How many pixels wide and tall should a custom doom texture be? And how do you make custom textures?

[DoctorBFG9000]

I want to make a snowy themed Doom WAD. Plz, help. Also how do u make custom skyboxes?

[MFG38]

To my understanding, there's no real specific resolution that a texture has to be, with the exception of flats which should always be 64x64. But then again, that too depends on the port you're developing for - I'm talking strictly vanilla Doom here.

 

You can make a basic texture by drawing one in an image editing tool of your choice and importing it into your WAD file in SLADE or some other WAD editing program. I do recommend SLADE, though, since it has tools for converting your textures into Doom-compatible graphics. But again, in case you're developing for vanilla Doom, you'll want to take Doom's 256-color palette into consideration so the textures won't look horribly wrong once you've converted them. I think you could export the palette as an image file using SLADE and then pick the colors from that.

[Doomkid]

For a lot of ports, 128 units is the maximum texture height.  I think anything with a multiple of 8 is okay in terms of width, as long as it doesn't surpass 1024 pixels. Either way, those rules have always worked for me.

[Urthar]

6 hours ago, Doomkid said:

For a lot of ports, 128 units is the maximum texture height.  I think anything with a multiple of 8 is okay in terms of width, as long as it doesn't surpass 1024 pixels. Either way, those rules have always worked for me.

 

You'll have problems with any texture that isn't a power of 2 in width or height in vanilla. Boom is more flexible with height, but the width restriction remains. (Or at least, powers of 2 have always worked for me. People with more experience with vanilla limitations such as Essel probably have a more precise idea.)

 

Edit: if your texture isn't intended to tile vertically then the power of 2 restriction can be ignored, and indeed there are vanilla textures with heights of 24, 72, etc. But you have to be a bit careful with them to avoid this: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Tutti-frutti_effect

 

Edited July 8, 2017 by Urthar

[Doomkid]

Thanks for the clarification, I was never sure what exactly the restriction was until now

[ReX]

On 7/7/2017 at 5:53 PM, RokkiDoctor65 said:

Also how do u make custom skyboxes?

An example tutorial

[Voros]

1. Typical skyboxes have a size of 256 pixels and 128 pixels for width and height respectively.

- the sky textures in Doom1 are named SKY1, SKY2, SKY3 etc. Replace any of these skies to get a custom sky in-game.

- the sky textures in Doom2 are named RSKY1, RSKY2 and RSKY3. Replace any of these to get a custom sky in-game.

- if you want a sky bigger than 256x128, you have to use a TEXTURE lump. Here's an example. Using Doom2's TEXTURE1 lump as base, I would make a small change for RSKY1:

RSKY1 1024 128

This defines the texture RSKY1 to have a size of 1024x128 instead of 256x128.

* RSKY1A 0 0
* RSKY1B 256 0
* RSKY1C 512 0
* RSKY1D 768 0

What this does is puts four different gfx at four different points. Each gfx is 256x128.

But most ports can handle big sizes, hence it can be as simple as this:

RSKY1 1024 128
* RSKY1 0 0

2. Custom textures don't really have that much restriction. It mostly depends on what port you plan on using.

- if Chocolate/vanilla, take care to use power-of-2 height and width such, such as 64, 16, 32 etc. For height, try not to exceed beyond 128 pixels.

- for other ports, you most likely won't have too many problems. If you do, feel free ask for solutions.

Maybe I used too much Doom jargon here.