SRB2 Level Editing Made Easy
Things You Will Need
There are several SRB2 level editors. The one preferred by SRB2
programmer A.J. "SSNTails" Freda, presumably the best one, is the Doom
Construction Kit, or DCK, but sadly it only runs in pure DOS, so you can
only use it if you are on Windows 95 or 98, and even then it will be
quite inconvenient. So most people use a Windows program called
WadAuthor, the program covered in this tutorial. It has trouble with
large levels, and the internal nodesbuilder isn't very good, but those
are things you won't need to worry about when you're just learning to
make levels (so don't worry if you don't know what a nodesbuilder is).
WadAuthor is shareware, and a trial can be gotten from
http://www.speakeasy.org/~wc/wauthor/.
Another thing you will need is a file from Doom 2, namely doom2.wad.
SRB2 is based on a source port of Doom and uses the same wad file format
(mostly) as Doom 2, so all the tool programs are too stupid to work with
it unless you have doom2.wad to show them. You can get it by purchasing
Doom 2. If for some reason you absolutely, positively cannot purchase
Doom 2, you can find doom2.wad rather easily on FTP search engines,
though I don't condone this — at least not officially.
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Finally, you'll need a WCF — WadAuthor Configuration File — for SRB2.
You can find my modified version, which has lots of additions and
corrections missing from the "official" WCF, in the Files section of
SRB2 World. It also
includes a wad file with graphics (aptly named graphics.wad). I'll
explain in Section 4 what purpose that wad file serves.
- You can also use the doom2.wad file made by the FreeDOOM project. It works,
but for some reason, WadAuthor displays floor textures multiple times
when you use it, and I haven't yet been able to figure out why. If you
can tolerate the minor annoyance (and for now, while you're just
learning to make simple levels, you can), the FreeDOOM wad will work
for you.