Titlepic, interpic, level names, vanilla doom.

[LittleTemple]

We've never actually touched vanilla doom ourselves apart from using chocolate doom to play the official wads and some old custom ones from the mid 90s so, it's pretty new to us.

A new friend of ours who hails from france is working on maps that are done strictly in good ol' doom 2 format with no designs that require looking or jumping. In fact, it's pretty much meant to be played in the vanilla experience, chocodoom, doom2.exe, doom95, so on.

She saw some of Dimensions and noticed the custom titles for levels, inter pics and title pics we had up and running and asked us how she could do that with her "Demon Laden" wad and we realized... oh shiz, this just got complicated!

We heard replacing intermission level name text is as simple as making a cyan colored background, cropping and setting it to the proper res and putting text on it. Though we aren't sure yet if vanilla doom would dump it with many of it's errors.

Titlepic and interpic have proven to be... tough. For example, as we understand it. the rez has to be 320x200 and in 256 color bmp. Gabrielle made a simple titlepic to test it and the 256 conversion to bmp (with MS paint) distorted some of the colors and chocolate doom crashed with an error on startup. we've googled and googled but we can't seem to get the exact answers we're looking for. Gabrielle just shrugs it off because she's more concerned with the design of her maps (a good thing) but it bugs us.

any help would be great. Also, we noticed in the SYTHE wad that the custom intermission level name text looks just like the ones in DOOM 2. How do you get the font to look like that? Also, is there a strict font size you have to use for DOOM 2 not to yell at you?


Thanks in advance!

[Gez]

LittleTemple said:

We heard replacing intermission level name text is as simple as making a cyan colored background

No! Don't fill poor little Gabrielle's head with this cyan nonsense!


Okay, so first thing first. Map names.


Map names are present in two different places: in the program itself (which is what is shown in the automap), and in the data file (the picture shown during the intermission).

You can replace the map names shown in the automap with a DEHACKED lump containing BEX string replacements. It is the simplest method.

Here is the DEHACKED for Epic 2 as an example:

[STRINGS]
HUSTR_1 = 01: Entrance
HUSTR_2 = 02: Voodoo
HUSTR_3 = 03: Black magic
HUSTR_4 = 04: Sarcophagus
HUSTR_5 = 05: Abu Gurab
<snip>
HUSTR_30 = 30: Amenthes
HUSTR_31 = 31: Osirion
HUSTR_32 = 32: The Harbour

As you can see HUSTR_x corresponds to the name for level x. Note the [STRINGS] thing at the top, it's important.

Now for the intermission name pictures. They are graphics with names CWILV00 to CWILV31. Here's the subtlety: the number is one less than the level. For example, MAP01's name is in CWILV00, and MAP32's name is in CWILV31.


INTERPIC and TITLEPIC have to be 320x200, yes. And now comes the time to talk about the Doom picture format:

It is not BMP. BMP is a format used by programs like MS Paint, but Doom doesn't use it. Doom uses its own format (actually, two different formats, since flats -- the textures placed on floors and ceilings -- use a different format from all the other graphics in Doom) which is not know by any image editor outside of specialized Doom utilities. So, she will need to use a specialized Doom utility, namely SLADE 3.
http://svn.drdteam.org/slade/

Import your picture into your wad with SLADE 3, and then convert it to Doom's picture format from within SLADE.


How do you do transparency? Your source image can have transparency to begin with. If it doesn't (for example, you used MS Paint to create it), when you convert the picture with SLADE, you can select one color to be the transparent color (it can be cyan, or anything else really). You can even click on an area in the "source" preview picture to choose the color that'll become transparent.

[LittleTemple]

Dude, if i was a woman I'd marry you. Or at least ya know...

Haha joking aside DAMN you just saved us.

I always thought cyan was weird...

can chocolate doom read dehacked files if they are merged into the main wad themselves?

I don't know if gabrielle cares or not but, we were wondering, dehacked can also replace text for the story screens right?

One more question i forgot to ask in the first post.

a few people have made demos of themselves playing Gabrielle's levels and we were wondering... how on earth do we get chocolate doom to record demos of custom wads? gabrielle said she wanted to replace the three demo files in her wad to give it more of a "classic doom(ish)" feel.

With defaced, it's a simple as typed up the level names in that style into a text editor, making a lump called dehacked and dumping the text in there, right?

Sorry for the noob questions! DARN YOU MAPINFO!

[Gez]

LittleTemple said:

can chocolate doom read dehacked files if they are merged into the main wad themselves?

No. Technically, it could, but it is not allowed. If you specifically want the automap names to work in Chocolate Doom, you'll have to make an old-fashioned (not BEX) DEHACKED text file. It's more complicated.

It'll look something like this:

Patch File for DeHackEd v3.0

# Note: Use the pound sign ('#') to start comment lines.

Doom version = 19
Patch format = 6

Text 17 21
level 1: entryway1 - a fool's paradise

Text 19 14
level 2: underhalls2 - sand-storm

Text 20 25
level 3: the gantlet3 - arc of the pendulum

Text 18 19
level 4: the focus4 - the helltrain

Text 26 16
level 5: the waste tunnels5 - the citadel

You have to list Text, then the size of the source string, then the size of the replacement string, then the source string and the replacement string without even a separation. It looks ugly and confusing and it's easy to make mistakes.

You can use Whacked to create such dehacked files more simply, but as I have never personally used this program, I can't help you with it.

LittleTemple said:

I don't know if gabrielle cares or not but, we were wondering, dehacked can also replace text for the story screens right?

Yes! With BEX strings, it's as simple as CxTEXT = whatever you want; where x is a number from 1 to 6.
MAP06 to MAP07: C1TEXT
MAP11 to MAP12: C2TEXT
MAP19 to MAP20: C3TEXT
MAP30 to endgame: C4TEXT
MAP15 to MAP31: C5TEXT
MAP31 to MAP32: C6TEXT

With old-fashioned string replacement, it's... well, you guess what it is.

Line feeds are created with the \n combination.

LittleTemple said:

a few people have made demos of themselves playing Gabrielle's levels and we were wondering... how on earth do we get chocolate doom to record demos of custom wads? gabrielle said she wanted to replace the three demo files in her wad to give it more of a "classic doom(ish)" feel.

I'm not a demo expert. From what I know, you have to use the -record parameter on the command line (this also requires warping to the level since if you start a game from the menu, it'll stop the demo).

[hex11]

Download the dhe31.zip from /idgames and you won't have to fool around with manually creating a DHE file by hand. Also it's safer, because it knows all the hard limits, like how long a text string can be. You can change the in-game strings, but you can't lengthen them (you can make 'em shorter though). Anyway in the program you just hit F7 and select the strings you wanna change, edit them, and save. It's not hard at all.

BEX is more powerful but not vanilla compatible so don't use it for vanilla mods. Also, don't embed the DeHackEd file as a lump in the PWAD or else it won't work with doom.exe (without using a tool to extract the lump so you can run dehacked.exe on it). In the case of ports (including Chocolate Doom), the player just loads the patch with the -deh switch.

To record a demo, it's just: chocolate-doom -file mymap.wad -skill 4 -warp 3 -record mydemo (which will automatically create a file called "mydemo.lmp"), and if you want to test playing it back, just substitute -playdemo instead of -record. You can change the skill and level number as desired, and those only need to be given during recording (playback just uses the values stored in the demo file). And to stop recording, just hit the "Q" key, otherwise it doesn't end (even if you die) until the recorded file reaches the maximum demo size limit. Chocolate Doom has an option to ignore that limit, but it's best to just keep the demos relatively short and sweet, so they can be played back with doom.exe.

You'll probably want to browse through the fine documentation and save a copy of that page for reference.