Sky texture Hell!

[Borg]

Extreme mapping newbie here so please be gentle. I'm building maps using Doom Builder 2, Zdoom in doom. Doom2.wad is my resource.

Threnody is one of all my time favorite wads so I "borrowed" the textures using Slade3 and inserted them into my own wad Raven1.wad.

It was cool until I started messing around with sky textures. First,  I replaced F_SKY1 with Threnody's SKY1. It replaced the old sky texture but not where I put it, just everywhere else where F_SKY1 was. So I thought about it and put the old F_SKY1 back and built a small room off to the side in an empty area and put SKY1 in place of F_SKY1.

Now it worked for all the sky textures. I did not save this version of the map Raven1. I quit the map and when I came back The sky texture was changed to SKY1. It also changed all of my backups that started with Raven1 and I could not restore the old sky. I was worried that I had corrupted Doom2.wad but it was fine.

 

What the hell did I do?

Not worried about my map. it was experimental.

[Nihlith]

Did you rename the sky texture you wanted to use so that it would load by default or did you define the sky for your map in MAPINFO? I'm not sure I understand what you did.

[OkDoomer174]

Replacing F_SKY1 is not how you change sky textures. You'll need to make a MAPINFO file in SLADE3 for your WAD. Here's an example MAPINFO:

map map01 "Raven1" 
{
    next = "EndGameC"
    secretnext = map02
    music = "D_RUNNIN"
    sky1 = "SKYTEX" // This line changes your sky texture!
    cluster = 666
}

I highly suggest that you do not blindly copy-and-paste this into your WAD. Instead, read up about MAPINFO map definitions here. MAPINFO can also do a lot more that I recommend you look into; the ZDoom wiki is your best friend.

Edited November 16, 2021 by OkDoomer174

[Gez]

F_SKY1 is not the sky texture. It's just the sky placeholder. It's there to tell "draw the sky here instead of a regular ceiling or floor" but it doesn't tell what sky to draw exactly. (Except I think in Doom 64 where you have F_SKY1, F_SKY2, etc. to indicate which sky you want, IIRC.)

 

Read the technical details here: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Sky

[Borg]

19 hours ago, Nihlith said:

Did you rename the sky texture you wanted to use so that it would load by default or did you define the sky for your map in MAPINFO? I'm not sure I understand what you did.

No. I did not rename it. All I did was set the ceiling in 1 sector to SKY1 which is a texture from Threnody. I did a ctrl z and then made a sector in an empty area and set that ceiling texture to SKY1. After that, all sectors using F_SKY1 as a ceiling changed to the Threnody texture SKY1 which is yellow. In visual mode it looked just like the old F_SKY1, and also displayed F_SKY1 in visual and sectors modes. I have been unable to change it back or change it to anything else.

I apologize for my unclear terminology in my original post.

 

I have read that copying and pasting textures from other PWADS can result in some odd behavior.

[Borg]

I plan on looking into MAPINFO and doomwiki Sky.

Thanks for the help.

 

 

[Ashurion Neonix]

F_SKY1 is used to tell the game where to put the sky. The actual sky textures are named SKY1, SKY 2, and SKY 3 (depending on the episode)

Alternatively you can use any texture name and then specify it with MapInfo. This depends on the port however so if you want more port compatibility you will need multiple mapinfos. You should be able to find good information about sky and MapInfo on doomwiki.org. Or, if you're just using gzdoom, you can check the zdoom wiki's MapInfo page which has some good examples.

[Borg]

19 hours ago, Nihlith said:

Did you rename the sky texture you wanted to use so that it would load by default or did you define the sky for your map in MAPINFO? I'm not sure I understand what you did.

Sorry again for my last reply. I just found out that copying the textures from Threnody into my wad is what changed the sky texture. Nothing else.

 

Btw, using the textures from Threnody was for experimental purposes only. I would never have used them in any of my wads that I might publish.

[Nihlith]

1 hour ago, Borg said:

Sorry again for my last reply. I just found out that copying the textures from Threnody into my wad is what changed the sky texture. Nothing else.

 

Btw, using the textures from Threnody was for experimental purposes only. I would never have used them in any of my wads that I might publish.

 

No worries. @OkDoomer174, @Ashurion Neonix and @Gez have it right as far as I can tell but I think we might all be talking past each other. You appear to be talking about how the map builder works and saying that the sky is changed everywhere after you made this change. You can change that stuff back or change it to something different by going to tools, game configuration and altering the resources you are loading when running the map builder in any given mode. The sky might be changed everywhere because that's what was loaded when you started editing the map. 

[Borg]

Bingo!

MAPINFO is very powerful.

Major jump in learning curve here.

You guys are great.

Chubdozer helped too.

Thanks a bunch.

[Borg]

What are you guys using to modify and build new textures? My old version of Paint Shop Pro works but I need to make text that is smaller than it allows.

[Nihlith]

I like GIMP. It's great and it's free. 

[Borg]

15 hours ago, Nihlith said:

I like GIMP. It's great and it's free. 

I have GIMP but I'm not very good at it. I have to refer to the help file quite a bit and it's kind of clumsy for a help file. Similar to Linux type help files which are also a bit hard to get get used to. I do need to get good at it because it's probably much better than Paint Shop Pro 7 which is 20 years old.

[Nihlith]

5 hours ago, Borg said:

I have GIMP but I'm not very good at it. I have to refer to the help file quite a bit and it's kind of clumsy for a help file. Similar to Linux type help files which are also a bit hard to get get used to. I do need to get good at it because it's probably much better than Paint Shop Pro 7 which is 20 years old.

You can improve pretty quickly playing with it and querying the interwebs for instructions. There are soooo many menus and tools.

[Ashurion Neonix]

On 11/18/2021 at 11:04 PM, Borg said:

What are you guys using to modify and build new textures? My old version of Paint Shop Pro works but I need to make text that is smaller than it allows.

I've been using Aseprite as it works quite well for spriting and pixel art. (It is paid though.)

[Mr.Rocket]

I've been using PSP 7 for a long time too as well as several other paint programs, and Paint shop pro always seemed good enough and you could always load and save the doom palette in it as well, but one thing caught my eye:

On 11/18/2021 at 6:04 PM, Borg said:

but I need to make text that is smaller than it allows

Do you mean fonts via PSP or do you mean the actual Doom in-game text?

Because there's ways to just display the in game text pretty much any way you want via MAPINFO or other ways. 

[Ashurion Neonix]

On 11/18/2021 at 11:04 PM, Borg said:

My old version of Paint Shop Pro works but I need to make text that is smaller than it allows.

Doom writer is a pretty good tool for generating Text in the doom font. (Or any custom doom font file.) The interface works pretty similar to the way zandronums coloured name system works. Once you are done you are can just resize the exported PNG in another editor. Doomkid did a pretty good tutorial on it. https://youtu.be/zfQWZNliozM

[Borg]

Thanks for the good info guys. I like making small signs and stuff. In one map I played, don't remember which one, you go through a door into what looks like a small office with a Baron of Hell in it behind a desk.  On the walls were these small pictures of himself. Might have been his kids. I still laugh when I think about it. SOB killed me while I was looking at his family pictures.