Playscii: new editor for ENDOOM lumps
Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2017 9:06 pm
ENDOOM art seems to be somewhat beloved despite ZDoom's Windows-only support for it, so recently as I was adding an Importer/Exporter system to my ASCII art editor Playscii I decided to use ENDOOM as a test case, and because the format is fairly simple it worked well. So! You can now use Playscii to import, edit, and export ENDOOMs. I know PabloDraw is already a pretty good option for these but maybe hex editing the file to make it usable by Doom scares you? Or maybe you'll like Playscii's idiosyncratic little user interface.
To be clear, Playscii is an existing non-Doom project of mine. It's an ASCII art, animation, and game creation tool. It's open source and PWYW-free on itch.io. Easiest way to try it out is to download it there via the itch.io app and hit launch.
You can import an existing ENDOOM lump with "Import" from the File menu. Playscii supports all kinds of character sets and color palettes but ENDOOMs will be imported with the DOS character set and EGA palette, as expected.
You can then use Playscii's paint tools to make whatever you want - see Playscii's art mode docs. The screenshot above shows the custom ENDOOM from WadSmoosh, with a version of the Doom logo converted from a bitmap - that's a nifty thing Playscii does.
Keep in mind one limitation of the ENDOOM format is that you can't use any of the brighter EGA colors as character backgrounds, even though Playscii will happily let you do so it won't show up correctly in-game.
When you're done editing, select "Export" from the File menu, choose the ENDOOM exporter, and you'll have a lump file written in the Playscii documents folder, ready for adding to a wad.
The one ENDOOM feature it doesn't currently support is the blinking text. I could probably add support for this pretty easily, maybe by reading any non-blank characters on a second layer (Playscii supports photoshop-style layers btw). If people are dying for this feature I could add it, I just know not all source ports support it.
If you find a bug, you can report it here.
To be clear, Playscii is an existing non-Doom project of mine. It's an ASCII art, animation, and game creation tool. It's open source and PWYW-free on itch.io. Easiest way to try it out is to download it there via the itch.io app and hit launch.
You can import an existing ENDOOM lump with "Import" from the File menu. Playscii supports all kinds of character sets and color palettes but ENDOOMs will be imported with the DOS character set and EGA palette, as expected.
You can then use Playscii's paint tools to make whatever you want - see Playscii's art mode docs. The screenshot above shows the custom ENDOOM from WadSmoosh, with a version of the Doom logo converted from a bitmap - that's a nifty thing Playscii does.
Keep in mind one limitation of the ENDOOM format is that you can't use any of the brighter EGA colors as character backgrounds, even though Playscii will happily let you do so it won't show up correctly in-game.
When you're done editing, select "Export" from the File menu, choose the ENDOOM exporter, and you'll have a lump file written in the Playscii documents folder, ready for adding to a wad.
The one ENDOOM feature it doesn't currently support is the blinking text. I could probably add support for this pretty easily, maybe by reading any non-blank characters on a second layer (Playscii supports photoshop-style layers btw). If people are dying for this feature I could add it, I just know not all source ports support it.
If you find a bug, you can report it here.