Random CYL1_1 Texture Question

[Average]

I'm not a mapper so there may be a really obvious answer to this but why is CYL1_1 rarely centred?  I've been playing Doom since the year dot and have seen this texture used many, many times but I could count on one hand how many times I've seen the logo actually aligned to the centre.  It's often used as a kind of billboard or signage contained within a frame and it drives me nuts that, to me at least, it looks off.  I've even seen the left side of the logo actually cut off and the right side have another texture appended to fill in what would be a gap.

 

The above is an example (from Akeldama) of what I'm talking about.  Go pick a WAD that uses this texture and check it out... I'm not insane, right?

[plums]

The actual texture name is SHAWN1, and in Doom 2, it looks like this:

 

It's 128 x 128 pixels, and naturally off-centre, so I guess most people just don't bother to adjust the texture offsets to centre the logo.

 

Let's look at the history of the texture a little bit:

 

In early alpha versions of Doom, there didn't seem to be any requirements for texture sizes, and textures were all kinds of different sizes. This is different to the actual release where texture widths have to be a power of two, and heights need to be 128 px to tile vertically without errors (and couldn't be any taller). A lot of the early textures got fixed for these sizes in different ways of varying laziness -- a lot of them were originally 72 px tall, and were adjusted by just repeating the patch a second time underneath to fill 128 pixels total.

 

Here's the earliest version of CYL1_1 I can find, in the 0.4 alpha resources. It's 118x72 pixels:

 

Some time later they replaced the logo with the current one, which was already being used on that metal door. To fill the height for the proper release of Doom 1 they tiled some silver underneath -- you can see the seam on the silver pattern -- and filled the right side with... stone?

 

This looks pretty bad. But, the texture itself is only used in E2M7, in a hallway with a bunch of these half-pillars, and another single half-pillar elsewhere.

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You might need to click to enlarge the image to see, but the stone bit of the SHAWN1 is visible but placed against the other stone stone texture. (something I never noticed before!) It's hard to say whether that was "clever" texturing from Sandy, but it seems likely.

 

For Doom 2 they figured that looked bad and at least filled the stone section with silver instead, as in the first picture. This texture is only used in two maps though, several times in one area in MAP10, and just in a secret room in MAP17.

 

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In MAP10 you can see that it's off-centre, but in MAP17 you probably won't notice if you weren't looking for it.

 

 

Anyhow if it really bothers you, here's a wad with an edit of that patch so that the logo is centred. I didn't change the texture, so there's still the funny silver band on the side, but this makes it compatible with wads with new textures as long as they don't change that patch.

 

cyl1_1.wad

 

Keep in mind that this will mess up the offsets on any maps that actually do try to correct the offset (surely there are some), and anything else that relies on specific positioning of that texture. Can't find a good example right now but feel free to take another screenshot of Akeldama if you load it, here's MAP10 for something though.

 

Edited June 7 by plums