QuakeMap Documentation
Changing a wall texture


How to change the texture displayed on a wall during the game ?


Animated textures

Animated textures are textures with names that begin with a '+'. The second character of the name is a number from 0 to 9 or a letter from A to J. Quake will alternate the displayed texture every few tenths of second : if a wall's texture name begins with a '+', the texture will be changed into the texture with the same name except that the second character (the one directly following the "+"), will be increased by one. For example, if textures +0BUTN, +1BUTN and +2BUTN exist, the displayed texture will cycle from +0BUTN to +1BUTN to +2BUTN. After +2BUTN, the texture comes back to +0BUTN, and starts the sequence again.

Warning : there is a bug in QuakeMap, up to version 2.6, that caused troubles in animated textures. Only the textures actually found in a map were extracted, so that if a button has texture +0BUTN, Quake didn't find the next textures. If you are using QuakeMap version 2.6 or below, you can get around this bug by putting dummy cubes outside the map with the textures +1BUTN, +2BUTN, and so on.


Changing a wall texture

I told you there are two intervals for the second letter : from 0 to 9 or from A to J. Depending on choices made in QuakeC code, Quake will cycle through the first range or through the second one.

The standard entities func_wall, which are usually seen as just a solid wall that can be disabled in some modes - for example, the wall will not be not present in deathmatch -, have been programmed to answer to trigger events by changing its texture-cycling range from 0-9 to A-J and vice-versa. This means you can give a wall a TargetName Specific, and any trigger with the corresponding Target will make the wall change its texture.

Of course, this does not allow for more than two textures, although each one may be independently animated.


What to do

You need to make new textures, even if you want to use Quake's ones, because they don't have the required names beginning with '+'. So close your map, choose New, New textures, click on View / Edit, and make two new textures. If you want to reuse Quake textures, you can use copy and paste between texture pages. Give your two textures the following names :

  +0Something
  +aSomething

Open then your map, and put a func_wall in it. Put a polyhedron in the func_wall. Set this polyhedron' texture to +0Something. Put a TargetName into the func_wall's Specifics, and give a trigger or a button the corresponding Target. That's it !

A sample file where the above operations have been done is available : FuncWall.zip.



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Date: 21.01.97, by Armin Rigo