MFADEMAP

[wesleyjohnson]

I think that there is some extra garbage in the MFADEMAP lump.

The yadex editor keeps complaining (with my changes, so this may not be standard behavior) that the size of the MFADEMAP lump is not what it should be. It does not complain about the other fog maps.

The lump size should be 8704, but MFADEMAP is currently 8776 bytes.

Is anyone responsible for MFADEMAP, and is that extra actually contain anything ??

[andrewj]

Yadex does not read or check colormap tables or fog maps.

This MFADEMAP lump must be sitting somewhere it does not belong, e.g. amongst all the flats.

[wesleyjohnson]

This Yadex does know about color map tables because I fixed it to have that capability, and sent the patches to the author.

MFADEMAP is the only one that gets this error message, otherwise it works fine. It looks like the lump has extraneous stuff in it and I am asking if the lump MFADEMAP is intended to be larger than needed.

[Gez]

These numbers remind me of something...

I'm going to guess the added weight should simply be ignored; it's Inkworks' signature, and it's just a string that goes: "This lump was created by The Cookie Monsters InkWorks for DOOM (ver 1.1)" (version number may vary of course).

[wesleyjohnson]

That would explain where it came from.
The problem is that it sets off checks specifically put in to detect corrupt and malformed lumps.
Also we do not really need to include advertising in the FreeDoom lumps.
I request that we trim the advertising off.

[Gez]

wesleyjohnson said:

The problem is that it sets off checks specifically put in to detect corrupt and malformed lumps.

Given that Inkworks is still the go-to program for creating palettes and colormaps, it would be a good idea for the checks to take that into account. After all, if this signature is there, it's because it works with vanilla.

Even if it is trimmed from Freedoom, there would still be a lot of other mods where a colormap features that signature.

[wesleyjohnson]

I doubt that I would change the checks just to allow for tools to include advertisements. I do not use Inkworks. If I had a program that put a little "extra" into the output, I would junk it and find another program. Sneaking something extra into the output is behavior that I find intolerable in a tool.
I would rather warn the user that advertising has been detected in a lump, so they can deal with it.

Who do they think is ever going to see that advertising in a colormap lump. They only do that so they can claim some sort of ownership over any output from their program.

[Gez]

Look, I've made some minor contributions to SLADE3. It's during testing its ability to view colormaps and palettes that I've discovered the Inkworks issue. There are A LOT of mods with that.

Whether you want your port to be incompatible with vanilla-compatible mods is your own problem. I'm just pointing out that this thing exists, that it's not going to be fixed on Inkworks' side (it's not maintained anymore IIRC), it's not going to be fixed in the hundreds of mods which feature lumps created with Inkworks, and it's not a problem for the original game and all other ports that exist out there.

[Graf Zahl]

Ugh...

Reminds me of this


The general rule when developing tools is to make them work with the existing data, not to declare that data invalid and start whiny threads.

Bottom line: If you refuse to make your tool/port handle these lumps it'll be considered broken. End of story.

[wesleyjohnson]

I don't know what issue those last two reply posts have wandered off into, so I will restate what I said, and make it more obvious.

I do not like tools that slip advertising into their output. I have encountered them before, and I will abandon such tools given any chance to use another tool that does not do such things.
I have had to strip off such labeling by hand to use the output.
I have encountered tools that had an option to leave off the labeling
(someone else must have complained too).

I say this loudly so that any tool developer that might read this forum, that thinks it is cute to label the output with such advertising, might be warned off from doing such a thing.

Please stop reading other interpretations into this.

My patch to Yadex, that detects this odd sized lump, was included because there were other tests doing the same thing for other lumps and I included similar code in my patch for handling colormaps.

It correctly detects an odd sized colormap lump, and prints one line of warning that the lump is odd sized. It in no way prevents the user from proceeding. I have been using Yadex with this patch to create FreeDoom MAP13 and MAP09 over many months. It prints one warning line each time that FADEMAP is odd sized for a colormap lump.

The other colormaps must have been made with a different tool.

I believe that it is wrong to change the test of correct lump size in order to give into one badly behaved tool. The tool that that did it right should be credited for not invoking warning messages.

It is YADEX, the wad editor, that is detecting this.
It is possible that such advertising could break ZDoom, Legacy, or Eternity engines, if it was used on other lumps. I wish to discourage such ideas.

[Graf Zahl]

Much ado about nothing...