Adding custom animations for a cross-port Heretic wad?

I'm helping Eregore with his Heretic Community Project and we're aiming to make it compatible with the various sourceports that can run Heretic (mainly Zdoom/JHeretic/Legacy) and while making it for vanilla will ensure compatibility, he wants to add a couple of new animated textures and switches.

So, is there a way to achieve this? Does the Doomsday engine and Legacy have their own equivalent of ZDoom's ANIMDEFS?
Or is there some sort of Boom Animated equivalent that I'm unaware of?

A.Gamma said:

So, is there a way to achieve this? Does the Doomsday engine and Legacy have their own equivalent of ZDoom's ANIMDEFS?
Or is there some sort of Boom Animated equivalent that I'm unaware of?

ANIMATED might work in Legacy Heretic. I'm pretty sure it'll work in ZDoom Heretic. And whenever Eternity will actually get working Heretic support, it'll probably work there too.

For Doomsday, you'd have to add a DD_DEFNS lump, with group definitions.

Thanks, I will try with the ANIMATED lump for Zdoom and Legacy, as for Doomsday... I've never worked with that. Do you know of any Doomsday wads that use custom animated textures so I can look at how it's done?

Unrelated: I've downloaded the r2248 of Eternity which has some crude Heretic support, it feels like we could get Eternity Heretic any day now.

Ok, I've managed to add boom animated textures and even switches but it won't work with Legacy, only Zdoom and Vavoom.
Now I will start trying to figure out how to add animated textures and switches for Doomsday

Doomsday, as of writting, only supports custom switches with XG created line types.

For animated textures/flats, just look at the examples at the link Gez posted.

Why in the world should the line type have anything to do with the texture that's on it? An animated switch should work just as well on any line. Making it work otherwise is a monumental feat of misengineering. Like building a bridge upside down.

I don't know if the SWITCHES lump would work with Heretic anyway. Given how it's tiered into shareware/registered/commercial Doom; would Heretic count as registered Doom? Or should there be different levels for Heretic entirely?


Fortunately, Heretic mapping practice is to put the switch in a small indentation, so if you really want several different switches, you can put them all on the same texture and use offsets.

Gez said:

I don't know if the SWITCHES lump would work with Heretic anyway. Given how it's tiered into shareware/registered/commercial Doom; would Heretic count as registered Doom? Or should there be different levels for Heretic entirely?


Fortunately, Heretic mapping practice is to put the switch in a small indentation, so if you really want several different switches, you can put them all on the same texture and use offsets.

Eternity already uses ANIMATED and SWITCHES to define the animations for Heretic. The shareware/registered mechanism works as expected, since there are shareware and registered versions of Heretic. "Commercial" has no meaning.

Quasar said:

Why in the world should the line type have anything to do with the texture that's on it? An animated switch should work just as well on any line. Making it work otherwise is a monumental feat of misengineering. Like building a bridge upside down.

XG was built as an evolution/revolution to Boom's generalized types. It is a system that allows one to make their own line and sector types from scratch.

Included in XG is an algorithm that automatically animates wall textures like switches, if the wall texture has a 'SW1XXXX' or 'SW2XXXX' name.

The original Vanilla types were to be folded into and replaced with XG definitions.

Ultimately, that never quite happened; while XG is a very powerful and flexible system that can do things you could never have dreamed of doing with the Vanilla types, it lacks a couple of features required to completely replace the original Vanilla types with.

Vermil said:

Ultimately, that never quite happened; while XG is a very powerful and flexible system that can do things you could never have dreamed of with the Vanilla types, it lacks a couple of features required to completely replace the original Vanilla types with.

Then I don't see any harm in supporting the BOOM SWITCHES lump like every other port, in addition to any port-specific solutions as such. There shouldn't be a gap there of this size, IMO.

Quasar said:

Then I don't see any harm in supporting the BOOM SWITCHES lump like every other port, in addition to any port-specific solutions as such. There shouldn't be a gap there of this size, IMO.

Doomsday plans to support Boom's features (it's currently early WIP), so it will support the SWITCHES lump eventually.

Quasar said:

Eternity already uses ANIMATED and SWITCHES to define the animations for Heretic. The shareware/registered mechanism works as expected, since there are shareware and registered versions of Heretic. "Commercial" has no meaning.

Yup, changing the switches definitions to shareware and registered made it work with eternity but not with legacy. Anyway thanks a lot :D

You could ask weasleyjohnson to add support for ANIMATED/SWITCHES in Legacy. He's on the forums pretty often.

Gez said:

You could ask weasleyjohnson to add support for ANIMATED/SWITCHES in Legacy. He's on the forums pretty often.

Will do, thanks for the suggestion.

Quasar said:

Then I don't see any harm in supporting the BOOM SWITCHES lump like every other port, in addition to any port-specific solutions as such. There shouldn't be a gap there of this size, IMO.

ANIMATED and SWITCHES are already supported in Doomsday and have been for a while.

I didn't think Boom support was that far along yet, my apologies.

On the whole its not, however many of high level features are. ANIMATED, SWITCHES, pass-through flag and more. Stuff like generalised line/sector types aren't however as we plan to fold this into XG.

DaniJ said:

ANIMATED and SWITCHES are already supported in Doomsday and have been for a while.

Hey this is awesome! I just tested it with build 675 and it does work. Thanks for the info.

DoomLegacy had Heretic SWITCHES restricted to only Episode 4 switches.
This restriction has been removed.
Committed to SVN 966, Nov 10, 2012, and will appear in upcoming Alpha4 release.