AASTINKY

AASTINKY is the first texture in the Doom texture directory. In Doom II, the name AASHITTY is used instead. AASTINKY is not a real texture, but is a dummy texture to work around a quirk in the Doom engine's internals. Using this texture has the same effect as using the '-' "empty" texture.

Internally, Doom refers to textures by their index in the texture directory. A value of zero is used to represent the empty '-' texture. However, in C, which Doom is written in, array indices start from zero. The result is that the first texture in the WAD directory is equivalent to the empty texture.

The AASTINKY texture was likely introduced as a workaround to the indexing problem, deliberately occupying the first texture slot so that real textures will be unaffected by the problem. The AA prefix forces the texture to be the first in the directory, as the textures in Doom's WAD directory are sorted by alphabetical order.