[Engine Standard] External Texture names for MDL/SPR

[mh]

Right now there are two competing methods for naming external textures used by MDL (and SPR) files. Some engines just tack the frame number onto the end of the base name (example: s_light0.tga) whereas others use the full name, including extension (example: s_light.mdl_0.tga).

All engines should use the second method, and all content creators should use the second method too. Why?

Pop quiz time. If you used the first method and you had an image called "s_light0.tga", which texture would it replace?

The screenshot below (from ID1's pak0.pak) should give a hint:

[Spike]

use a particle effect for the shambler's lightning, and problem solved.
Alternatively you can use different texture paths for content, like models/*.tga for models and sprites/*.spr, which results in it potentially working on dos ports, the platform quake was originally released for.

what's more annoying is the identical names for differing textures in maps.

[Karatorian]

I'd say I'd have to agree with the OP. While I can see how having multiple dots in a filename might give some wimpy filesystems fits, I don't think it matters much on modern systems. Simply put, I'd favor clarity over the sort of kludges that stripping the extension causes. This one example in pak0.pak is reason enough, but there are sure to be more in the vast quantity of Q1 content out there.

The multiple textures in maps thing is indeed obnoxious, but I think it's possible to work around it. I believe the QRP has documented all concurrences of this in the standard Quake levels.

Per level texture overrides should be able to handle cases where different levels use the same name for different textures. (Although, of course, this needs to be standardized as well.)

Symbolic links would work nicely to solve the problem of multiple names being used for the same texture, if it weren't for the fact that a particular (popular, but garbage) OS doesn't support them. The QRP guys came up with the link file idea for this. I don't know how widely (if at all) this has been implemented, but I think it's a good workaround.

[mh]

[revelator]

[mh]

[dreadlorde]

[Karatorian]

[Spike]

[mh]

[Spike]

[mh]

[metlslime]