As you can see, I've blended some red into the patch at half intensity. At 0.1, the graphic is an almost entirely solid color, while at 0.9, it's a very light tint, opposite what you may expect.


Now I'll show you how to use translations. We're going to take FLAT14, which is a blue carpet-looking flat from Doom 2, and make it red. So, first we define our image, but you know how to do that by now. If you've written translations in DECORATE or ACS, this is easy as can be, and it uses the same syntax.


As you can see, I've added the Translation keyword, followed by my crappy translation that turns the soft blues of the image into reds. You can also use GZDoom's special translation function to use colors outside the palette. Here's a fabulous purple carpet which shows off this feature's use in TEXTURES.

Bear in mind that Translation and Blend cannot be used on the same patch!

Next comes rotations. These are also easy to do, and applied in much the same way as flips. For an example, I will show you how to make a practical texture out of an existing one; we're making a horizontal version of the DOORTRAK texture.


First of all, note the dimensions of the texture; when using rotations, bear in mind what the dimensions of the texture would need to be to accommodate the patch once it has been rotated. Now look at the patch block. As you can see, you begin with the rotate keyword, followed by an angle. As of writing this, ZDoom only supports rotations in angles of 90, limiting your options to 90, 180, and 270. Either way, you now have a horizontal door track!


Now I'll show you how to use different rendering methods. First, here are the rendering styles you may use. All of these use the Alpha parameter to control the intensity of the effect chosen.

• Copy - The patch is completely solid. No translucency or other effects are applied. This is the default and you don't need to apply it.
• CopyAlpha - Copy for PNGs with their own translucency.
• Translucent - Basic translucency.
• Add - Additive translucency, which makes the patch appear bright as if it's producing its own light.
• Subtract - Removes the patch from the patches beneath it while inverting the patch.
• ReverseSubtract - The same as subtract, but without inversion.
• Modulate - Darkens the patch considerably.

IMPORTANT! A common misconception is that translucency affects the final texture. Keep in mind when using translucency that you cannot make the resulting texture translucent, only the patches in relation to one another. As such, using translucency on a single-patch texture will result in a darkened mess. Consider the texture itself to be a black canvas. When you place a patch on it and make it translucent, in game on a wall or HUDMessage, you will see the "canvas" behind the patch.
Let's create another texture with two distinct patches; a wooden crate with a label on it.


Now if you load your TEXTURES lump with Doom 2, wherever you see a big wooden crate, it will have a translucent radiation sign on it. The other rendering modes are just as easy to use. With the exception of Blend and Translation together, you can freely combine any styles and alterations you wish.


Next, I'll show you how to make a scaled texture. Let's say you've got an image that's 256x256, and want it to be only 128x128 in-game. That's easy to do.


As you can see, it's as simple as scaling it down by two. If you wanted it to fit to a 64x64 texture for use as a flat, you would scale by four and so on.
IMPORTANT! When defining a scaled texture, make sure you set the image's dimensions as the size of the texture, and not the size you want to scale down to!TEXTURES' scaling is quite robust. Let's take an image with far more oddball dimensions and scale it down. For instance, I have a texture that is 419x531, and I want to scale it down to 80x128. Open a calculator program and enter in the width of your texture. Divide this by the desired width, and the output number is your scaling factor.


As you can see, the scaling factor can be decimalized, allowing for greater flexibility. You can also scale images up. Here's a texture that's 64x64, scaled up to 128x128.


The process to get an inverted scaling factor is more or less the same. Take the dimensions you want, and divide them into the dimensions of the image.


Finally, TEXTURES can be used to create sprites. The process is much the same as creating a new texture, with an extra set of parameters. Let's create a simple flipped decoration.


This code will give us a flaming can that's been flipped on its X axis. You could go on to redefine the other two frames of it in this manner to create a mirrored flaming can decoration. Note the offset keyword before the patch block. This tells the engine where to draw the sprite in relation to its physical location. Here, I'm using the offsets of the FCANA0 sprite.

You can also make new weapon sprites in a similar way. For example, here's the player's fist on the left side of the screen, again using a simple FlipX command.


Note that when using the Scale functions for sprites, offsets can become difficult to calculate. While scaling can be directly applied to any actor from within DECORATE or through ACS, high-resolution weapon sprites require scaling via TEXTURES. Unfortunately, I have no easy method for calculating these offsets except by trial and error.
A note on sprite naming: When using the sprite frames [, \, and ], you must enclose the name in quotations or the parser will not recognize it! For example, "POSS\1".Now that you understand TEXTURES, you may wonder why you should use it. If you don't require anything more advanced than a list of textures you can use, TEXTURES is really not necessary. However, with it you can accomplish a number of things and save a considerable amount of space. A number of texture packs offer recolored versions of many classic Doom textures, but you can do these with translation code now to save space. You can use flipped and rotated versions of classic textures without having to add anything new, complete textures that require mirroring (for instance, from games like Doom 64, Duke Nukem 3D and Blood), and any number of other graphic-related needs.