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Topic: Any plugin to open Doom WADs? (Read 5167 times) previous topic - next topic
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Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

As the title states, is there any plugin (like the one for XMPlay) that can open Doom WADs and directly play the MUS lumps within without needing to extract them first? The only plugin I've found so far is foo_game (Game Audio Decoder) but as the readme states, "The plugin supports only the WADs from Core Design's Tomb Raider 3. Doom WADs are unsupported."

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #1 –
I could make a WAD archive reader plugin, but it will need to perform heuristic matching on the filenames in the archive to determine the type. Since, as you may or may not know, Doom resources are only identified by a short filename, without an extension or file type field. Maybe I'll make the file type rules configurable, just to leave it up to the user if the defaults are bad.

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: kode54 on
I could make a WAD archive reader plugin, but it will need to perform heuristic matching on the filenames in the archive to determine the type.

Would love to see such a plugin! Also, since MUS files begin with "MUS." = "4D 55 53 1A", wouldn't that be sufficient to detect that the lump is a music resource?

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #3 –
I was thinking of supporting sound resources as well, which requires filename matching instead, since the sound file signatures aren't really that great.

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: kode54 on
I was thinking of supporting sound resources as well, which requires filename matching instead, since the sound file signatures aren't really that great.

Would filename matching be a wise idea? After all, there are probably thousands of IWADs/PWADs, not just for Doom/Doom2 but also all other id/non-id games that used the same popular engine such as Heretic, Hexen, Strife etc., so a generic approach would be preferable instead of hard-coding filenames. Other things to consider would be properly handling padding for sounds, and also whether to add support for the PC speaker sound lumps as well.

Anyway, it's entirely up to you to decide if adding sound support is worth the effort or not. Personally I'll be happy with just MUS and MIDI support (latter supported since v1.5 of the game engine). Moreover, if you do add sound support then it would be nice if we can make the plugin ignore everything except the music lumps, so that we can just open WADs and not have to bother filtering out the sounds.

No matter what's implemented, am really looking forward to the plugin! Thanks for considering the suggestion and working on it.

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #5 –
I think even just MUS detection would be sufficient for a first version.

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Zarggg on
I think even just MUS detection would be sufficient for a first version.

Completely agree, although something just occurred to me regarding support for sound lumps. Clearly the game engine mustn't be using filename matching or else it can't properly deal with all those third party WADs. Since the sources are available a motivated developer can check out the relevant code to see how the game manages to locate these resources. Of course as previously stated I would be more than grateful for just good MUS and MIDI support.

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #7 –
Just wanted to ask kode54 if there's been any progress on this. Sorry if it's too soon to bump the thread.

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #8 –
I registered just to request WAD support too! Is the WAD archive reader plugin available yet? I couldn't find it in the Components list...
 

Any plugin to open Doom WADs?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Thundik81 on
http://aluigi.altervista.org/quickbms.htm

There are lots of tools to extract, modify and reinsert WAD resources. This one's nice too (didn't know of it before), but the point is to have foobar play the MUS lumps without needing to extract them first from every WAD. I suppose I'll just have to use XMPlay along with its WAD reader plugin that sandy.v mentioned above.