Trying to do basic stuff in Slade and failing... :(

[Hellbent]

The first experience that's thrown me for a loop is when I use the file browser in Slade3. The file directory lists like 9 or more redundant names of each wad file instead of just one which would be normal and expected... this is so confusing to me. Am I supposed to arbitrarily click one? Why so many of each file? Why not just one? What am I supposed to use the file browser for?

 

Secondly, I opened a wad file a friend made long time back with sunflowers in it. I want to make the sunflowers taller so I figured I'd try to export the sunflowers, edit them, and re-import them into the wad. Easy peasy, right? So I'm looking at the graphics that have been added to the wad and they are all in grayscale, but when I play the wad they are all in full color. I bank on this being some kind of weird UI issue with the program and export the sunflowers as .PNGs hoping they will be in color. Nope, they are still grayscale. Why is Slade displaying the sunflowers and other custom graphics in the wad as grayscale, even though they are color when I play the wad?

 

Third, once I solve number 2, is it possible to skew the sunflowers within Slade as a quick/easy way to make them 72 units tall instead of the current ~48ish they are now? (I'm happy to export them, but if Slade has a way to easily tweak graphics within the program that might be handy for me to learn it). 

 

Fourth, and unrelated to the above three, how do take a bunch of map01 single level wads and make a megawad out of them? I've heard tell Slade is the place to do this (I'm finding DBX to be rather irksome when trying to do this; it's a bit cumbersome to say the least).

[Nevander]

13 minutes ago, Hellbent said:

Why so many of each file? Why not just one? What am I supposed to use the file browser for?

It should just be a list of your recently opened files. I don't know why there would be multiples of single files.

 

14 minutes ago, Hellbent said:

So I'm looking at the graphics that have been added to the wad and they are all in grayscale, but when I play the wad they are all in full color.

Did you add your Doom IWAD as base resource? SLADE needs to know what color palette to use.

 

15 minutes ago, Hellbent said:

is it possible to skew the sunflowers within Slade as a quick/easy way to make them 72 units tall instead

This I don't know. Regardless, it would be easier to export, edit, import.

 

16 minutes ago, Hellbent said:

how do take a bunch of map01 single level wads and make a megawad out of them?

Very simple. Create a new WAD and then open the other single level WADs. Copy all the lumps from the single map and paste into your new WAD. Repeat with the other maps. Just make sure you paste at the end of the previous map lumps and not in the middle.

 

So, a visual example:

 

MAP01 map marker

<other lumps>

*paste here*

MAP02 map marker

<other lumps>

[Hellbent]

Thanks!!  The graphic I want to resize is 128x60. I resized it to 256x120. I imported it and converted it to doom format. In slade it shows the graphic as being in the wad as 256x120. When I open it in doombuilder it shows the graphic as being 128x60. When I run the wad in zdoom it shows the graphic as cropped 128x60 graphics (so they are bigger, but not expanded into the 256x120 space but are still 128x60). I don't understand why slade shows it as 256x120 but the graphic is still 128x60 (and now cropped).

[Gez]

On mercredi 3 juin 2020 at 11:32 AM, Hellbent said:

The file directory lists like 9 or more redundant names of each wad file instead of just one which would be normal and expected... this is so confusing to me. Am I supposed to arbitrarily click one? Why so many of each file? Why not just one? What am I supposed to use the file browser for?

You've found a bug. I wonder how long it's been there, I guess it means that very few people use the file browser feature... (Personally I open anything that's not on the "recent files" list by drag-and-drop from outside.)

 

On mercredi 3 juin 2020 at 11:32 AM, Hellbent said:

Secondly, I opened a wad file a friend made long time back with sunflowers in it. I want to make the sunflowers taller so I figured I'd try to export the sunflowers, edit them, and re-import them into the wad. Easy peasy, right? So I'm looking at the graphics that have been added to the wad and they are all in grayscale, but when I play the wad they are all in full color. I bank on this being some kind of weird UI issue with the program and export the sunflowers as .PNGs hoping they will be in color. Nope, they are still grayscale. Why is Slade displaying the sunflowers and other custom graphics in the wad as grayscale, even though they are color when I play the wad?

The Doom graphic format does not store any color information in the graphics. It just says "color #1 here, color #2 there, color #3 over there" but it doesn't say what these colors are.

 

To know what these colors are, you need to have an external palette which contains this information. This is a lump called PLAYPAL. When you play the wad, the game does not load just the wad, it also loads an IWAD which contains a PLAYPAL. If you want SLADE to do the same thing, you've got to load the IWAD too. This is the "base resource archive", which SLADE uses to fill in the blank for any resource it needs that isn't in the WAD, such as a PLAYPAL but also, you know, things like the patches and stuff for the texture editor.

Notice these very obvious drop-down in the SLADE toolbar? Yeah. Make it so that it looks like it does above, with "Doom2.wad" as the base resource, and things will look as expected. Click on the cog to set the base resources. You can then change from one game to another very easily.

 

Alternatively, see the "Palette" drop down? Yeah, you've got a ton of palette choices in there. Existing/Global means that if there are no palette available, it'll default to the palette from the base resource; and if there's no base resource then it defaults to using a grayscale palette.

 

On mercredi 3 juin 2020 at 11:32 AM, Hellbent said:

Third, once I solve number 2, is it possible to skew the sunflowers within Slade as a quick/easy way to make them 72 units tall instead of the current ~48ish they are now? (I'm happy to export them, but if Slade has a way to easily tweak graphics within the program that might be handy for me to learn it). 

No. You can crop images to make them smaller, and you can also do some simple pixel touch-ups. But there's no easy way to make images larger at the moment, and there aren't any scaling tool.

 

On mercredi 3 juin 2020 at 11:32 AM, Hellbent said:

Fourth, and unrelated to the above three, how do take a bunch of map01 single level wads and make a megawad out of them? I've heard tell Slade is the place to do this (I'm finding DBX to be rather irksome when trying to do this; it's a bit cumbersome to say the least).

Copy all the map lumps one after another, and rename the map so that your first MAP01 is still MAP01, but the second MAP01 is renamed MAP02, and so on.

[Hellbent]

Thanks Gez for the clear explanations. Still can't figure out why the replaced textures are still 128x60 instead of 256x120. Is it possible textures they replace are 128x64 and cannot be resized larger by a larger texture?

[Gez]

I don't know. Are you sure you saved after importing the taller variant?

[Hellbent]

The new texture when playing in the level looks like it's been blown up (zoomed in) but the texture is still only 60 units high (instead of 120). 

 

So it's like the texture did get enlarged as I wanted, but then got cropped to stay at the original 128x60 units instead of being the new desired size of 256x120.

Edited June 5, 2020 by Hellbent