ANIMATED

The ANIMATED lump is a Boom feature for defining additional animated walls and flats. Although some modern editors such as SLADE 3 allow to create and edit this lump directly in binary form, the original method devised by TeamTNT involved creating a text file and converting it with a small utility called swantbls (switch and animation tables).

ANIMATED lumps are not cumulative, only the last one loaded will be used.

Format

The ANIMATED lump makes the names of the animated flats and textures known to the engine. It consists of a list of records, each 23 bytes long, terminated by a record (not used) whose first byte is -1 (255). The terminating record does not need to be complete and may be only the first byte; the rest will be ignored.

Length	Description
1 byte	255 to terminate list, 0 if a flat, 1 if a wall texture. ZDoom also uses the value 3 to mark a wall texture allowing decals.
9 bytes	Null-terminated string naming last texture/flat in animation.
9 bytes	Null-terminated string naming first texture/flat in animation.
4 bytes	Animation speed, number of tics between animation changes (little-endian). SMMU and the Eternity Engine use a speed value of 65536 or greater to define warping textures. This feature is also supported by ZDoom.

Swantbls syntax

The swantbls tool converts a plain text file into an ANIMATED and SWITCHES lump. The format of the plain text file prior to conversion is as follows (quoth defswani.dat):

# This file is input for SWANTBLS.EXE, it specifies the switchnames
# and animated textures and flats usable with BOOM. The output of
# SWANTBLS is two lumps, SWITCHES.LMP and ANIMATED.LMP that should
# be inserted in the PWAD as lumps.
#
#switches usable with each IWAD, 1=SW, 2=registered DOOM, 3=DOOM2
[SWITCHES]
#epi    texture1        texture2
1       SW1BRCOM        SW2BRCOM
...

#animated flats, spd is number of frames between changes
[FLATS]
#spd    last        first
8       NUKAGE3     NUKAGE1
...

#animated textures, spd is number of frames between changes
[TEXTURES]
#spd    last        first
8       BLODGR4     BLODGR1
...

External links

• Boom editing utilities at Doomworld/idgames, including swantbls.
• ANIMATED at the ZDoom wiki