
Texturing Thread
A thread to ask about map textures' creation, conversion, editing, techniques and problems, including external textures and skyboxes. Map texturing is a rich field that deserves its own thread.

Textures for regular models and sprites can be discussed in the modeling thread.
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To Confirm 
what this thread is about. Is it a continuation of the good parts of this one? http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60248 
Getting Started Modifying And/or Making Textures 
I've wanted to experiment with texture modification and creation for the longest time. However, having very little technical knowledge and no experience with this sort of thing, I need a bit of help getting started.

This is what I think I know so far:

I remember reading somewhere that GIMP is good for working on textures. I also have this vague idea that if I want to work on textures using GIMP, I need to somehow configure the programme or use some file or something so as to ensure that I use only the colours in the Quake palette -- but I have no idea how I would go about doing so (nor am I even completely sure I understand what all of that means).

So I suppose my question is, if GIMP is the right programme to use, how do I set it up so that I can start working on Quake textures?

My OS is Linux, by the way. 
check out this FAQ I made a long time ago:


It has no information about artistic techniques, just how the different special types work and what dimensions they should be and what the naming rules are.

Also does not talk about external textures. 
Many Thanks, But Not Quite What I Am Looking For Yet... 
Thank you for that FAQ, metlslime. I remember bookmarking it a long time ago on an older computer; very good to have it again for future reference.

Thank you for the link, Joel B. I skimmed through the videos for now. Only the last one seems to touch on actual texture creation and focusses exclusively on Wally. I guess I could try and get Wally running through Wine, but I was rather hoping to be able to use Gimp -- or something else that runs natively on Linux -- instead.

By the way, any links to especially written guides/tutorials would be much appreciated (I realise I'm in the minority with this, but I really dislike following video tutorials). 
FWIW here's a page about making Q2 textures with GIMP: http://maps.rcmd.org/tutorials/q2_palette_textures/

If you understand Q1 textures pretty thoroughly then it should be possible to lift some relevant ideas from there. 
Thanks, Joel B! 
TexMex Under *buntu With Wine 
Not sure if I picked the right thread for this, but it is texture-related, so here goes:

I've used TexMex under Xubuntu and Linux Mint before (so I know it is possible), but can't seem to get it to run now. This is what I've tried so far:

First, I made sure that TexMex can be run as a programme by right-clicking on TexMex.exe --> Properties --> Permissions and ticking the box next to "Allow this file to run as a program".

When I right-click TexMex.exe, I have the option to "Open with Mono Runtime", but that does nothing. I seem to remember this working in the past (on an older computer and OS), but maybe I'm wrong.

I installed Wine via the Software centre, but it doesn't seem to exist as a launchable application on my system, and I don't have the option to open TexMex.exe with Wine.

I installed PlayOnLinux and tried opening it with that, which worked once, although when I closed TexMex there were still all these processes running in the background that I couldn't seem to stop, and had to restart my computer. Since then, trying to open TexMex.exe with PlayOnLinux does nothing.

As is probably obvious from this post, I don't really have any idea what I'm doing. Any help would be greatly appreciated! 
Wine-ing TexMex 
I use Wine on my system (elementary OS, which is based on Ubuntu 18.04) to run a browser agent for a password manager (1Password). So I already had Wine installed and a "~/.wine/drive_c" directory. I don't think I did anything particularly special there in setting it up? but it's been a long time.

Some people like to freeze their Wine installation at a particular version that works for them, but I just roll with the updates. It looks like currently I have Wine 5.0.1.

Anyway, I got the TexMex 3.4 installer from the link on dumptruck's texturing video, extracted it, and ran "wine texmex_34.exe". This started the TexMex installer.

I just clicked through everything with the default choices, except when it said that I already had HHCTRL.OCX that was newer. I chose to keep the newer one there.

The installer finished and promptly opened four (?) TexMex windows. I closed all of those.

Checking "ps -efl | grep wine" at this point, I see wineserver, my 1Password agent, and a couple of winedevice.exe running. That's what I would normally see, so nothing extra going on there.

Now if I do this command:

ls -al "/home/joel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/TexMex"

I see this:

total 1004
drwxrwxr-x 2 joel joel 4096 Aug 1 08:48 .
drwxrwxr-x 8 joel joel 4096 Aug 1 08:47 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 joel joel 6418 Oct 16 2000 ReadMe.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 joel joel 90081 Mar 6 2000 texmex.chm
-rwxrwxr-x 1 joel joel 913408 Oct 16 2000 TexMex.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 joel joel 1758 Jun 20 2000 tips.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 joel joel 2891 Aug 1 08:48 uninstal.log

which looks good.

If I now do this command:

wine "/home/joel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/TexMex/TexMex.exe"

It starts up one TexMex window and everything looks pretty cool? I'm not a real TexMex user so I don't know for sure if it's all ok.

More comments in next post. 
Because you already did something with PlayOnLinux, TexMex may already be installed in one of PlayOnLinux's virtual drives somewhere, using one of PlayOnLinux's embedded versions of Wine. I don't know if it's worth trying to figure that out though? If you do want to mess with that, first thing would be to start PlayOnLinux and see if you have a TexMex title/icon in the main list of installed stuff. There must be a way to arrange for PlayOnLinux to start a particular exe inside a virtual drive, but I haven't poked at that for a long time.

It might be simpler to delete whatever entry you created in PlayOnLinux and then just install TexMex using normal Wine. If you do "wine --version" from a shell prompt you can see if you have Wine installed on your system (outside of PlayOnLinux). If you do, you can probably use it to install and then run TexMex like I did above. 
Re: #12:

Thank you so much, Joel B! Followed exactly the same steps as you with exactly the same results.

Now I also know how to open the TexMex.exe I already had on my computer (not the installer, but rather the .exe generated by the installer, which I must have created at some point on a previous computer using a similar process to the one you just guided me through) -- the answer being simply to open it with the terminal, by typing wine /path/to/TexMex.exe. Thank you; I would never have figured this out without your help. Just using the GUI was not getting me anywhere.

And thank you for the additional comments in #13, which I've now also read.
Very useful, thank you! 
It might be simpler to delete whatever entry you created in PlayOnLinux

I don't think there's anything to delete, as PlayOnLinux didn't actually go through the install process, but rather somehow managed to open the programme itself (which I guess is not what it's really designed for and might explain all those unkillable background processes...?). I don't see an entry for TexMex when I start up PlayOnLinux. I'm just not going to worry about that. :) 
Sounds good! 
TexMex Alphabetical Texture Sorting? 
Is there a way of viewing textures alphabetically within TexMex?

When I open a wad the textures seem to be sorted completely haphazardly, which makes it rather time-consuming to find a specific texture within a huge wad. Like when I open id.wad, it'd be nice to have all textures starting with "rock" or "key" in the same place.

I know I can type texture names in the wad window, but this doesn't completely solve the problem. 
Nvm, Found It. 
Right click -> Sort Items -> Ascending/Descending 
Merging Wads Without Creating Duplicate Textures 
Usually when I want to merge two or more wads, I would open both wad 1 and wad 2 in TexMex, select all the textures in wad 1, and copy+paste them into wad 2.

However, if wad 1 contains some of the same textures as wad 2, TexMex copies over all the duplicates and names them "UnNamed[some number]". I then have to manually delete each one of those afterwards.

Under View -> Preferences -> File Load/Save -> Duplicates -> "Ignore"/"Rename", I have "Ignore" selected, but TexMex still copies over the duplicates and renames them.

Any idea how to get it to stop doing this?

Or is there perhaps a much simpler way of merging wads? 
2nd Question: Creating Preview Jpg 
How does one create a single preview jpg that shows all of the textures inside a given wad? 
Sounds like you want to merge two wads and remove duplicates. Check out the program "mergewad" located here:


For the second question, I don't know of any automatic tool for that. 
Yeah for the second thing I would just google up any general solution for making a "contact sheet" or "thumbnail sheet" from a folder full of images. 
Thanks For The Answers, Metl &amp; Joel 
I'll check out mergewad.

And thanks for the tip on googling "contact sheet" or "thumbnail sheet". I assume, though, that that would involve exporting all the textures first, as I can't imagine programs like Gimp or Photoshop being capable of reading directly from a wad. It might be simpler in this case just to take a screenshot of all the textures inside TexMex... 
Merging Wads, Cont. 
Thanks again for your earlier answers, metlslime and Joel B.

Mergewad seems like a less than ideal solution. I'd need to run it trough DoxBox and it's designed to merge just two wads and create a new, merged wad. If I need to merge, say, 20 wads, that's a lot of repetition and deletion.

It's kind of frustrating that I'm not able to use TexMex for this. In theory it should work: as I see it I'd just need to open one instance of TexMex, load all the wads I need and copy+paste their textures into a single wad, provided the "Ignore" duplicates setting actually worked. That seems to be the only problem. 
I see... but, if the 20 wads are always the same, you could write a batchfile that merges them 2 at a time and then deletes all the temporary files. 
How big is the wad? Typically I just do it by hand because,as far as I recall, the only really big wads have been from other games - Q2, Alice, Kingpin, etc. 
Metlslime, Ijed 
Thanks very much for the responses.

metlslime: Not sure if I understand you correctly, but I'm looking for a method that'd allow me to merge any selection of wads and not just one particular collection.

In any case, thanks for the tip to write a batch file. It sounds like a good idea, but I don't have any kind of IT background and have never written a batch file in my life! :) If the learning curve is not too steep and it's something that's bound to make my life a lot easier (despite my hardly ever using using Windows), I'm willing to try and learn. Are batch files used much in current computing, though? I thought they were relics of the DOS/Windows 9x era...?

ijed: When you say by hand, what do you mean? Copy+pasting with TexMex as I've been doing? If so, can you confirm that the "ignore duplicates" setting is indeed broken?

To answer your question, in this particular case I'm dealing with around 30 smallish wads with plenty of repeated textures, all of which I'm trying to consolidate into one wad. I merged about half of those with TexMex when I realised it wasn't actually ignoring duplicates and that I would have to delete them by hand. So now I have around 15 wads left to merge.

Since the wads in this case aren't enormous, simply repeating the same process with the remaining wads is doable, but it's still really inefficient and time-consuming, with plenty of opportunity for human error (such as accidentally deleting one or more textures that aren't actually duplicates). 
If each time it’s different, a batch file may be less useful. I think it’s possible to write one that can take any number of wads with arbitrary file names but that’s a little more involved.

So maybe just try it without a batch file and see if it’s still faster than your Texmex workflow.

Also most map editors and most bps compilers can handle multiple wads, I think the only limit is if the list of wads gets too long (1024 characters?) then it stops working. 
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