Wad capabilities Created 4 years ago2020-06-19 20:49:07 UTC by JaviCac

Hi everyone, I have some experience with mapping -I made many cs 1.6 maps to play with my friends back in high school but now I decided to make a hl mod- I am making new textures for it (almost 700 textures so far) so I used wally to make new wad of what I have so far and applied it on the wip maps, however, the problem is that many textures don't appear in jack hammer (and the wad was compiled without any error) maybe there is a limit of how many textures the wad can store and I should divide it into two separate wad files?

also, I often have compiling errors due to the new textures requiring too much of the maps memory, should I not make my textures kind-of big? (for instance, walls are often 512x416 or 512x272. doors are often 192x432 but some are 304x512. computer screens are 480x272. file cabinet is 320x272 and there is a specific floor texture being 512x512, though most textures stay around 256x256)

The WAD can store maaaany textures, halflife.wad is an example. I'm not aware of how many exactly.

Also yes, you generally shouldn't make textures too big. Generally, you should stick to 240x240 and less. HLBSP is gonna subdivide polygons every 240x240 texture pixels. This means, if you have a 200x200-unit brush with texture scale set to 1.0, its top will be 1 face. However, if you scale it to 0.5, you'll get 4 faces.

Having large textures is okay if you aren't making the scale really small. 0.5 is the minimum acceptable texture scale IMO, 1.0 is the default, and in larger areas, you can get away with 2.0, sometimes even 4.0.

The error which you get by using low texture scales like 0.5 or 0.25 is typically "AllocBlock full", which means you've hit a limit of how many lightmaps can be allocated for the map. The engine, unfortunately, has a hardcoded value of allocating 1 lightmap pixel per 16x16 texture pixels.

Now, in regards to actual texture dimensions, I'd suggest you to use 240x240 and 480x480 for really HD stuff. HL used to have a "feature" where it would downscale any non power-of-two texture (e.g. 160x160) to the nearest power-of-two one (e.g. 128x128), so you'd lose quality. But, nowadays it's no longer a thing.

Also, the reason those textures might not be appearing in J.A.C.K. is, the texture dimensions maybe aren't divisible by 16. Not exactly sure.
Generally, you should use these values for X and Y:
32, 48, 64, 96, 128, 160, 240, 256, 320, 384, 480, 512, 544.

The maximum texture resolution is about 544x544, but it only works if it's embedded into the BSP.

I just try and guess the max size a texture can be based on its aspect ratio, as long as the surface area is under 262144 pixels then ur good

Thanks