Custom Sprite Names (Dehacked)

[Snarboo]

Something I discovered years ago, but only just remembered, is that Strain uses unconventional sprite names for its custom things.

Being a vanilla partial conversion, I decided to load the dehacked patch and wad file into WhackEd4 to see how this was done, and was greeted by this:

Wait, a sprite block? I looked into it further on the Editing subforum, and found a semi-relevant thread about it. That leads me to this thread: why was sprite renaming dropped from Dehacked with Boom patches and up? This seems like an incredibly useful feature, especially when using something like Dehextra, where extra sprites can only be named "SP##."

[holaareola]

Whacked4 does support sprite renaming. Given the sprite block message, I suspect this might be an older .deh format thing. In the latest (hur hur) version of Dehacked, you simply rename the sprites through the strings table, the same way you would change the pickup messages, automap names etc.

 

It's extremely useful, as you surmised. If you're wanting to to run your wad on doom[2].exe, renaming sprites is the only way to use new sprites without including the entire IWAD set.

Edited April 20, 2021 by holaareola

[Snarboo]

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

It's extremely useful, as you surmised. If you're wanting to to run your wad on doom[2].exe, renaming sprites is the only way to use new sprites without including the entire IWAD set.

Ah, that makes sense! I noticed that Dehacked patches targeting Doom 1.9 are the only ones that have access to this feature in WhackEd, so I'm wondering if there was a reason .bex patches dropped this feature.

[NiGHTMARE]

Any port which supports .bex patches also supports .wads which have replacements for some (but not all) of the IWAD sprites, so I guess it was dropped because it wouldn't really be that useful.

Edited April 22, 2021 by NiGHTMARE