How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Advanced Wolfenstein 3D source port based upon Wolf4SDL and ZDoom.
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NTI
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How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by NTI »

Hello.

Probably most of you should remember the NewWolf source port last released nearly 10 years ago. The engine added High Resolution textures and 3d models, indeed back at the time it was the best source port available, until Wolf4SDL and eventually ECWolf came up.

Cutting off the BS, during NewWolf's lifetime, I put my hands in a lot of textures pack for it, but just one of them fully replaced all Wolf3D textures, and this one made my day every day through the years =)
However, at some point I heard about ECWolf, and since this one does seem to have a long and great future ahead, I started to wondering if it would be possible to "port" this NewWolf texture addon to the ECWolf engine.

Only recently I started to look for information about ECWolf modding, but I can't find precisely info about how the source port load external textures, neither the supported image formats (I suppose only PNG)

I have zero knowledge about modding, but before I be willing to learn, would like to know: Is it possible to create a texture pack without recurring to external tools? (only assigning names to the textures so they replace the original ones and place them together in a pack file like in NewWolf)
Blzut3
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by Blzut3 »

Yes. You just need to convert the textures to PNG (preferably in the Wolf3D palette since ECWolf will do use a 15-bit lookup table to do the conversion at load). Put them in a folder called hires and follow the naming scheme in wl6map.txt and sodmap.txt (which you can find in ecwolf.pk3). Zip this folder up and load it with ECWolf like any other mod. Note that a pk3 is just a renamed zip in order to indicate to the end user that it should be run instead of extracted.

With the latest development versions there are two more things you can do. Firstly you can autoload the file by adding it to the Autoload keys in your ecwolf.cfg. Secondly should you need to distinguish between games (no need for Wolf3D, Spear, or the Lost episodes), you can use the filter directory following the naming scheme from Autoload to load certain resources with certain games.
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NTI
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by NTI »

Thank you very much, that's all I needed to know =D

While looking for info about the subject, I found this thread: http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=48633

Sounds like CeeJay already done something similar, but his mod's main focus seems to be the sprites. So, I had the neat idea of replacing those medium quality textures with my own set.
http://1drv.ms/21GJdSv

Image
Image
Image

However, because of the 15-bit color limit, that seemed to screw the Wood texture:

Image

How it should be:

Image

Others textures also suffered this color decrease, but it's hardly noticiable, tried to lower the Wood texture to 15 bit and less but the result was still the same in-game.
Because of that, I choose to let in the package the unmodified PNG files to anyone else who decides to play around with these long time lost textures. ;D
Last edited by NTI on Sun Dec 06, 2015 13:56, edited 3 times in total.
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Nokiaman
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by Nokiaman »

That grain oh god :D
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NTI
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by NTI »

Just made a little update, I messed some textures names previously but it's alright now!
http://1drv.ms/21GJdSv

Also, added one more high resolution image:
Image

And to complement, a gameplay video:
Last edited by NTI on Sun Dec 06, 2015 13:53, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by Blzut3 »

the way how ECWolf renders the game screws up entirely files which do not comply the Wolf engine limitations (15 bit color with a fixed choice of colours)
To clarify, Wolf3D uses 8bpp color not 15. The palette actually has 18-bit resolution (VGA is 6 bit per channel) and ECWolf does support full 24-bit palettes. The part about a 15-bit lookup table is for the 24->8 conversion (or as you can imagine it 24->15->8) that ECWolf/ZDoom use to speed up load time with true color textures (speed vs accuracy). Thus it's possible to get slightly better results by using an external program which does more accurate color matching. With your textures you see that the difference isn't really noticeable, but it can be in some cases.
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NTI
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by NTI »

Thanks for enlightening this to me, indeed I was lacking this technical stuff, just erased all the misinformation written there.

I also already got the wolf palette properties and will try to decrease the textures manually while retaining the original colors as much as possible.

Just for curiosity, would it be possible to ignore the need of speeding up load time or the results would be so badly that only OpenGL could be able to handle?
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NTI
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by NTI »

I managed to make the Wood Textures to resemble more closely its true colors:

Image

I'm afraid there is no more improvements to do in the textures. Hopefully, this is the best compromise I can get. =)

Additionally, I also finished to redo some of the screens featuring textures using the new textures:

Image

Image

Download: http://1drv.ms/21GJdSv
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by raphael_cavalcanti »

Sorry for bumping this, but the lik doesn't work. Could you reupload it?
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by Banjo »

Another bump to request a working link please?
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Re: How to make High Resolution texture pack for ECWolf?

Post by Guest »

NTI wrote: Mon Nov 30, 2015 19:51
Thanks for the update :)
Last edited by Rachael on Sat Dec 15, 2018 12:26, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Removed images from post quote since they were note needed
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