Vanilla wide skies (multi-patch)

[Juza]

Vanilla Doom can only take skies that are 128px vertically. Horizontally is another story, as I've seen textures go as far as 1024, which is probably the limit. In case you want a sky that wide, you'll need to cut it up in 256px wide pieces, and piece them together in Slade. For this I'll just use TNT's episode 1 sky, consisting of 4 individual textures: DOEDAY, DONDAY, DOWDAY and DOSDAY, placed from left to right in that exact order, to replace Doom 2's first episode sky. In case you're using your own texture, also make sure it has consistent names, such as MYSKY1, MYSKY2, MYSKY3 and MYSKY4.

 

First, you're gonna do it the same as adding any other texture. In case you don't know how to do that:

 

    1 - Go on the top right of Slade to make sure the base resource is set to your desired wad (most likely DOOM2.wad).

 

    2 - Create two new entries, P_START and P_END.

 

    3 - Put your textures in-between those lumps.

  

    4 - Select all of them, go to Graphics, and select Add to Patch Table. There will be a pop-up informing you that there's no texture definition and if you wish to create it now. Press Yes, and in Source, Import from Base Resource Archive. Now select all the textures again, right click, Graphics, and Add to Texture Table.

 

 

Now there'll be two new lumps in your wad, PNAMES and TEXTURE1. Open TEXTURE1 and search for SKY1. Select it, and in "texture properties" at the bottom change the size to 1024x128. That's the required width to store four 256px wide textures.

 

Now, to the right, you'll see the Patches window. Remove the RSKY1 patch, and add your textures one by one.

 

 

 Adjust them to their proper position. The first one will have its X by 0, the second 256, the third 512, and the fourth 768.

 

 

By this point, all left is to save and check it in-game.

 

Edited June 6, 2021 by Juza
typos / slight wording improvements

[DuckReconMajor]

This is one of those "i've seen it can be done but not how to do it" things. 

Thank you for taking the time to write this up once you figured it out!

[URROVA]

nice tutorial :)

[1Destro3456]

Thanks, I needed that right now, I'll fix my sky now

[SLOTH MARINE (CB)]

very helpful :)

[The_SloVinator]

Hopefully this stays forever. May reference back to this if needed. Thank you!

[Gez]

On mercredi 26 mai 2021 at 10:14 PM, Juza said:

Horizontally is another story, as I've seen textures go as far as 1024, which is probably the limit.

You can go longer. It's just useless for skies, because 1024 units is a full wraparound, and any texture data in the 1025th column and later would just be cropped out and ignored.

 

For wall textures, though? You can go longer than that, as proved with this silly example. Oe thing to keep in mind, though, is that for spurious reasons, vanilla Doom will refuse to load if the sum of the sizes of the patches that make up a single texture exceeds 65535 bytes. So that puts a limit to how crazy you can go with long hyperlong textures, though this limit is not strictly a texture dimension limit. (You can test that by switching around the TEXTURE1 and MIXTURE1 lump names in my example wad. The LONGTEXT texture is 2048x128 in both cases, but there's one where it's gussied up with a lot of completely gratuitous patches added to it, and the other where you kinda have to open the map in an editor to really notice the texture is actually long.)

longtexture.zip