How to release maps with texture packs?

[Korshun]

Hello.

How are wads released when they use texture packs? In case of a project with a predefined texture pack it is clear but it is not clear in other cases.

Say if I make a map that uses only like 10% of a texture pack, what do I do? Copy the unused 90% of the texture pack? Manually and tediously delete unused textures? And what if there is a lot of them?

[Phendrena]

Not that this helps with you question, but I was also curious about the same thing. Is there a utility out there that will scan a wad and strip out textures and patches that aren't used???

[A.Gamma]

You can do this with Slade 3, open your wad and then go to:
Archive -> Maintenance.
There you should see the remove options.

[Kappes Buur]

Except this doesn't work for textures between TX_ markers.

[Krispy]

Or you could do what I did here and just require that people load it with another wad that includes those textures. But as no one downloaded it maybe that's too inconvenient. /bitchin'

[Phendrena]

A.Gamma said:

You can do this with Slade 3, open your wad and then go to:
Archive -> Maintenance.
There you should see the remove options.

Cool! I've not done much with Slade3 other than importing some extra textures in my wad and didn't realise that option was there. Great stuff!!

Dave

[Korshun]

Phendrena said:

Not that this helps with you question, but I was also curious about the same thing. Is there a utility out there that will scan a wad and strip out textures and patches that aren't used???

Long ago I tried to make one (command line dedicated utility) and failed/got bored. But I did plan animated texture support from the start :).

Krispy said:

Or you could do what I did here and just require that people load it with another wad that includes those textures. But as no one downloaded it maybe that's too inconvenient. /bitchin'

I have never seen a wad require external texture packs before cc4-tex.wad showed up :).

A.Gamma said:

You can do this with Slade 3, open your wad and then go to:
Archive -> Maintenance.

Wow. Didn't know. It is like in 50% of cases when someone asks "how do I do that with wads" the answer is "use SLADE3" :).

[hex11]

Korshun said:

Long ago I tried to make one (command line dedicated utility) and failed/got bored. But I did plan animated texture support from the start :).

Sounds like you were trying to do it the hard way (from scratch). I'd have written a simple script (or even a perl one-liner, heh) that pipes together and manipulates the output from several xwadtools programs (wadldc, deutex). That's the Unix way - it may not look as pretty as a GUI, but to me it's much more beautiful. :-)

[Memfis]

A.Gamma said:

You can do this with Slade 3, open your wad and then go to:
Archive -> Maintenance.
There you should see the remove options.

I tried to do this with my latest wad but it said "removed 0 patches and 0 entries" even though I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of unused textures (for example, "AKIRA"). What am I doing wrong?

[tempun]

Memfis said:

I tried to do this with my latest wad but it said "removed 0 patches and 0 entries" even though I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of unused textures (for example, "AKIRA"). What am I doing wrong?

Must remove unused textures first. Check the list of textures, though; I don't think SLADE3 unused textures removal tool knows about skies or animations.

[Memfis]

Oh, so it's not a magical button that does everything for you? :( I thought it would scan through all levels, see which textures are used and delete everything else. I think I'll just release the wad as is then, don't want to bother with this...

[GreyGhost]

Memfis said:

Oh, so it's not a magical button that does everything for you? :(

No, it's a bit more involved than that.

What I did was to first remove unused textures (don't untick any), followed by patches and flats. That unfortunately results in a pruned PNAMES lump, which some ports simply won't abide, so I created a temporary wad and (with some shuffling of lumps back and forth) used that to repair the PNAMES lump and create a smaller TEXTURE2 lump for kuchitzu.wad.

Try this - I don't think I've broken anything.

[esselfortium]

Memfis said:

Oh, so it's not a magical button that does everything for you? :( I thought it would scan through all levels, see which textures are used and delete everything else. I think I'll just release the wad as is then, don't want to bother with this...

It only takes a few minutes.

I used it for BTSX E1... I didn't have to do any PNAMES repair like GreyGhost mentioned, and no one has mentioned any issues with loading it. I did, however, have to put a dummy room in MAP24 containing every type of switch because Doom was choking if some of those weren't present. You should be able to just directly reuse my switch room for the same purpose, as long as you swap out any other (non-switch) textures for ones that are actually in your wad.

[Memfis]

Thank you GreyGhost!

esselfortium said:

It only takes a few minutes.

Uh, can you describe the process then? How do you know which textures to delete, do you go through all levels and write down the name of every used texture? Sounds more like it would take at least a few hours to clean BtSX this way.