Edit UDMF map format with texteditor (Notepad++) breaks it?

[Tormentor667]

Hello all together,

for Blade of Agony I am using Notepad++ to search and replace textures across my wad files (UDMF map format). Unfortunately it doesn't work the way I want it. As soon as I open a map in the editor, change a single letter and save it (as an example I just changed one texture in the text editor), I can't neither play it with GZDoom (map can't be loaded, console error) nor can I open it in GZDoomBuilder (wad doesn't contain any map).

Is there some kind of checksum in the WAD? And how can I search and replace across more than one wad regarding textures?

Best regards,
Dan

[simc]

One cumbersome way is to edit the textmaps outside their wads: (Make backups first)

In Slade open the wad, select the TEXTMAP lump, choose Entry > Export, and save it with some name: textmap-e1m8.txt
Now edit and save the textmap in other editors.
Reselect the TEXTMAP lump of the original wad in Slade, choose Entry > Import, and choose the edited and saved textmap-e1m8.txt.
Save. If vertices/lines/sidedefs got changed the nodes need rebuilding.

[Gez]

Did you open the wad file directly?

[Tormentor667]

@simc - This makes sense for 1-3 maps but not if you have 30 maps you want to search and replace.

@Gez - Exactly but I wasn’t aware that it breaks the wad if I only change textures. What other choice do I have if I want to search and replace textures across several wads that have map data in them?

[Gez]

Unfortunately, even with a text editor that dutifully preserve binary data, if you do any modification that changes the size of the TEXTMAP lump, you're going to break the wad's directory, because it's going to change the offset position of the following lumps.

Your best bet if you don't want to do it manually is to either get someone to fill in SLADE's missing feature of search-and-replacing textures in UDMF maps, or get someone to write a small utility to mass extract TEXTMAP lumps from wads and then mass-inject them back after modification.

[Enjay]

It's worth remembering that a WAD file is a container file that has lots of lumps inside it and the TEXTMAP lump is just one of those. If you were to open another container file directly in a text editor (a zip, a RAR, a PAK, whaever) and tried to edit the files therein, it also wouldn't work out well because even though the text editor can edit and save the text lumps, it doesn't know how to save the container format and that's where the problem happens. By opening the container (WAD), that's the file that the text editor has open and so that's the file it tries to save - and the text editor doesn't know how to save a WAD. It's probably doing something like trying to save the entire container in a text format and thereby losing all of the directory structure and other information.

So, as has been suggested, you either need to extract the TEXTMAP lumps and work with them outside the WADs as text files, or use a dedicated WAD file manager that can do what you want (and the full functionality that you are looking for doesn't seem to be available yet - though it does sound like something that would fit into SLADE's feature set quite nicely).

[Tormentor667]

Understood, thanks for the explanations to both of you Gez and Enjay, now I understand why the whole thing isn't working as expected. I already posted a feature request to UDB and SLADE - hoping to avoid 3280 actions of search & replace

[simc]

If this is still open, it can (almost) be done automaticly with existing commandline tools.

The method is to extract the TEXTMAP lump from the wad, replace the text strings and attach it back. However, there's one crank in the last phase that'll require manually to order the lumps with Slade. It also requires a premade list of all the texture changes to do. Still it could be faster than replacing the textures one by one in UDB.

To try this,

---

get:

sed.exe (Stream editor, this version:) https://sourceforge.net/projects/unxuti ... s/current/
The exe is in the usr\local\wbin directory of the zip file. There are newer versions of sed.exe but use this unxutils version instead.

twt.exe (TOGoS Wad Tool) http://www.nuke24.net/projects/TWT/archives/
The exe is packed in TWT\bin directory of the tar.bz2 file. (use 7zip to open)

And the attached zip file. Both sed.exe and twt.exe do run on 64-bit Win 10.

What to do:
Create a folder and extract sed.exe, twt.exe, and the bat+txt files from the attached zip file in there. Inside there create a new subfolder named "wads" and copy the udmf wads in there.

Next compose the list of the textures to be changed. The list should be in format:

Code: Select all

OLDNAME NEWNAME
textures/snow_b22.png SNOW_B22
textures/snow_g06.png SNOW_G06

See more details from the example in the attached zip. Save the texture list with the name "tex-changes.txt". Then run the bat-file.

The bat will run both sed and twt and create directories for the extracted TEXTMAPS and finally compiled wads. sed.exe will change the text strings, but it can take some time to go through large TEXTMAPs with plenty of changes.

twt.exe both extracts the TEXTMAP and imports it back to the wad. But IFAIK (I must be wrong) there are no command line tool to directly replace a single lump with a new one(?). As the result the wad will include both the old and the new TEXTMAP lumps. The final step is to edit the wad in Slade and delete the old TEXTMAP (after MAP01/E1M1/C1M1 marker) and move the new one in it's place.

(Warning, XWE will hang if you try clicking a large TEXTMAP lump. Use Slade instead.)
Make backups! Don't delete your original wads! Try to open the edited wads in your map editor and test run them first!

[Gez]

Torm, that's your best bet for the time being.