I'm NEW

[johnno56]

I am new to the Doomworld Forums and have been a fan of Doom since the old Intel 486 days.

I am keen to learn editing. I run with Linux Mint 17.2 64bit and as such I have installed the Eureka Editor. If anyone can recommend another editor, that runs natively on Linux, I will be glad to check it out. At the moment Eureka has little to no documentation. Hence, one of the reasons, I am here on this Forum.

I am afraid that I may need a lot of help. I am more of a player than a creator... lol

I welcome any tips, clues, advise (constructive) and assistance as I can get.

J

ps: Almost forgot. I managed to install Slade3... don't know how I could have forgotten that one... it took some time to install... dependencies and stuff like that... lol

[Fonze]

Welcome to the forums!

I cant advise you on anything Linux-based, but as a general rule of thumb, be a player first and a mapper second :) Always play as many maps from others as you can. Study them, read people's opinions and learn the standards for quality in wads for the community. In addition, always provide info (format/port needed, etc) and screenies for wads you post; it will increase the number of people who check it out astronomically, as well as the quality of the first few replies you receive. Don't be upset if you make a map and it only gets one decent response (though of course all responses need to be thought about: if you could have done anything differently in the beginning...), many folk get just that: one or two good responses. When starting, one of the most recommended approaches is to make many small-medium, 1-map wads in order to garner not only the best experience, but the most feedback over time as well. Definitely do spend time on your maps, though, and ensure that they are at least the community's standard, otherwise the comments you receive will likely not be related to what you want to talk about.

I wish you the best of luck and once again, welcome!

[johnno56]

Thanks Fonze,

The advise is much appreciated.

I was not all that hopeful in finding Linux-based editor support. But good advise in map making is useful for any editor. I find documentation and tutorials, for me, are the hardest resources to find when it comes to Linux editors. Maybe one day that will change.

I will also look at Windows-based editors and attempt to run them through 'Wine' (a compatibility layer that allows Linux to run windows applications - some better than others *sigh*). Which windows-based editors would you recommend?

Again, thank you for the advice...

J

[Fonze]

You're welcome man.

There are a few users here who operate on Linux. I'm sure one will be along eventually who can offer better help, though if you use the search function, I'm sure I saw a thread about Linux-based editor support not too long ago, though of course pickings are slim.

For Windows-based editors, by far the best right now is GzDoom Builder. It'll handle just about anything except the actual wad editing stuff that Slade does. GzDB+Slade3 is the winning combo for Windows and Slade also has a function to open maps in GzDB straight from Slade, which is convenient if you are in need of both. Just always be extra careful of having the same wad open in multiple programs, as only one can be saved without over-riding the other.

[Quineotio]

Welcome :)

I found this, but it's for doom builder (as opposed to gzdoom builder).

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-builder/44355-doom-builder-on-linux-how-to/.

Good luck with it :)

[johnno56]

Thank you, Quineotio, for the welcome. Much appreciated.

You must have read my mind. That reference was one of the first that I found. Unfortunately it didn't work for me. Followed all the instructions to the letter. The editor installed and started without issue. I attempted to access the menus and the program "spat the dummy" and promptly died a painful death. This was expected but I had hoped that it would work... *sigh*. Not every program that normally runs on windows will run 100% accurately using Wine... Experience is a hard tutor...

I thank you for the advice. If memory serves correctly, I believe that GZDoom Builder is based on Doom Builder 2... but I could be wrong... and yes, I have tried both Doom Builder 1.68 and 2 using wine, with similar results... *sigh*

I am currently researching documentation and tutorials for Slade3... fingers crossed...

J

[hex11]

If you ever used DEU or other related thing like DETH, then Yadex is another option.
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Yadex

[johnno56]

Thanks Hex11.

I'm surprised that I missed that one. Yes, Eureka's founding program... Version 1.7.0... 2007... yikes, old. But, then again, so is Doom... lol Anyway, I downloaded the beastie as soon as I opened your message, and will "take it out for a spin" as soon as I am done replying. lol.

Thank you again for your assistance. Living on the other side of the planet makes 'Forum' conversations quite lengthy. But, I must say, the amount of responses I have had in the past few days has been encouraging. Thank you for being a part of that...

J

[Tracer]

Welcome to your new home, bud. I love mapping and would be happy to answer any questions you have, or if you just want to exchange maps with each other just to have some fun, we can do that too.

Send me a PM whenever.

[johnno56]

thank you TraceOfSpades for the welcome. Much appreciated.

A "long" time ago (pre-windows XP) I tried my hand at map making. I cannot recall which program I used... would have had to have been dos-based... managed to get two "rooms" linked by a passageway. Nothing else. Just that. Thought it was pretty cool. But then I was introduced to Linux and the map making "went south". Linux had little to no support back then and I didn't have a clue as to how to compile an editor from source.

The only two editors that I have running are Eureka and Slade3. Documentation and tutorials (text or video) are difficult to find especially for Eureka. I have emailed the creator of Eureka and was told that documentation has not been done yet. The current version of Eureka was published in 2013... hmmm...

I have always been curious as to how others can seeming easily produce map after map, wad after wad, and megawad after meagawad. I know they are not 'easy' to make and can take great amounts of time, but still, to have the knowledge and skillset to make the maps... now that would be something...

I am here to learn and to build.

Again, thank you for the welcome.

J

(Sorry. My mind wanders at times and the only way I can catch is to babble on with forum responses... lol)

[hex11]

johnno56 said:

Version 1.7.0

One caveat about that: if you're building from source (like if your OS doesn't supply a Yadex package), it needs patches to compile on 64-bit system. There's a slightly newer version that already fixes that. It was only mentioned on the mailist list, but I don't think it's ever going to get an update again. Download link is here:
http://www.freelists.org/post/yadex/Yadex-17901

Since Yadex is based on DEU 5.21, the best way to learn it is to just read the docs that come with that old DOS program. It's actually very informative and sort of works as a tutorial too.
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/level_edit/deu/deu521
Some of the keybindings in DEU.TXT differ from those of Yadex, but the principles are the same. Yadex is really just a superset.

Otherwise, overall Doom level-building knowledge is scattered all over the place, but you can get a whole lot of it from this book:
http://cd.textfiles.com/instantdoom/
^ one of the PDFs in the EBOOK directory is corrupt, but the other one works.

And if you don't mind running some old level editor in dosbox, DCK is really easy to make stuff with. But that book covers a bunch of them.
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/level_edit/dck362

Last thing: you're probably going to want this too, if only for the node builders. But programs like wadwhat and lswad are pretty handy also.
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/XWadTools
^ again, if you're on 64-bit system it's easier to use this newer one:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-editing/59068-xwadtools-updated-again/
But it looks like the code.google.com stuff is gone, so maybe we have to find where he moved that stuff to.

[johnno56]

Cannot compile newer version of Yadex. Compiler is asking for the X11 libraries to be installed. They are already installed. I am suspecting that Yadex is expecting the presence of the 32 bit libraries. My system is 64 bit... *sigh*

Thanks for all the links. I will try to use DEU via dosbox and see how I go. But whichever editor I use, documentation and tutorials for me anyway, are a big plus.

J

ps: Downloaded the 'ebooks' and both seem to be intact. It looks like they are the same books. That's a LOT of reading. Almost 900 pages..!!

[hex11]

My guess is it just can't find the X11 libs, so you have to tell it where they are. It builds cleanly on my OpenBSD 5.9 (amd64) laptop, without any code changes at all, but I had to configure it like this, by first setting some environment variables:

CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/usr/local/lib" ./configure

Then after running "make" (gmake in my case), it's just a matter of editing the installed yadex.cfg, at the very least to define the doom or doom2 IWAD path, and specify the default game.

[johnno56]

Hmmm... Perhaps I am doing something wrong?



J

[hex11]

Probably your X libraries are in a different path than mine. See what directory this shows:
locate libX11.so
locate libX11.a
^ The configure script expects to find those files.

Then adjust the first LDFLAGS from /usr/X11R6/lib to whatever yours is.

[johnno56]

There are 32 and 64 bit libX11.so* files but only one libX11.a

J

[hex11]

Sounds like something for backwards compatibility, but anyway you want the 64-bit directory that has both the .a and .so files.

[johnno56]

I feel I am becoming a nuisance... I am uncertain as to whether this is done right...



J

[hex11]

Well that looks right to me. Maybe try to also give the same library directory as an argument to the configure script.
[CPPFLAGS & LDFLAGS env vars] ./configure --x-libraries [directory]

[johnno56]

Adding the --x-libraries etc to the ./configure allowed it to compile successfully... however, 'make' was a different story... , I think I am not meant to be using Yadex... *sigh*

The screens of errors made the output too large for a screen dump. Here is the raw text.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

john@john-H81M-DS2 ~/Downloads/yadex-1.7.901 $ make
Generating obj/0/files_etc.man
Generating obj/0/files_share.man
g++ -Wall -DY_ALPHA -g -c scripts/m7/m7.cc -o obj/0/m7.oo
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:41:0:
scripts/m7/output.h:38:43: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
virtual int putc (char c) = 0;
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:42:0:
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:39:35: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
int putc (char c);
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:67:36: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
inline int Output_buf::putc (char c)
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:43:0:
scripts/m7/output_file.h:40:35: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
int putc (char c);
^
scripts/m7/output_file.h:81:37: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
inline int Output_file::putc (char c)
^
scripts/m7/output_file.h:103:15: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
putc (*s++);
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:44:0:
scripts/m7/output_null.h:39:35: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
int putc (char c);
^
scripts/m7/output_null.h:62:37: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
inline int Output_null::putc (char c)
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:45:0:
scripts/m7/input.h:40:73: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
virtual int getc (const char *callerid, int nest) = 0;
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:46:0:
scripts/m7/input_buf.h:38:47: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
int getc (const char *callerid, int nest);
^
scripts/m7/input_buf.h:101:59: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
inline int Input_buf::getc (const char *callerid, int nest)
^
scripts/m7/input_buf.h:131:19: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
echo_->putc (c);
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:47:0:
scripts/m7/input_file.h:40:47: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
int getc (const char *callerid, int nest);
^
scripts/m7/input_file.h:137:60: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
inline int Input_file::getc (const char *callerid, int nest)
^
scripts/m7/input_file.h:156:19: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
echo_->putc (c);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:726:35: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
c = input.getc ("txt1", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:744:16: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
output.putc (c);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:777:35: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
int c = input.getc ("ref0", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:799:29: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
input.getc ("ref1", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:800:19: error: macro "putc" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given
output.putc (c);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:813:33: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
c = input.getc ("ref(", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:818:33: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
c = input.getc ("ref{", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:847:31: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
input.getc ("reff", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:859:39: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
int c = input.getc ("refn", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:957:35: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
c = input.getc ("refw", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:1024:35: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
c = input.getc ("refW", nest);
^
scripts/m7/m7.cc:1039:29: error: macro "getc" passed 2 arguments, but takes just 1
input.getc ("ref)", nest);
^
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:41:0:
scripts/m7/output.h:38:47: warning: non-static data member initializers only available with -std=c++11 or -std=gnu++11 [enabled by default]
virtual int putc (char c) = 0;
^
scripts/m7/output.h:38:47: error: ‘putc’ declared as a ‘virtual’ field
In file included from scripts/m7/m7.cc:42:0:
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:67:24: error: ‘Output_buf::putc’ declared as an ‘inline’ variable
inline int Output_buf::putc (char c)
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:67:24: error: ‘int Output_buf::putc’ is not a static member of ‘class Output_buf’
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:67:24: warning: extended initializer lists only available with -std=c++11 or -std=gnu++11 [enabled by default]
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:47:19: error: invalid use of non-static data member ‘Output_buf::buf’
std::string buf; // Yep. Would you like a goto with that ?
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:69:3: error: from this location
buf += c;
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:69:10: error: ‘c’ was not declared in this scope
buf += c;
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:69:11: error: expected ‘}’ before ‘;’ token
buf += c;
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:70:3: error: expected unqualified-id before ‘return’
return 0;
^
scripts/m7/output_buf.h:71:1: error: expected declaration before ‘}’ token
}
^
make: *** [obj/0/m7.oo] Error 1

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope you can make sense of it all because it's all Greek to me....

J

By the way... The Widows version of DEU (WinDeu) seems to run via Wine... I have not attempted to do anything with it yet... I'm running low on caffeine and sleep... I am quickly reaching my 'used-by-date' for today. It's 12:30am, here in Melbourne, and I'm starting to doze off... I think I will call it a day.

Many thanks for today's help. I appreciate all that you are doing...

Good night.

J

[hex11]

Wow, that's pretty rough. Looks like it's barfing on macros. I'm guessing they changed the compiler again, and Yadex will need another update. It didn't affect me because OpenBSD tends to be pretty conservative, and the system compiler is still this: gcc version 4.2.1 20070719
If you can install an alternative, older version of gcc (ideally this exact one) from your package system, then maybe you'll be able to build Yadex with that. Normally you can have several compilers installed side-by-side and choose which one you build stuff with.
Otherwise, the code has to be updated to reflect whatever compiler changes they made. It's possible some other Linux distro has already done this if they have Yadex package and new compiler. Then you could just use that same patch.

[johnno56]

Well, THAT 6 hour nap didn't last long... felt like I just closed my eyes...!

It may be caffeine withdrawal talking, but I think I may be able to save us both from a Yadex headache, by letting the beast die a natural death and concentrate on either Eureka or Slade3. Both of them are installed and both are functioning...

I don't know about you but I'm certainly ready for some pain relief... lol

By the way... Which editor(s) do you use?

J

[hex11]

I just use Yadex, since it always worked for me.
Anyway, there wasn't any Eureka yet, and Slade just crashed a lot. Also I couldn't figure out how to make anything with it. That was about 5 years ago though.
There's also tkwad, another program that comes with xwadtools. But it doesn't have much in the way of keyboard shortcuts, so I didn't bother with it.

[johnno56]

Is it me and my inability to locate documentation or do people create these editors and mostly forget to create documents or tutorials? I found 'How to import monsters' and 'how to convert images to PNG' but nothing on how to put together a simple map. (in regards to Eureka and Slade3)

I do not do "stumble around in the dark" very well. I'm the kind of person that needs documentation. I tried DB2 some time back on an old WinXP box and found video tutorials on 'The Basics'. Build a simple level from 'the ground up'. Very helpful. Unfortunately DB or DB2 will not run on my current machine *sigh*

I need coffee...

J

ps: Found a tutorial "WinDEU for Beginners" from https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/docs/editing/wdeuguide

Woo Hoo!! 88 pages of gold... As soon as my coffee is ready, WinDEU, is getting a workout... YES!

[scifista42]

johnno56 said:

Is it me and my inability to locate documentation or do people create these editors and mostly forget to create documents or tutorials? I found 'How to import monsters' and 'how to convert images to PNG' but nothing on how to put together a simple map. (in regards to Eureka and Slade3)

Both Eureka and SLADE3 have documentations and/or tutorials on their homepages.

[johnno56]

Eureka's documentation consists of a chart of keybinding (very helpful) and a few impressive screenshots. The creator of Eureka says that there is no documentation available yet.

Slade3, on the other hand, is a lot more helpful. It has an on-screen tutorial for building a Doom 2 map. Really cool...

Oh, looks like WinDEU is a beta version and some of the 'functions' have not been 'implemented yet'. It looked SO promising...

Looks like I will lean towards Slade3 for the time being... unfortunately, today's time limits have suddenly 'gone out the window', and I find myself out for most of the day... Oh well, there's always this evening.

I will tackle a simple map later tonight... :)

Have a great day.

J