Nukage Splash Trims

[40oz]

Something that has been really teasing me lately is that Doom comes with a variety of wall textures with liquid splash trims on them. They get a bit of mileage in the Doom IWADs such as E1M1 and E2M3 and a variety of other places, however they are rarely used outside of the IWADs. When they are, they are either used effectively in intentionally 'classic' IWAD-style level designs, or very poorly in more modern maps. It's a cool effect but it is seemingly useless outside their specialized uses. They don't tile vertically so you cant use them for walls greater than 128 in height, and only a few texture themes come with a liquid splash trim, so you are often limited in what texture variety you want to use in your maps. I'd like to make my mapping style a bit more original by putting in a better effort to use these types of textures but I've run into a series of hurdles and can't seem to come up with a perfect innovative use to generate the desired effect whereever I want.

 

1. Ugly Edges - I've seen this done a few times in the early 2000s. This makes me wanna barf. It's especially annoying in those mandatory poison tunnel runs. Not only is this retarded, players will obviously exploit it to avoid mandatory damage, and it makes for shitty clunky movement when there are monsters involved. It's a little better to make the nukage trims inset below the walls, but you are still limited to using it in small enclosed spaces and eliminate a lot of potential for detailing where you want it.
    
2. Make tops and bottoms meet - For really tall ceilings, you can knock down your pillars and raise the floor 128 units, then lower the ceiling directly above it all the way down to the floor. That way you can keep the wet part at the bottom and the rest of the texture at the top without the jarring trim tiling You can also create a trim around the walls to achieve the same effect. The problem of course is that if you want to put windows or ledges or pillars the player or monsters can stand on, you still can't go above 128 units without tiling unless you wanna pull the Ugly Edges effect in #1.
    
3. Create a liquid splash patch - By making a little general use liquid splash, I can patch a little splash at the bottom of every texture I want in the TEXTURE1 lump. The problems of course are that this effect can't look good on everything and calls for some transparent blending into the texture in order to look right, or it will just be a pixelly mess in a possibly cool 90's retro way but not the most convincing cool way. You'll need boom compatibility at least to create textures greater than 128 units to avoid the tiling, though. I think I've heard more modern sourceports allow decals or alpha blending for patches which would be nice if you're making a GZDoom map.
    
4. Create a liquid splash version of every texture - To overcome the ugliness of #3, I could inflate my texture wad with duplicates of every general wall texture with a liquid splash variant, which kind of helps, but also quadruples the size of your texture wad with textures you might not need and have to painfully scroll through to browse your general selection while mapping. Not to mention the annoyance of picking the liquid splash trim ones by mistake when you want the plain one. I'm sure we've all grabbed GSTONE2 or PIPE1 by mistake before, but in general only as slightly less problems than #3
    
5. Superimpose Middle Textures - For some reason Doom has a 24 height nukage trim texture, but it's actually possible to use it as a middle texture, lower unpegged, then manually move the vertices on to the surrounding walls (without stitching the vertices together) to superimpose the patch on walls of any height, good for brown textures such as TANROCK5. This however causes rendering issues with GZDoom and possibly other OpenGL source ports. I'm not sure if this a hacky mapping workaround that Graf Zahl isn't going to want to complement, or if it's a legitimate error.

 

So what the fuck? What do you think is the best choice? Or do you have a better suggestion? I'm really not ready to just say fuck it and abandon it as a silly IWAD thing that has no merit elsewhere. I really wanna use FIREMAG around my lava and nukage and blood splashes around my pits and rivers.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

My personal inclination would lean towards 4, while taking advantage of the Doom texture-composed-of-multiple-patches features.  What I mean is, edit the texture to look good in a graphics program, then chop away the unchanged part to leave a new patch that you superimpose over the unchanged one in TEXTUREx, making a new composite texture.  Sort of best-of-both-worlds of 3 and 4.  The only thing you'd have to watch out for is the medusa bug if you're doing vanilla.  As for having a lot of space-wasting variant textures, well, I think that'd be a case where it might be best to build the map first and then make those custom textures according to what edgers it ends up actually needing.

 

I'm a little surprised that 5. works reliably in any renderer, if you're actually overlaying the vertices and not just positioning the extra lines a 1-unit space away from the wall or something of the like.  Interesting.

[Fonze]

If it's that big a deal, wait til you are about to release your wad, find places where textures 'need' to be slimified, nukulated, or lava--... deded and patchurize them as needed. That said, I enjoy clever Frankensteinery and things like the pics in number 1 look good to me. If a mapper is too stupid to know how to make them inexploitable then that's on them, not on the aesthetic. Number 1, in uses slightly different than in the pics presented, allows for a great deal of texture variation almost akin to patching all the textures with liquid stains.

[printz]

This seems to be an yet unsolved problem: stacking multiple textures on a wall surface.

[Gez]

That's what you'll want to use decals for.

[Bauul]

I'm also suprised 5. works, how do you not just get a load of z-fighting? Moving the verticies 1 unit from the wall seems safer.

 

I personally don't think 1 is as bad a solution as you made out. The corridor looked bad, but the first and last screenshots looked fine. Although obviously you need to like your own maps.

 

If you're sticking to vanilla, you've listed all the options available to you. Them's the limits of working with an engine chucked together by one dude in 18 months!

 

[scifista42]

What about "Ugly Trims" that are actually higher than the player can climb / jump onto? I mean, trims higher than 24 while lower than 128 map units, with splashes at their bottoms, placed next to tall ledges covered with whatever vertically tiling textures.

Edited April 4, 2017 by scifista42

[Not Jabba]

I'm not sure how applicable this is to liquid splashes, but in Heretic mapsets, people are able to superimpose banners against any texture by creating a line that's 1 pixel out from the wall and using the banner as a midtexture (I'm not sure if that's the same thing you mentioned in #5). It looks pretty seamless, and unless you wanted a huge number of liquid splashes, it might be pretty practical.

[riderr3]

I know how to make lower texture with trim and upper texture without trim on same linedef. Make a sector behind it and heights must me a zero, then raise it higher. Working only if there are no sectors behind that linedef.

Spoiler

 

[MinerOfWorlds]

The only one that i know of that looks good is number 2.

[scifista42]

8 hours ago, riderr3 said:

I know how to make lower texture with trim and upper texture without trim on same linedef. Make a sector behind it and heights must me a zero, then raise it higher. Working only if there are no sectors behind that linedef.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

That's exactly 40oz's 2. point.

[printz]

21 hours ago, Gez said:

That's what you'll want to use decals for.

Do you mean to tell me ZDoom lets you place decals in the editor on any sidedef surface at any point, letting you paint on textures whatever you want?

[scifista42]

ZDoom has a special actor that you can place next to walls in the editor and it will paint decals onto the walls as soon as the map is loaded in the game.

[Dragonfly]

4 hours ago, scifista42 said:

ZDoom has a special actor that you can place next to walls in the editor and it will paint decals onto the walls as soon as the map is loaded in the game.

I've been meaning to make use of this feature for a while, it'd be especially good for making 'bloodied up' rooms, graffiti in city maps, dents, scratches, secret area indicators, bullet markings and the likes!

[scifista42]

20 minutes ago, Dragonfly said:

graffiti in city maps... secret area indicators...

Keep in mind that some people play with decals disabled, or their limit set to a low number, for performance or other reasons.

[Gez]

Some people play with dynamic lights or brightmaps disabled, too.

 

Decal things are not affected by the decal limit anyway; that limit is only for scorch marks and blood splats.

[Graf Zahl]

On 3.4.2017 at 1:24 AM, 40oz said:

1. Superimpose Middle Textures - For some reason Doom has a 24 height nukage trim texture, but it's actually possible to use it as a middle texture, lower unpegged, then manually move the vertices on to the surrounding walls (without stitching the vertices together) to superimpose the patch on walls of any height, good for brown textures such as TANROCK5. This however causes rendering issues with GZDoom and possibly other OpenGL source ports. I'm not sure if this a hacky mapping workaround that Graf Zahl isn't going to want to complement, or if it's a legitimate error.

 

This is more a problem with hardware rendering than with GZDoom. Overlapping textures can create z-fighting and in cases where there's no good way to determine which one should get preference there isn't much that can be done. Some mod will always lose out.

 

In GZDoom it also gets complicated by decals.

 

[BigDickBzzrak]

On 3.4.2017. at 1:24 AM, 40oz said:

re: ugly edges

players will obviously exploit it to avoid mandatory damage

umm you do know about impassable linedefs? You can put detail behind the impassable line, it won't hurt.

[scifista42]

^ The problem is that, in vanilla, you can't smoothly slide against such 2-sided lines that are flagged impassable but you'd pass them if they weren't. This would be fixed with the edge raised so that it'd be impossible to climb onto it, then it could be flagged impassable as well and you'd slide against it smoothly anyway. The other problem, of course, is that the impassable lines may obstruct the intended way into or out of the nukage, for example if there's a ledge rather than a 1-sided wall next to the nukage, the player should be able to jump down from the ledge into the nukage.