AFAIK Vavoom can load and unload wadfiles on the fly, right? I think it would make sense to have a different artwork file for dungeons and for towns, since very little of the artwork is common. Town artwork includes lots of special textures and objects for housing, but it doesn't need monsters, weapons and many of the textures (e.g. switches, animated lava etc). It would make both artwork files smaller and easier to find something when editing.

We can definitely make any number of wads or pk3 files for anything, if you'd like, you can even make a single wad for textures, sprites, sounds, etc. . While we are still working on maps and other stuff we can use wad files, but for the final version we can make pk3 of these wads too, move them all to the folder they belong in the Vavoom game directory structure and they'll be loaded automagically

Does WadAuthor read the stuff from the wadfile or does it use a config file (i.e. if I remove e.g. all the monsters from the current scatteredevil.wad file and use it for city mapping, does it work out of the box or will it be looking weird/have problems)?

IIRC, if you remove the monster sprites from the wad file, you shouldn't have problems with WadAuthor, as long as you leave the textures as they are now and that you don't touch TEXTURES and PNAMES lumps .

I was also thinking about removing textures. I think my whole question wasn't phrased clearly enough: it's about using custom wadfiles and NOT using hexen.wad any more. I.e. unless I load a wadfile where we have our monsters, there are no monsters present in the game - and neither should they be in WadAuthor.

Also for mapping, working with texture files that only have relevant stuff in them should make things smoother (less scrolling through useless stuff trying to find a texture).

Future KoraxRPG releases should not require any hexen.wad content to run, just like Korax Arena doesn't need the original iwad - just copy the iwad check code from the KA codebase (AFAIK it looks for a certain entry in the original iwad and if it finds that then determines the iwad to be original and allows the game to start). When in a dungeon map, only wadfiles (or pk3) that contain monsters, weapons, dungeon specific textures etc should be loaded. When in a town, only wadfiles (or pk3) that contain village/city specific textures, NPCs, farm animals, corn and flowers etc should be loaded.

Hmmm, now you are talking about a different matter, I'm sure we can work out something like what you are describing, but wadauthor NEEDS all textures placed in the same wad file, because it looks both for TEXTURE and PNAMES lumps, and these two need to have all the textures listed, since it's a bit old, it doesn't support PK3 files, we could make multiple texture PK3 files easily, but making different directories of patches and load them appart from each other, but you might need to use a different map editor (doom builder), since I know DB has a small learning curve that might slow you down it's like , right?

My suggestion for you to reduce the browsing for textures would be to give textures used for houses, for example, similar names, so you only would need to browse for "houseXX", for example...

I have no prob with trying out Doombuilder, just give me a link to the latest version.

Actually, I don't really see the problem with WadAuthor either, I would just go and define my towntextures.wad or whatever name as my main iwad in WadAuthor, as long as it accepts that as Hexen main iwad, I should be fine. My plan is to finish up the whole "civilized" part of the world first (all towns and villages and NPCs/deco placement etc), and only then start on the dungeons (and it's entirely probable someone else will do the dungeons part anyway). Even if I would have to go back to a map and edit it with WadAuthor, I can just change the main iwad in the configuration.

AFAIK, IWADS (hexen.wad, heretic.wad, etc.) have a different header file, so I don't know if WadAuthor will accept a textures only wad as the main wad file, but it's not enough to stop you from trying, heh!

Doom builder's latest version can be found here: http://www.doombuilder.com/files/builder_setup.exe

I'll begin separating sprites and textures from the wad file of the last city map, if that's ok with you, I'll convert the sprites file to a PK3 file, since those can be called done (it's just the damage skins ).

I think it's a nice idea to start with villages and civilized areas, we can then just add conversations and quests / side quests then when everything is starting to shape up.

2 RambOrc: I think Vavoom engine requires one of the iwad presence; unless we change something in main vavoom executable, it WILL require Hexen.wad.

2 All: Current version of Textures.wad has some mistakes. First of all, many textures duplicate, commonly these ATOWN* textures has duplicates with KW_* names.
Also there seem to be textures that duplicate even original Hexen textures and their second names are buggy because they have spaces in them (which is prohibited AFAIK), like added " 2" to the name of texture.

Yes, this seems to come from SE wad file, I didn't noticed until CW mentioned it, I'll fix it ASAP and upload a new textures WAD file.

BTW, Ramborc, could you solve the error you were getting with Doom Builder

Yep, but for the moment I'm sticking to WadAuthor, I can work reasonably fast with it.

I need 8 arrows for the travel map, pointing in 8 directions (N,NE,E etc). not very large. I found inventory arrows suit the purpose nicely, but there are only 2 of them (pointing left and right).

If you upload the two BMPs, I can rotate them and upload the other directions.

I've just done that , it's on KDEV, inside the koraxrpg folder, it's a ZIP file named travelmap_arrows.zip.

As for the internal release, I'll upload the latest resources for koraxrpg once I'm home, ok?

Ok, but Travel map screen will take some more time to be fully functional. I think release can be delayed till weekend.
BTW, since we are talking about resources. Travel map requires a graphic named "trvlmap" to display it on backround, and also 2 music files that must be named "trvlmap1" and "trvlmap2", I believe they should be "Places To Go" and "To The East" by The4thClass