What kind of missalignments can you get away with? (stock textures)

[joe-ilya]

As you know, missalignments are a major complaint around this forum, but how can you get away with the so-called "Texture murder"?

I need some tricks to abuse!

Here's a couple of examples of what you should and shouldn't:

1)This is usually frowned upon (mostly by the OCD patients that get by), but I don't really see the problem, the monochromatic moss covers the misalignment.
And the tiles don't cut off abruptly since they're too small (two pixel rows) and are made of the same texture.


2)This is OK. (The bars, incase you haven't noticed)


What do you think of the many misalignments you ever saw and thought were OK?

[esselfortium]

The second picture looks a lot worse to me than the first. Midtexture alignment is worth the effort!

[pavera]

esselfortium said:

The second picture looks a lot worse to me than the first. Midtexture alignment is worth the effort!

Agreed. Though the first one is such an obvious misalignment that it makes me twitch.

I don't agree with the idea that texture alignment doesn't matter. I understand that when things get very complex in your map, it can become very painstaking to pay attention to every little detail. I can forgive when an obvious effort goes into it...but come on people, have some pride and (try to) align your textures!

I guess one of the areas that you can get away pretty well with some misalignments is with rock textures that are plastered across very organic looking outdoor scenery. It can be very hard to get that kind of stuff to line up correctly, especially if you've got linedefs going at lots of fancy "natural" angles.

[esselfortium]

If you really want to get lazy about texture alignment, look at American McGee's and John Romero's maps in Doom 2. They both picked their texture combinations with the intention of being able to just leave nearly every line at 0,0 without it being too glaringly obvious. ZIMMER, STONE4, BSTONE, METAL2 (it has lines, but it's low contrast and simple), etc.

[scifista42]

Misalignments on textures like BRICK1, BRICK2 and maybe BRICK5 might be tolerable. :)

[kuchitsu]

In most cases texture misalignments look a lot more interesting because they result in tons of different unique visual patterns, whereas in a perfectly aligned level most textures are used in only one way that you encounter again and again. The latter feels very artificial and unnatural, and usually it gets old quickly. You only really need to make sure that switches are not buried in the ground, faces like MARBFACE are not cut off in an ugly way, etc. And maybe you can work on the vertical alignment a little bit if you're using textures with a lot of horizontal stripes and such things, but don't spend too much time on that either.

[Fuzzball]

All in all...don't be a lazy cunt and leave unaligned textures because you can't be arsed...often just looks bleh. You can however get some interesting "new" textures by messing about with alignment...

One the other hand just placing shit loads of one texture then hitting auto-align can be just as bad if not worse at times...offsets messing up and textures randomly starting around corners looks weird.

[pavera]

Auto-align is just as bad as not bothering to align your textures at all if it is used incorrectly. It can be a great tool though, especially auto-align vertical. I find that most of the time though, it's easy enough to just go around resetting texture offsets and then tweaking the textures so that their natural lines line up correctly with the level geometry and height.

I like essel's suggestion of "use lazy textures" because it can give the mapper a simple texture set to work with and learn how to build a level around properly. It's kinda funny how one of Doom's most iconic texture sets (STAR) can actually be very hard to build a level around when you're trying to pay attention to proper X and Y alignment. Actually, the map I'm building currently is probably the only map in which I've used the texture set extensively! :X

[Technician]

I wish Sandy Peterson was registered to post.

[Maes]

All of them. Such is the powah of 1994.

[40oz]

I'm not too crazy about texture alignment, I just make it pretty quick and dirty. Always upper and lower unpeg around windows. Textures with evenly spaced vertical seams should get the attention. This means stuff like metal2, tekgren, startan3 etc. not brown1, brown96, cement, wood1, where the seams are more frequent and not always equal measurements. I always align the evenly spaced stuff, especially around 90 degree angles and breaks in patterns. Like if you had a wall where half the wall is tekgren and the other half is ASHWALL, you definitely want the tekgren to be aligned to the break in texture pattern. If its a room, you're going to want to align it to the corner of the room too. The stuff in the middle really doesn't matter that much, especially if you're working with unconventional angles.

So yeah, just those evenly spaced textures on corners, and ends. And upper, lower unpeg your windows. That's pretty much all I do. Keep the lighting low so the mistakes aren't so obvious!

[hex11]

If you use an editor that doesn't have 3D preview (granted the newer ones all have this), you'll go insane trying to align everything perfectly. But low detail level and using the grid to match textures can probably go a long ways.
There should be a community project where you're forced to use old editors like this, just for fun.

[kuchitsu]

I would participate in such a project. I like the idea.

[Justince]

r_init: getpostnumberforname: post not found!

Edited August 1, 2017 by Justince

[hex11]

Justince said:

It's simple math.

If your geometry is simple and multiples of 16, then it's pretty easy. But if you're doing a hell map, or wilderness map, or any other thing with lots of irregular angles and lengths, then it gets a lot more tedious to align things manually.
Granted a lot of editors, (even DEU derivatives) have auto-align functions. But those aren't foolproof. I had one central hub surrounded by BRNBIGC midtextures (of irregular lengths) that couldn't be aligned this way. Even doing it manually with calculator only worked on one side, then the backside was offset incorrectly. So I just gave up and took out those textures entirely. If it was a cave wall or something else that's not human-made, I would have probably just left it unaligned though.

[Justince]

r_init: getpostnumberforname: post not found!

Edited August 1, 2017 by Justince

[esselfortium]

Technician said:

I wish Sandy Peterson was registered to post.

Sandy probably actually did the most texture alignment of all the id mappers. (Look at the rocks in E2M9!) His mistakes are just more noticeable than the others', because he was often the only one using the more complex and high-contrast textures.

[Nuxius]

hex11 said:

There should be a community project where you're forced to use old editors like this, just for fun.

Hopefully it would go over better than this one did:

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/34186-newproject-project-1994/

[hex11]

Nuxius said:

Hopefully it would go over better than this one did

It looks like he tried to make it too extreme. There just wasn't much choice of editors in 1994 proper. I can get by in DEU 5.21 (even made one map with it, hex-e2m9) but it's missing some basic features, like "undo". So if you mess something up, you have to reload old version of your map, and that also means closing the GUI and going back into the DEU shell. This sucks because it's really easy to mess things up if you're new to that editor... Yadex has the same problem, but I'm much less likely to make a mistake with it. I think DETH added undo though.
DCK was a really nice DOS editor that was simple to learn, and a lot of old maps were made with it. If he allowed even just that one, his project would have gone a lot further.

[Technician]

esselfortium said:

Sandy probably actually did the most texture alignment of all the id mappers. (Look at the rocks in E2M9!) His mistakes are just more noticeable than the others', because he was often the only one using the more complex and high-contrast textures.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt simply because he had to make his maps so fast.

[VGamingJunkie]

Horizontal misalignment, especially if the texture is wrapped totally around, is more forgivable since there's naturally going to be some misalignment unless you just have it spaced out absolutely perfectly to match the length of the texture but that restricts you a moderate degree. Vertically, though, there should be more effort placed.

[Da Werecat]

I once tried to make a bunch of maps with 0,0 everywhere, with a few necessary exceptions. I failed miserably. First, some less necessary exceptions were negotiated, and then it snowballed until I had everything aligned to death.

I can appreciate 90s, but I can't 90s myself, apparently. :(

[40oz]

Justince said:

I already do, and no it's not that hard. It's simple math. For x offsets just know the length of your texture, and the length of the lines you're working with. Y offsets are simply subtracting the differences of ceilings. People have become so complacent.

Thank you for this. I think I made a thread a few years ago asking about how to do texture alignments without testing and seeing them for yourself, and I don't remember getting any good answers. Someday I'd like to be so affiliated with making doom levels that I could make a decent looking and fun to play full-size doom level without having tested it at all. I'm working on getting a feel for good gameplay but I'd like to tackle texture alignment without visual mode in the future.

[hex11]

40oz said:

Thank you for this. I think I made a thread a few years ago asking about how to do texture alignments without testing and seeing them for yourself, and I don't remember getting any good answers.

This book (Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus) talks about that (and lots of other stuff!) in detail:
http://cd.textfiles.com/instantdoom/EBOOK/DOOM.PDF

There's also the lower/upper "pegging" of textures, that behaves differently on 1-sided and 2-sided walls, and can be used simultaneously with x/y offsets. So it can become pretty confusing sometimes.

[Jayextee]

I'm almost tempted to make an entire map of 0,0 textures (upper/lower pegging allowed though) just to emulate my WadEd days... :3

[Dragonfly]

As a mapper I try to allow for no misalignments when mapping - That doesn't mean that I don't misalign textures, I'm almost certain there's multiple misalignments in every map I've ever made/released.

When playing people's maps however I feel more lenient. For example, I'd let the texture alignment seen in the screenshot here slide, but I'd be unhappy about it if it was my own map. Also, rock textures are the hardest to keep aligned with, without a doubt!

Jayextee said:

I'm almost tempted to make an entire map of 0,0 textures (upper/lower pegging allowed though) just to emulate my WadEd days... :3

Select all, reset texture alignment, done. :P

[Kira]

I was lazy as hell, and now when I look back I cry:



Don't do this at home.

[yakfak]

unaligned textures can be pretty nice, its not like all materials should automatically wrap n scroll like they come on rolls of wallpaper. Stop pressing CTRL+A ya damn whipcrackers

[Justince]

r_init: getpostnumberforname: post not found!

Edited August 1, 2017 by Justince

[NaZa]

Misaligned zimmer, ground, ash and "mini"-brick (BRICK1, 2) textures work pretty well, based on my experiences.