HINTS

This hints are for UNIX users, I'm very ignorant about DOS and Windows and
so I don't know which tools you need for those, besides what is included
in this archive.

WAD editors:
============
Sure is possible that you don't like tkwadcad. Fortunately there is an
alternative for UNIX systems, try out Yadex
(http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/yadex/), this is a WAD editor for UNIX/X11
based on the DOS WAD editor DEU. Well, have a look anyway, this editor can
do several things which tkwadcad currently cannot do. Is free open source too.

GRAPHICS:
=========
If you want to edit images for PWAD files, good programs for this task
are 'xpaint' and 'gimp', both free available with sources from the Internet
(you know how to use search engines to locate source archives, right?).
Make sure you are using a 24bpp X server while editing images, else your
images will look different in the game engines than in your image painting
program. A 8bpp or 16bpp X server will not use the correct colors from the
game palettes and the tool 'wadgc' will be forced to adjust colors with a
'best match' method to the correct colors. Besides that the process is
slow, usually the result is horrible too.
Don't use _some_ color palette when drawing images, use a correct color
palette appropriate for the game, or the results also will look horrible,
same reason as above. This tools include the program 'mkxppal', which can
create palette files for xpaint. Open your image in 'xpaint' and then load
the palette from the file and use the colors from this palette only. If you
prefer to use 'gimp', there is the program 'mkgipal' which generates palette
files for this one.

I would suggest you do all your work in PPM P6 image format, no compression
algorithms which mess up your colors and other fun like that. However, you
might want the 'netpbm' tools, those can convert between almost any existing
image format, helpful if you want to start working based on images in
another format than PPM P6 (which 'wadgc' requires to assemble graphic
resources for PWAD's). If you start from graphics not using the correct
color palette for the game, create a color quantization map with 'mkqmap'
and use 'ppmquant' to quantize the colors for the PPM file. The algorithms
used in 'ppmquant' work much better than the one implemented in 'wadgc'.
Blah... how do I do that???

	mkqmap -c doom >doom.map
	ppmquant -map doom.map orig.ppm >new.ppm

Note: ppmquant is part of netpbm, not part of xwadtools.

If you don't like to draw images by hand, a free ray tracing program is
'povray'. It can generate very realistic looking skies and stuff like that.
The tool 'mkpopal' creates an color include file with the colors from the
game palettes, use this one instead of the color include file which comes
with 'povray'. There are some example povray scene files in
EXAMPLES/doom/textures, use them as a base for experimenting with povray.

Sound:
======
A pretty good package for editing sounds on UNIX workstations is 'snd'.
You also might want 'sox' which can convert between all the various
different sound formats. For composing MIDI music 'Rosegarden' is
a good program. It is a good idea to visit http://www.4front-tech.com/,
4Front has a very complete list of UNIX applications which work with
their OSS sound driver on many different UNIX platforms. What really is
missing is a program which converts MIDI music files into the MUS
format for the id games. The only program existing for this so far is a DOS
program, which some company wrote for id Software, sources not available.

That's it for now folks, if you have more helpful hints you would like
to share, send email which allows me to quote you here.