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Bucket

Preliminary research

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I'm brewing an idea of a story-based Doom mod. As of now it's just in research phase and I can only do so much with such a vague idea of what ZDoom is capable of. If anyone's interested, I'd appreciate links to WADs with some good examples of the following engine features:

- Dialogue boxes and cutscenes
- Item interaction and puzzles
- Affecting player movement (fatigue etc)
- Enemy properties and AI that vanilla monsters don't have

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Well, for dialogue. there's the Strife dialogue system available in Zdoom.
Zdoom also got a GUI feature where you can create GUIs for your item interactions to create puzzles, keypads or what have you. (or at least they had that in development and at least functional some 8-10 years ago, so I assume it's in there by now)
People done all sorts of weird stuff with player movement in Zdoom, I recall one person making a parcour type of movement mod once for instance.
Check out the other Id Tech 1 games as well as the bestiary over at realm667 for examples of other monster abilities. Safe to say though, the sky is more or less the limit.

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I'm proud of this little showcase of the Strife dialog system, some ACS in general and camera textures as monitors. I also used some bosses from that Wolfenstein 3d bosses thread, one of them even has armor which gets destroyed!

Check out Winter's Grasp, too.

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It seems like creating custom art is problematic.
I created a WAD in Doom Builder and I'm trying to import graphics into it using SLADE. It seems Doom Builder will only detect flats, not wall textures. If I leave them True Color, they display fine in DB but show up as tutti fruitti in Odamex. Paletted textures show up grey in DB but display fine in Odamex.

This seems like a beginner problem but if there's any info on the internet about this, I haven't found it. I'm such a presumptuous jerk, thinking I could just make a level and put graphics in it, GOSH. So what are the 135 convoluted steps and obscure quirks that I need to be aware of to accomplish this?

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Depends on if you consider TEXTURE1 and TEXTURE2 and PNAMES convoluted. SLADE3 does apparently have a texture editor which you can use to create those lumps. You may need to do that if you wanted them to work in Odamex, as I'm not sure if it supports true-color stuff, despite it being based on ZDoom (a lot of those features were removed).

If you're going for current ZDoom, put them between TX_START/TX_END instead of PP.

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OP makes it sound like you're willing to use current ZDoom, so I'm not sure if your mention of Odamex was just because that's what you use to test or if that's something you're actually targeting. if you plan to use ZDoom or GZDoom, though, you might consider using the pk3 format instead of wad. if you use pk3, you can basically just make a new pk3, create a folder called textures, and dump anything you want in there. (GZ)Doom Builder should just recognize those as textures if you load up the pk3 as a resource and are using one of the ZDoom formats (UDMF definitely recommended if you are indeed using ZDoom).

or if you want to use wad, just do what BS said

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OK, I see the problem is about conflicting versions. I'll give (G)ZDoom Builder a shot, and look into .PK3 files.

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Not all ports support truecolor textures, I don't know much about Odamex, though.

Bucket said:

Paletted textures show up grey

You said "in DB", but if you've actually meant "in SLADE3", or if you've been converting them to the Doom palette using SLADE3, you need to set base resource archive and choose palette first. This picture by Gez shows what to do:

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If your project is ZDoom-only then use pk3 files. You can have these folders in it:

\maps
Here you put your maps, example: MAP01.wad
Use fucking GZDoombuilder

\music
Here you put your music, for example SONG01.mp3

\sounds
Sounds go here, example: boing.wav

\sprites
I prefer png files for sprites, you can use subfolders to keep things clean

And free inside the pk3 you can have:
ANIMDEFS.txt
DECORATE.txt
MAPINFO.txt
SNDINFO.txt

You can see this in action in my little project I mentioned in my previous post.

I worked on it normally as a folder named 'pk3' and to compile into a [k3 file I used this batch file (while having 7z.dll and 7z.exe in same folder as batch file)

 @echo off
 set ProjName=BossesoftheReich
 echo Ready to Start.
 
 echo Step 1: Packing
 echo Packing...
 cd pk3
 ..\7z a -r -ssw -x!*.dbs -x!*.backup* -tzip ..\%ProjName%n.pk3 "*" 
 echo Done packing.
 
 echo Step 2: Replace old version
 echo Replacing old version.
 cd ..
 del %ProjName%.pk3
 ren %ProjName%n.pk3 %ProjName%.pk3
 echo Done replacing.
 
 echo Done.
 pause
I exclude files that aren't needed for the release.

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I don't want to sound overly ambitious but I didn't plan on using any existing Doom assets. Does choosing a base resource affect the capabilities of ZDoom?

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Bucket said:

I don't want to sound overly ambitious but I didn't plan on using any existing Doom assets. Does choosing a base resource affect the capabilities of ZDoom?

ZDoom doesn't depend on any IWAD, there is an iwad cmdline parameter to load a custom one, too. You can also use a separate config file if your mod contains many new options and you don't want to pollute the user's main ini.

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