DRD Team

Wonder if there's anything what could be done with the sky textures
of Roger Ritenour's ZDoom wads Pleiades.wad and EarthZD.wad?

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=10625
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=10222


They were made for ZDoom 1.17b, but it looks like their sky
textures work with none of the modern engines.

GZDoom 1.0.21 - skies are messed
ZDoom 2.1.6 - skies are messed
GZDoom 1.0.13 - skies are messed (+large HOM in the sky)
ZDoom 2.0.90 - skies are messed
ZDoom 2.0.63a - crashes at start up
ZDoom 2.0.47 - skies work OK
ZDoom 1.23b33 - crashes at start up
ZDoom 1.17c - skies work OK


The patches look malformed even in the current XWE. Otherwise
the wads play fine with GZDoom.

The sky textures in that WAD are totally fucked up. Even on the versions where they seem to work they produce memory corruption that might cause crashes. I consider this WAD in its current state not worth bothering with.

I have debugged it: all the skies were totally screwed, no matter where I found the zip file.
I already corrected the pictures, played the pwad, and released the corrected version.

What you must know is that Pleiades is a pwad made after Phobos and is including most of the maps from Phobos, but updated for Zdoom.

You can find it here

I'll do the same thing for EarthZD.wad (there is also a version for Doom II, dated July 19, 1997)

But... Personnaly, I don't like that much the pwads made by Roger Ritenour. They are far too much confusing: you don't know where you have to go, what you have to do, or what is happening...
Thus, the architecture and the gameplay are really awesome... most of the time.

for EarthZD.wad, I fixed it using one of the skies made by me some years ago.
It fits perfectly the design intended by Roger Ritenour and the effect is fine.
I have simply replaced all the screwed patches with one sky, "Horizon"

Ok, it's not like it was created, but, at least, it's playable and, quite frankly, not that bad for a fix made in the course of 5 minutes.
Try it, and you'll see by yourself that the effect is cool.
(I can send to you the bmp file, if you want)

and here is the result:

Ah, I used to love that wad. Shame I never bothered to fix it so I could enjoy it again.

You'll have to wait a few days, and I'll release my fixed version (there were numerous bugs everywhere, for beginning this famous and horripilous bug of the door with the action D1, which is closed and not openable again...)

For those of you never reading the text files... Yes, I have the authorization to fix all the wads made by Roger. It's why I have already released 2 edited versions of the most famous.