Can’t make a Quake level without textures, right? Let’s talk about how to get them loaded into ToeTag and what you can do with them.
WAD Files
Loading
Quake loads textures from WAD files. You can find a whole bunch of them at Quaddicted if you don’t have any of your own.
ToeTag reads WAD files directly so once you have a MAP file open (either by opening it or by starting a new one) all you have to do is click the menu item “Tools > WAD > Open...”. Find the WAD file that you want to load and click Open.
In the pic below, I’ve loaded BASE.WAD from my hard drive.
Appending & Saving
You can work with this single WAD or you can append other ones to create one monstrous mega WAD. Using the menu item “Tools > WAD > Append...”. This is what it looks like after I append METAL.WAD.
The danger now is that since you’ve created a merged WAD in memory, you need to save it out before it will be of much use to you. That’s easily done through: “Tools > WAD > Save As...”. Enter a name and save it. Now you have a merged WAD that you can use in the future!
Of course, if you don’t append WADs together and just want to use a single WAD you won’t have to worry about any of this appending or saving stuff.
Texture Browser
Name Filter
The texture browser is pretty straightforward. The first control is a name filter. Enter some text there to filter the textures shown in the browser to only those with names containing the text you entered. For example, using the merged WAD above, let’s filter on the text “met”.
Now you’ll only see a subset of textures. This is great if you know the name (or a part of the name) of the texture you want.
Usage Filter
The next set of controls are simple filters that allow you to filter textures by usage. It breaks down like this.
All - Every texture loaded
In Use - Just the textures that are currently being used in the level
MRU - Most Recently Used. Shows you the textures that you have clicked, in backwards order. This means that the textures you’ve been clicking on recently will be at the top of the list.
The extra filters are great for reducing texture usage in your map by letting you see what is already being used.
Zoom
The slider control on the right side controls the size of the textures in the browser. It’s useful to scale the textures down if you have a small screen or scale them up if you have one of those huge 30” screens. Here’s a shot of the textures scaled down.
Texture Assignment
Brushes & Faces
Applying a texture to brushes or faces of brushes is really easy. Just select the brushes you want to change the texture on (or select the individual faces on those brushes) and click a texture in the browser. The texture will get a white border around it to show that you clicked it and the brushes/faces in the level will be changed.
