faking decoration sprites

[raymoohawk]

i was thinking that maybe we could have the appearence of aditional decoration sprites by having them be textures. tho i suppose theyre usage would be limited to places in the map where the lack of rotating wouldn't be noticeable, like inside a small tunel or something like that

[MrFlibble]

Do you mean decorations that are sort of standing/hanging near a wall (but actually part of the wall texture), or actual decorations in texture format, with transparent areas?

[andrewj]

I think in general the flatness of such objects will be too obvious.

Some things could work though. Too bad we don't have any animated textures spare to make a spinning fan (the ones in BTSX are a nice touch).

Things designed for outside of the level, e.g. a spaceship sitting on a launch pad could work as a texture if its view was limited.

Be nice to have decoration textures like hanging vines, spider webs, wires.

[Maz Hades]

This would work very well for things like lamp posts and people leaning on things, but as Ray said, they'd need to be in areas you can't see how flat they are.
It'd be a good way to include more normal humans, such as scientists or prisoners.
Here's how it looks in game:
spoilered because babes

Spoiler

[raymoohawk]

yup, waht andrew and maz said is the sort of thing i was thinking, tho there is the issue of lack of animation

[MrFlibble]

Well, I remember that in HacX they scrapped animations of some items to free up extra sprites for decorations and add animations for destructible props. The sprites are re-organized using the DEHACKED lump only, so it could be implemented in the IWADs too. However, this almost certainly means breaking PWAD compatibility of course.

I'm not sure if the same method can be used to actually add new sprites alongside existing ones, or if that would require a custom executable. However I think that this is worth considering, at least as a theoretical possibility.

BTW, what kind of decorations do you have in mind? Captured NPCs?

[HorrorMovieRei]

In Batman Doom they used this same trick to make stuff like crowds of people, sewer openings and stalagmites. There are many clever ways we could use these, like for the final boss, maybe?