Understanding WAD files
In geeky terms:
A WAD file is two things: 1. A directory listing of all the parts of a WAD file. 2. Seperate pieces of data (called 'lumps') crammed into the WAD as explained by the directory listing. Similar to a tarball, WADs have no compression.
In simple terms:
Think of a WAD file as a folder sitting on your hard drive. You can move or copy one or many individual files to or from the WAD. These files are called 'lumps', and there are many, many kinds of them. There is no limit as to exactly how many lumps that you want to cram into the file, and there is no limit on how big they can be. The only limit is your hard drive.
XWE and Lumpmod
Lumpmod is just a stripped-down* version of XWE for dos. Lumpmod doesn't convert images or sounds into the format that WADs use, so this can be both a good thing
and a bad thing. It's horrible for characters, though, so we're going to focus on XWE for now.
*Omega, Bigboi, and Ritz: Please stay away from the above sentance.
XWE is a WAD lump browser. That means that you can open a WAD file in XWE, look at alll the individual lumps, add lumps, remove lumps, and make changes. XWE supports, among other things:
- The editing of maps (although it doesn't to this very well. I'd recomend DoomBuilder for that)
- The editing and importing of sprites and graphics
- Importing sounds
- Colormap editing (screw up the screen)
- Built-in hex editing for lumps that have gone wooka
- Built-in text editing (usefull for SOC scripting)
Don't bother to understand all of those. You'll learn, my young Padawan. You'll learn.
XWE is actually fairly simple to use. The first time that you start it, just point it to the srb2.srb file in your SRB2 directory.
The file menu has options for opening, saving, and cleaning up WADs.
Edit has copy, paste, all the good stuff.
Entry allows you to load, delete, and select lumps, in addition to individual functions for the type of lump that you're currently editing.
View has just toolbar junk.
Help is there for when you need it.
On the left side of the UI, you'll see a listing of allllll the lumps in the currently open WAD file. On the right is the actual data for the lump that you've selected.
Any questions?
