How were the maps for Blake Stone and Wolf 3d made?

[bradhig]

What was used to make those 3d maps?

[DarkWolf]

I used PHP.  To make things easy I wrote a few scripts.  One transformed the wall textures into an isometric perspective, one transformed the floors (needed for Blake), and the final script assembled all the pieces together.  I also used a map editor for those games so I didn't have to deal with decompression (also made it easier to map walls and sprites to their number values).

Using the same idea in one my scripts I skewed the Doom textures and made some stuff.

[bradhig]

UGH I was hoping to use it to map Corridor 7 and Operation Body Count which use the same engine as Wolf3d.

Also I was wondering about mapping the two addon missions for Spear of Destiny.

[DarkWolf]

Unfortunately I'm not going to make the script public.  Not because I want to withhold anything, but because the script is sloppy and it's not like you can just put it in a certain directory, execute it and it produces a finished product.  There are some things that have to be done manually.

I have thought about doing Body Count, but it has a lot of special engine enhancements (even more than Blake vs Wolf) and I'd have to alter the script quite a bit.  I've never really cared for Corridor 7, so I'm probably not going to do that.

[osrevad]

Your Wolfenstein maps bring back a lot of memories. Not so much from playing the game. I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but when I had the shareware DOS version of doom, it came with an exe called mapedit. It allowed you to view the maps from the game from a simple top-down view, and even change it if you want. My older brother and I would create maps and challenge each other with them. Good times.

I played Blake Stone too (PC-13 for Profound Carnage), although I never got very far. I seem to remember enjoying it a lot more than Wolfenstein. Maybe it was easier, or the texture design was more varied.

[Will]

Wolfenstein 3D was lucky enough to upgrade and advance into "Return to Castle Wolfenstein". Heh! I'm surprised Blake Stone didn't get an equivalent action 3D packed sequel.

[TerraEsperZ]

I know this is an old topic, but I had a question for you DarkWolf. I'm interested in the actual algorithms involved in turning square tiles into isometric walls and floors. Would you accept to share just that, or else give us a link to a site that shows how to do that? Actual code wouldn't be that useful since I would have no idea how to run it anyhow.

[Maxim]

It's easy for walls - it's a skew up/down 1px every 2px across. I don't know a good way to achieve that in image editors, though. Floors are trickier, I think you'd need a blurry algorithm to avoid losing pixels.

[TerraEsperZ]

I pretty much figured how to do the walls but I'll be honest and admit I didn't check your map to see if you were using 2:1 skewing or using scripts to achieve a projection where all three axes are 120 degrees apart. It was really the floors I was wondering about. I remember reading a pixel art tutorial on a site that's no longer online that showed how you could replicate the effect in Paint somewhat by skewing, enlarging and then skewing again but I simply can't remember the exact instructions. Thanks anyway.

[DarkWolf]

Walls are exactly like Maxim said, you just shift every two columns of pixels up or down (depending on the angle) incrementing by 1.  For the floors I'm actually just going to release the code I used since it's small.  The script is fixed to work with 64x64 images so you'll have to figure out some additional math to process variable sized images.  The method probably isn't 100% accurate, more complex graphics might look crappy, but it did the job for the project at hand.

http://garoux.net/forum/floor_con.phps

[TerraEsperZ]

Thanks a lot for sharing this! I'll admit that I'm a bit rusty in terms of programming, since I haven't written a single line of code in over a decade, but this might be just what I need to get back on the game. I'm sure I could do a lot of neat graphical stuff with PHP, provided I learn how to actually run a script. Between this and learning the basics in Cinema4D, I'm finally challenging myself after years of of relative comfort

[Maxim]

I think it goes something like this. Let's say you have a texture like this:

Code:

ABCD
EFGH
IJKL
MNOP

If you put it on a wall it would come out like these:

Code:

  CD      AB
ABGH      EFCD
EFKL  or  IJGH
IJOP      MNKL
MN          OP

If you stuck them together and drew a floor in, it'd look like this:

Code:

  CDAB
ABGHEFCD
EFKLIJGH
IJOPMNKL
MN____OP
________
  ____

...so if we align things with the top-left of the texture at the left of the __ area:

Code:

  CDAB
ABGHEFCD
EFKLIJGH
IJOPMNKL
MNcdghOP
abefklop
  ijmn

(floor in lowercase to hopefully aid clarity). If the floor texture is quite "texturey" it might look OK, but this texture (a diagonal line):

Code:

XOOO
OXOO
OOXO
OOOX

would come out like this (OK on the left wall, bad on the right, terrible on the floor):

Code:

  OO  XO
XOOO  OXOO
OXXO  OOOO
OOOX  OOXO
OO OOOO OX
 XOOXXOOX
   OOOO

Hopefully this ASCII art isn't too awful. The only way to really avoid this ugliness is to use some filtered rendering which would mean a lot of blurring.

[TerraEsperZ]

Sorry for replying to this so late. Thanks for the explanation, and I can see how, depending on the tile being transformed this way, how ugly it might end up looking. I remember another method being shown that involved different transformation but I recall it involving filtering as well since there was some horizontal or vertical resizing going on.