which doom textures are useless or barely used?

[Stupid Bunny]

59 minutes ago, plums said:

BROWNWEL use is like a secret handshake for Ultimate Doom maps and mappers, I always love spotting it in people's maps.

 

You would enjoy playing my maps then I've shoehorned it into more little bits and places than I care to go hunt down right now

 

I struggle to find a texture that is truly useless.  I think I've found a good use for just about every texture out there, either as thematic base textures or as decorative flourishes outside of the "intended" use.  The exception might be ASHWALL6 and 7, both of which look horrendous and flat and staticky every time I use them, no matter how many chances they get.

 

The WOLF textures are indeed pretty useless outside of making Wolf3D themed maps, but then, that's a use, isn't it?  I've made a few of those now and even if they don't integrate very well objectively it still makes for fun theming.

 

WOODVERT I used to think was useless but lately I've grown a bit of a fondness for it.  I think I said before it reminded me of fake 70s wood paneling, and I realized at some point that that was actually awesome and should go into more maps.

 

I was going to say that I know I've used SPCDOOR4 at some point but I couldn't find it anywhere I thought I had.  Oh well, I did now :p

[Darkcrafter07]

There's no such Doom texture that left unused. The guys at iD wanted to save as much space as possible and that's one of the reasons textures are not images but a collage of pre-fabrished pieces called "Patches". Why create the same wall texture with different switches placed on it if you can have one patch for a wall and another for a switch.
 

I'd even say that textures in Doom are scarce as there's no color variations in them. The lack of scaling, skewing, sidedef-independent offseting, unified flat-wall texturing - made it a pretty poor collection to choose from. You couldn't draw lighting gradients on those, you couldn't change their tint or colors, you couldn't desaturate, no colored sectors and so on. It's only when GZDoom came out I grown a steady interest in mapping for Doom as it fixed it all. I hope ACE engine at some point will reach the same feature richness so it could be ran on your grandmas 486. Duke Nukem 3D theme and textures were like Doom ideas brought way way beyond and sometimes looked better than Quake which I absolutely hated to play cause it appeared looking way to choppy and vomit palleted to me. The first impression I had when launched Quake was like what, medieval bs? Meh...

 

The Doom theme made an impression of watching 90's cartoons, Duke looked much more solid, modern and raw and simply wonderful, it was like those 90's thriller and brutal action non-stop, you the best, you here, you got a gun, shoot to solve the problem and swear. Launching Quake was like "Black Knight" experience, exactly the "do you want peas" moment?

 

I think it would have been amazing if all those three games textures were merged into one pack.

[Fonze]

Not useless, but certainly one of the weirdest doom textures: compohso.

[bobstremglav]

9 hours ago, Betelgeuse said:

How dare you say useless, All the doom textures are great.

AASTINKY

[Scypek2]

2 hours ago, roadworx said:

well, if we're talking specifically about mapping and not the inner workings of the engine, then aashitty and aastinky are literal useless textures

 

I think I might have used them a few times in the past, when I wanted to have no texture somewhere but Doombuilder would aggressively texture my sectors... but then I think it worked inconsistently across source ports, so I had to stop.

 

Anyway, SPCDOOR4 is probably my favorite door, it feels gritty and totally industrial but also entirely non-spacey. I'm sure I've used it a whole lot. The BLODRIP sequence, on the other hand, seems especially useless, designed for a specific kind of hell theme no one really uses. I used it in one room in 3IAC and it might have been out of pity.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Scypek2

[Stupid Bunny]

13 hours ago, Scypek2 said:

The BLODRIP sequence, on the other hand, seems especially useless, designed for a specific kind of hell theme no one really uses. I used it in one room in 3IAC and it might have been out of pity.

If you mean the E3 style industrial/technical+medieval+flesh freaky hodgepodge theme then that’s my favorite way to do hell maps. I’m not sure I’ve actually used BLODRIP but that’s mostly because I’m not too fond of the specific texture it’s coming out of. Guess it’s something else to find a home for

[Async Unicorn]

You know, I find it funny how I managed to incorporate dummy "AASTINKY" texture into my techbase geometry...

I use it as barriers or little columns, though it needs to be 7 pixels exactly to be pixel perfect, which is... stinky!

Edited December 1, 2023 by Vanilla+Unicorn

[129thVisplane]

only semi related to my complete lack of WOODVERT usage but i just realized why it looks so out of place and non-doomy to me. it's from freaking shadowcaster

(i grabbed the sc texture from the r667 shadowcaster texpack bc i dont have the game, but i trust that its in the actual game)

[Quill]

43 minutes ago, 129thVisplane said:

only semi related to my complete lack of WOODVERT usage but i just realized why it looks so out of place and non-doomy to me. it's from freaking shadowcaster

(i grabbed the sc texture from the r667 shadowcaster texpack bc i dont have the game, but i trust that its in the actual game)

 

My theory is that WOODVERT could be an unused Wolf3D texture that id had lying around. Then they passed the engine over to Raven and have them edit the texture in their own game. Then, while id was developing Doom 2, they were looking through Wolfenstein 3D assets and said "oh cool a new texture" then added it to the game.

I couldn't find the texture in the Wolfenstein 3D files, so it could just be stuck in the id Vaults for an indefinite amount of time. ^{romero wolf dump when?}

Unrelated tangent while I was looking through Wolf3D textures contained below:

Spoiler

the spear of destiny expansion named Ultimate Challenge had freaking DOOM TEXTURES!!!!

 

[129thVisplane]

6 hours ago, Quill said:

My theory is that WOODVERT could be an unused Wolf3D texture that id had lying around. Then they passed the engine over to Raven and have them edit the texture in their own game. Then, while id was developing Doom 2, they were looking through Wolfenstein 3D assets and said "oh cool a new texture" then added it to the game.

idk, if i had a nickel for every time a shadowcaster texture showed up in doom, i would have at least three* nickels so maybe the artists of id and raven just hung out together and decided to share resources during the respective developments of doom and shadowcaster. your theory is also reasonable though considering there is a bunch of wolf3d texture edits in doom 2, a recycled unused wolf3d texture wouldn't be out of the question

^{*if we count the liquids as one, and include PANEL5's painting which is kind of cheating but it kinda counts}

 

back on topic though, it turns out my two least used/most "meh" textures kinda fit together pretty well, i wonder if i could make this work as a full map:

 

[Devalaous]

On 11/30/2023 at 8:38 AM, plums said:

BROWNWEL use is like a secret handshake for Ultimate Doom maps and mappers, I always love spotting it in people's maps.

I spotted it in END1 E1M2 the other day, and thought of this post.