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Kontra Kommando

Recommendations for making Sprites

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I want to venture into making custom decorations, trees and foliage for my WAD. However, I have never experimented with created sprites. I have watched some tutorials, and I’m sure I could get the hang of it; figuring out how to create textures wasn’t hard. Could anyone reference me to any particularly good programs to use? I understand GIMP 2, which I have, can be used. Further, any helpful tips would be much appreciated.

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Wrote a long answer to this a while ago.
Cannot figure out how to make a reference to another thread post.


Doom Editing > Graphic makers, what editors and methods do you use?
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-editing/64191-graphic-makers-what-editors-and-methods-do-you-use/

Save in native GIMP format, with separate planes for background, and layers of the sprite. Keep this for rework, even after you are done.

Do not use the Doom palette to draw. Let the tools convert to the Doom palette as the last step, during conversion to ppm.

Quantize the alpha using a filter, before conversion to ppm, to prevent faint overspray from showing up as a cloud around the sprite.

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Thanks for the advice.

I was able to figure out how to create sprites; I created a decaying zombie imp. I took the original imp and all of its poses, and altered them.

Moreover, by following Chubzdoomer's tutorial, I was also able to figure out how to create my own custom monsters.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM7X8wS4PPE

Also, how to edit their attributes with minor scripting. I took the basic imp, and made its health 400, and reduced its speed by half.

But now my question is, how do I add these new sprites I have created to my new custom monster?

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I use deutex to extract an existing wad to a working directory.

Save the portions you need for your sprite. There will several views
for the sprite with names coded to inform the engine as to which angles can use that sprite graphic. These codes can be altered such that there is a unique graphic for each angle, or a graphic can be used for two angles. The number of graphics and what each letter code represents is fixed by the engine. Some engines may be able to alter that too, but it limits the usefulness of your sprite.

Edit the deutex wadinfo file to only have the entries for your sprite.
You must alter the offsets for your sprites in the wadinfo so that the feet are on the floor.

Run deutex again to make a PWAD with only your sprite in it.

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If you're not a fan of command-line utility, you might like SLADE 3 instead of DEUTEX. :p

To have your custom monster use a different sprite, it depends on the system you used to make the custom monster. If it's with a real content definition language (DDF, DECORATE, etc.) then you just need to edit the sprite names in your monster's code.

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Gez said:

If you're not a fan of command-line utility, you might like SLADE 3 instead of DEUTEX. :p

To have your custom monster use a different sprite, it depends on the system you used to make the custom monster. If it's with a real content definition language (DDF, DECORATE, etc.) then you just need to edit the sprite names in your monster's code.


I've used Slade to create different monsters under the entry DECORATE. However, there are still some things I do not understand.

1. How do I add the sprites to the specific custom monster? So far, I have used XWE to simply replace the orginal entries. Therefore, every imp looks like the zombie imp as well. I would like to make the two separate.

2. How do I create multiple custom monsters in one single WAD? So far, I have them in separate individual WADS. When I try to save map into the custom monster WADs, everything is all wrong and messed up in game.

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Alright. I think you should begin with the beginning and read up about how the (Z)Doom engine uses data.

The DECORATE code contains actor states which refer to sprites using a conventional XXXX-X-X or XXXX-X-X-X-X scheme. So for example, imp sprites are named TROOA1 and so on: TROO is the sprite name, A the frame, and 1 the rotation. So you can take your sprites, and then rename them (you can batch rename them in SLADE 3 to something like NIMP* for your new imp so that they'll keep their frame letters and rotation number, but have a new sprite name). Once you've done that, you can edit the DECORATE code to replace TROO with NIMP in the states block. To learn about where to put lumps wrt. each other, read up on namespaces and in particular pay attention to level lump layout -- do not insert any non-map lump in between a map's lumps, or you'll break it.

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Gez said:

Alright. I think you should begin with the beginning and read up about how the (Z)Doom engine uses data.

The DECORATE code contains actor states which refer to sprites using a conventional XXXX-X-X or XXXX-X-X-X-X scheme. So for example, imp sprites are named TROOA1 and so on: TROO is the sprite name, A the frame, and 1 the rotation. So you can take your sprites, and then rename them (you can batch rename them in SLADE 3 to something like NIMP* for your new imp so that they'll keep their frame letters and rotation number, but have a new sprite name). Once you've done that, you can edit the DECORATE code to replace TROO with NIMP in the states block. To learn about where to put lumps wrt. each other, read up on namespaces and in particular pay attention to level lump layout -- do not insert any non-map lump in between a map's lumps, or you'll break it.


Thanks a lot, dude! I'll read up on the links you've provided.

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