SRB2 Level Editing Made Easy

Aligning Your Textures

In the glitch screenshot from the last section, repeated here for your convenience:



...there's one more glitch that we actually can fix. Notice that you can see three walls from where you are. But where the walls touch each other, there are two squares of the same dark-brown colour! What we need to do is realign the texture on the wall in the middle (horizontally speaking) of the screenshot. If we could offset the left of that texture by 64 units/pixels (the size of each square), everything would be fixed.

In WadAuthor, right-click that wall's linedef, which happens to be this one:



...and go to Properties. We'll be editing a sidedef. When we saw the problem, we were standing in sector 1, and the linedef's little line points to sector 1, so we want to edit the front sidedef. Notice these two boxes in the sidedef frame:



The label abbreviates X/Y Offsets, but what it really means is Horizontal/Vertical Offsets, because this has nothing at all to do with X coordinates or Y coordinates in the map editor. Set the first of the two boxes to 64 (like I've already done in the screenshot). This will offset the texture horizontally by 64 units, which is half of the texture, or one of the coloured squares. Save and test the level:



Hey! There we go!

Notice, though, that the alignment still isn't exactly correct. Between the first and second walls from the left, there's still a slight misalignment. And there are still several other places in the level where the alignment's all wrong.

Here's some harsh reality for you: it's theoretically impossible in most cases to get the alignment exactly correct. And getting it to be passably close, even on small levels, is a big fat stinking time-consuming aggravating pain in the tush. Even Greenflower Zone, Act 1, as distributed by STJr, has misaligned textures. All the official levels do.

My advice to you is to go on playing your misaligned levels. If you're sure everything is completely done, and there's one particular misalignment that's bugging you, and it's an easy fix like this one was, and you still have some free time left over, then fix it. Otherwise, leave everything as it is. Don't sweat the small stuff. Especially when fixing the small stuff is as involved and tedious as proper texture alignment is.

By the way, the second box under "X/Y Ofs.," as you might expect, controls vertical offset. I've only once ever had a use for it. If your ceiling heights and most of your floor heights are in multiples of 128, you'll probably never need it. You can't have all your floor heights be multiples of 128, unless you use way too many springs, because the characters can't jump 128 units; the maximum vertical jumping distance is about 96. (In fact, the next section will be about jumping and other vertical distances.)

I have been informed that some level editors have a feature to automatically align textures. While it doesn't do a perfect job, it can be a big help. WadAuthor is actually one such level editor, or at least it seems to be; there's an Align Textures menu item somewhere. I haven't figured out how to use it yet. SSNTails informs me that DeePsea has the best automatic texture alignment of any editor he's tried it with.