With the Wad Lab beta release looming ever closer, I felt it was a great time to share some vital information to prepare you for playing around with some DopeFish goodness.
First thing's first, what is the Wad Lab, and how does it differ from DopeFish?
Wad Lab is sort of a testbed, it is powered by the DopeFish engine, but it is NOT the DopeFish engine. Instead this tool gives you the ability to test out new features of the engine on your own wads, given that you follow the proper protocol. And don't worry, this will get easier as the engine gains more features!
How can you use the Wad Lab with your own wads? Well there are a few important rules to follow. Currently DopeFish only works correctly wads that have been processed by supported Node Builders. Currently the only supported node builder is GLBSP. Luckily Wad Lab comes with GLBSP included, and instructions on how to use it! In the future more node builders will be supported, and DopeFish may even come with one built in, leaving less for you to worry about!
Let's look at the UI!
You'll notice a readout on the right side of the screen, this will tells you various bits of information gleamed from the wad that you have loaded. It will also display any warnings, such as if there's no wad currently loaded, or if the wad is of an unsupported format.
On the left side of the screen you'll see our game window. This is here for a very important reason. Wad files contain sprites that are specific to a certain game. Each of the available games here contain their own database, however entries from a database in the game Heretic may be referenced using the same ID as some entry from the game Doom. So knowing which database to check is very important, and unfortunately, wads do not have any information stored in them that can tell the system what game they are for. Therefore the user must decide that.
Under the game window are your configuration settings. Load wad is self explanatory, but skill and multiplayer may be a bit confusing if you're not used to working with the wad format. See, items and creatures on a map can be assigned certain tags, such as skill number, or multiplayer. What these do is tell the game that will be loading the map that these entities should only be spawned if the game settings match the assigned tags. So if you set the Skill to 3, then only entities that are meant for a level difficulty of three or lower will be added to the map. Add thusly, toggling the multiplayer switch to the on position will tell the Wad Lab to load any entities on the map that are tagged for multiplayer.
And finally we have the map setting, and launch. It's pretty apparent what map does, simply typing in the name of a map in the wad will tell the game which level to transport you to when you click launch. However if you're not aware, in traditional wads, there are two ways a map can be named, ExNy, where x represents an episode or chapter, and y represents what map number in that episode or chapter. Such as E2M4 will take you to Episode 2, Map 4. And then there is the MAPxx format, where xx represents a any two digit number, traditionally from 01-32 or higher in some cases.
How will you know which naming convention to use? Well when you're designing your own levels you can choose whichever feels the best for you. However when loading from any of the wads that the Wad Lab ships with, the following rules will apply:
Freedoom, Doom, and Heretic all use the ExMy format.
Freedoom 2, Doom 2, and Hexen all use the MAPxx format.
Once you've entered in all of your configuration settings you're ready to play. Just hit the launch button and let the system load. If your wad isn't broken and you've chosen a valid map name you will be transported into a fantastical new world of pixelated and low poly goodness. The controls in this world are very simple, "WASD" to move around, "Space" to jump, and press "F" to pay re.... to interact with doors and switches. Pressing the "Enter" key will unlock the mouse from the screen and pressing the "Esc" key will terminate the program freeing you to go about your business.
That's really about all there is to know about the Wad Lab! The first release is coming very soon, but keep in mind this is all a work in progress, and that you will be playing with the Wad Lab at your own risk. The frame rates will be abysmal in some levels until further features are implemented into the DopeFish render pipeline. Things may even crash or make really abrupt and startling noises! That's okay, It's all being worked on! ( by one guy, give me a break man! :P )