curious about this if anyone knows the answer, eg for the upper and lower offsets of a window or something. Otherwise, other methods work fine.

[EarthQuake]

Not in vanilla. The only way you can get around this is by understanding how those flags work and design the map architecture around them, or in more severe cases, create custom textures that will fit on the walls you've already created by editing the texture, manually offsetting it, and reinserting it into your wad.

[printz]

Actually, you won't really lose anything if you use Dehacked to define a few more decorations. You can sacrifice the dead lost soul, the duplicate gibbed player and even the dead monsters (you'll produce dead monsters anyway as a player). And you can safely replace SS nazi, commander Keen and final boss frames if you don't intend to use those.

[EarthQuake]

Also don't forget the blocking and non-blocking hanging corpse variations. I never could find a use for both types in a single wad...

[foul_owl]

Yeah those are good ideas! Thanks!! I might start by replacing those, then if I need more I could try Zdoom.