My Doom 2 Custom Textures Don't Work When I Send My WADs To Friends

[Da Eediot]

How do I fix this? I made some custom textures, and they work when I play them. But when I sent my WADs with the custom textures to my friend, they didn't appear. Is it because I used XWE which replaces textures in Doom2.WAD? Because then that would mean they would need the same Doom2.WAD, correct? Is there another way to fix this without having to make them use my edited Doom2.WAD? Please help.

[yakfak]

ah, drat, the usual way of doing that is to add textures to a patch wad you load alongside doom2.wad and distribute that. Editing your own IWAD creates a lot of problems!

[Da Eediot]

Is there a way to fix this? I made a copy of my Doom2.WAD file.

[scifista42]

1. Do not use XWE - it's bugged, obsolete, and SLADE3 is better.
2. Never edit your IWADs - make new PWADs instead, with no IWAD content inside.

[Da Eediot]

But how do I fix this problem with my textures?

[scifista42]

Create a new empty wad and put only your custom graphics into it (correctly).

[Da Eediot]

But wouldn't I have to remake everything in my custom WAD?

[scifista42]

What everything? Do you mean default graphics, music and levels in Doom 2? No. PWADs are supposed to contain only your own new content, then they can be distributed freely. People who download PWADs are supposed to own a (legally obtained) copy of an IWAD. When they run the PWAD (and have an IWAD on their computer, and the game engine properly detects and loads the IWAD), the IWAD will be loaded and only the content actually present in the PWAD will override the IWAD's content. For example, you can make a PWAD containing nothing else than a MAP01 map replacement. When you run it (assuming you also have an IWAD on your computer), you will be able to play this MAP01, and after it finishes, the game will jump into IWAD's default MAP02 and continue from there. Almost all content replacements are possible in a similar fashion. Some of them have their specifics, though, for example the "adding graphics" wiki guide I linked you to.

[Da Eediot]

So, can I take my custom WAD and edit the textures in them?

[scifista42]

What "my custom wad", a new empty one or the edited IWAD one? What "the textures", are they just graphic patches or TEXTURE1 entries?

[Da Eediot]

The WADs I'm talking about are WADs I made using Doom Builder. I made custom textures. I replaced other textures with my custom textures using XWE.

[scifista42]

Step 1: Make a new empty PWAD using SLADE3 (or using XWE, but I recommend SLADE3).

Step 2: If you made any maps, use SLADE3 (respectively XWE) to copy them into this new empty PWAD.

Step 3: If you replaced any graphic patches, copy these graphic patches into the new PWAD and place them between empty P_START and P_END markers.

Step 4: If you anyhow modified TEXTURE1 lump in your IWAD, copy the entire TEXTURE1 lump and PNAMES lump into the new PWAD.

Step 5: Recover a clean (unedited) copy of your IWAD and delete the edited copy.

[Da Eediot]

Thanks, I'll try that.

[Da Eediot]

Sorry, I really suck at this. Could you make a video of it?

[scifista42]

I couldn't.

[Da Eediot]

Is there a video tutorial for this?

[scifista42]

For ripping content out of edited IWADs? I doubt it.

For using SLADE3 and proper adding custom graphics into wads? Probably yes. Search around Doomwiki.org, SLADE3 website and Youtube.

[Da Eediot]

Do you have a link to a specific video or webpage?

[scifista42]

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Editing_tutorials
http://slade.mancubus.net/index.php?page=wiki
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-editing-tutorials/

[Da Eediot]

Thank you! :D

[SavageCorona]

I don't know how Scifista could make it any simpler for you but I've created a video on how to do this and you can do it in literally 10 seconds if you're not going slowly so you can explain how to do it. It should be up in an hour.

[Da Eediot]

Okay. Thanks.

[SavageCorona]

Here you go. I can't really imagine you can fuck this up in any way.

[Da Eediot]

Thank you! By the way, is it okay if my textures are .BMPs? Or does it work with both .PNGs and .BMPs?

[Tango]

I can't say for sure about bmp, but I think the only supported graphics format is either png or doom format. so I would save your custom textures as png first, then load then into slade. if you want to convert them to doom format, right click on one, hit the convert button, and in the conversion-type dropdown menu, choose the "Doom Gfx" option. that should be pretty straight-forward, but I'd be happy to provide pics if need be!

also, it might be helpful to understand a bit about how loading custom wads works in the first place. apologies if you already know this or have picked up on it from the last few posts, but basically...

you have your iwads, which is full of all the original assets. iwads should never be altered; there's no reason to. if you want to load something custom, you load a custom wad file as an extra when you launch the game. this means that when you launch the game, you load the iwad as the "base" file, and then any custom wads get loaded on top of the iwad. custom wads (pwads) are essentially patches, meaning that when the game starts, it looks for and loads anything in the custom wads that either replace something that already exists in doom2.wad or is completely new. so doom2.wad contains a file called map01. if you load a custom wad called mywad.wad on top of doom2.wad and mywad.wad also contains a map01, the game will load mywad's map01 instead of doom2's.

so, as others have said, if you have a custom map that relies on custom textures, put those custom textures inside a wad file with the map. you can just open up your map's wad file in slade and add the textures, as shown by SavageCorona's video. adding textures and other custom replacement assets can be a little tricky at first because the method for doing so can vary based on what port (zdoom, prboom+, etc) your wad is meant to be played in, but it's generally the same stuff regardless.

sorry again if this was obvious or you already knew it D: hope it helps if not though!

[Gez]

Re: image format:
You should use either Doom's own picture format or, if your target ports support it, PNG.

For ZDoom specifically, you have more options, though BMP is not one of them.

SLADE 3 can convert BMP images to Doom graphics or PNG.

SavageCorona said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHOFrW4BXeE

Here you go. I can't really imagine you can fuck this up in any way.

You didn't mention putting at least TX_START and TX_END lumps before and after the textures.

[SavageCorona]

Yeah I forgot about that. Whoops. I put an annotation stating that you should do that.

[Da Eediot]

How do you add TX_START and TX_END?

[Gez]

See this:
http://slade.mancubus.net/index.php?page=wiki&wikipage=How-to-Import-Textures

TX_START/TX_END is the simplest way to make textures but it's not as widely supported since it's originally a ZDoom thing. If you're using ZDoom it should be enough for a start, though.

Click on the "new entry" button on the toolbar, name it TX_START, make sure it is above all your textures (if not, you can move it up with the blue upward arrow on the toolbar). Then do the same but for TX_END and put it below all the textures. New entries are created just below the currently selected entry by the way.

[Da Eediot]

Thank you, Gez.