How are the textures stored in wads?

[ovscore_]

Edit: I fixed it! I just didn't understand composite textures.

 

Now before you say anything, I do understand the wad format, and I know about how to get textures (mostly) out of it, but I just discovered an issue. 

 

I have recently started a project that involved porting E1M1 into Half Life to see how it would play with the different style. However, I discovered that I was missing textures. I originally used Wadext to extract all of the textures and put it all in wad3 to use in goldsource, but I found that no matter where i looked, wadext wasnt giving me textures. I decided to use Doombuilder to try and see the texture names to see if maybe it was just a mixup, but I discovered that Doombuilder was actually showing me at least 50 more textures stored in the wad than what Wadext extracted. This included things like a large majority of the switch textures, and all of the TEK prefixed textures, which actually happened to be what made me realize the issue. So what I want to know is this: Is wadext just broken? Is it only giving me a portion of the textures despite the fact that doombuilder is able to show more? Are they in some different format or folder that Wadext doesn't support? Or am I just doing this wrong?

 

One thing I can note is that Doombuilder uses texture sets, where it splits the textures into categories so theyre easier to find, and it lists Doom.wad separately. I originally thought that maybe they were just built in, but they cannot be seen when the wad isn't given. What the hell is going on?

 

TLDR; Wadext isn't giving me all of the textures that are present in the wad when viewed in Doombuilder.

The aforementioned TEK textures that are completely missing when extracted using Wadext.

Edited February 20, 2021 by ovscore_
I found the solution

[Sgt. Sleepy]

Try using Slade 3 to export the textures.

[DavidN]

Is it possible that wadext is extracting the patches rather than the textures? Several of them have the same names as the textures they eventually create, but many textures are made up of multiple patches with different names...

 

Nevertheless, Slade 3 will definitely be able to do it - load the wad, go to the texture browser in the menu bar, then select them all and right click to export to PNG.

[SaladBadger]

To give the specifics, the Doom wad file only contains "patches" for wall textures (floors/ceilings are stored in another simpler format that can only be 64x64). The game takes these patches and composes them into final textures, the intention being that you could do something like take a base texture and put a sign patch on it to create a wall with a sign. These composed textures are stored in TEXTURE1 and TEXTURE2, and I suspect wadext either isn't capable of rendering out the composited textures, or doesn't do so by default. As mentioned, SLADE 3 is capable of looking at these composited textures and exporting them as images.

[Nevander]

19 hours ago, DavidN said:

Is it possible that wadext is extracting the patches rather than the textures?

That sounds like the issue to me. In the WAD it's all patches. Textures are assembled with TEXTURE1/2.

[ovscore_]

I discovered my issue. I figured out how patches work, and composite textures. Slade saved me.