Surface textures

Textures applied to the surface of a block should be tiled, which means that they should fit together at all 4 edges (see image). The width and height of level textures must be a power of 2, like 64, 128, 256, 512 etc, however they need not be quadratic. Thus, sizes like 64x128 or 128x256 are also possible. Textures with wrong sizes are automatically resized by the engine, which reduces the rendering quality, consumes memory, increases load times, and will look wrong in the preview windows. Old 3D cards work best with texture sizes of 256x256 or below; sizes above 256x256 render remarkably slower. Textures (except for sky cubes) should not exceed 1024x1024 because many 3D cards can't render bigger textures.

Textures can be used from WAD files or from folders. Supported image formats are PCX, BMP, TGA, and DDS. PCX or BMP textures are stored in 16 bit color depth with 4 mipmaps. For high quality textures in 24 bit color depth, use the TGA format; for low memory consumption, use the DDS compressed format with only 4 bits color depth. 8 bit palettized PCX and BMP textures are also supported, but must use the same color palette per level. The first color of the palette (color #0) must always be black, the last color (color #255) must always be white. If you don't know what a palette is, don't use 256 color images.

PCX and BMP textures can be converted to the DDS 4-bit compressed format on level loading depending on a script setting (d3d_texdepth). The 4 bit format reduces the texture quality further and increases the level loading time due to the conversion process, but can save a lot of video memory.Map Properties. Native DDS images can be created with the DirectX Texture Tool, with ATI's Compressonator or with a DDS plugin for Photoshop. They can contain mipmaps and use a compressed 4-bit surface format (DXT1..DXT5) for saving video memory at the expense of image quality. They are not displayed in the texture and edit windows, but have the advantage of smaller level file sizes and faster loading.

Sky Textures

A texture with a name beginning with "sky" can be assigned to the walls of the sky box around the level. The texture proportions determine the kind of sky mapping. If it's width is twice it's height, it's first half is used for moving clouds below a sky dome and it's second half is used for the sky dome texture (see image).

If it's width is six times it's height, the texture is used for a sky cube around the level (see second image). For displaying the sky cube in the 3D window, activate 'Sky Cube' in Preferences -> Advanced.

More complicated multi-layered skies can be defined by script; see the sky entity section for details.

Animated Textures

If the texture name begins with a '+' sign followed by a digit (like "+0blink", "+1blink" etc.), the texture will be animated and cycle between other textures with the same name but beginning with '+0' and up to '+9'. This simple animation scheme can be used for blinking lights etc.

Memory Requirement

Video memory is consumed by the textures as well as by the shadow mapped surfaces in the map. Each texture pixel consumes around 5 bytes of video memory. Every 64 surface pixels consume 1..4 additional bytes for the shadow maps (depending on the light resolution). If the video memory available on the 3D card is exceeded, the game will still run, but will swap textures, which may result in slowdowns and sudden 'jerks' at some places in the map. You can check the current video memory consumption through the [F11] engine panel.

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