Mip Texture


Mip Textures are what cover the walls, floors, ceilings, etc, of Quake's
rooms. They consist of four different sizes of a base image. Each image
is half the size of the one before it such as that we have the first image
which we will call the 1/1, we have the second 1/2, we have the third 1/4
and we have the fourth 1/8. Besides being smaller, the images also become
smoother. This alleviates the aliasing effect which causes the moire patterns
in textures as they are seen farther away. As such, the farther one is from the
wall with a particular texture, the smaller the scale of the texture applied to the
wall will be. Note that since they are geometrically smaller, the base image for
a mip texture must be evenly divisible by 8.

Wavy Textures:
To make a mip texture use the waving effect (used in the water, lava, etc) the name
of the texture must begin with the asterisk symbol '*'.
Ex. *water1

Animated Textures:
Animation can be achieved by giving the texture the '+' symbol followed by its
place in the animation and its name.
Ex. +0slip +1slip +2slip +3slip...

Activating Textures: These are two textures, the first has +0 prefixing it, the other has +a. Note that it can be an animated texture as well. Ex. +0button ... +abutton

Sky Textures:
The sky textures must be begin with the name 'sky'. Sky textures are, as far as
I can tell, only 256 pixels in width and 128 in height. The first half being the lower
plane of the sky and the latter half the upper plane of the sky. Black in the first half
denotes transparency (palette index 0, rgb value 0 0 0).
Ex. sky4


Edit

The Edit button will call up a user defined pcx editing program for modifying
the currently displayed scale of the image. To set the other sizes to the modified
image, press the Rebuild button.

Export

The Export button will let you save the currently diplayed scale of the image
to a pcx file.

Replace

The Replace button will let you replace the currently displayed scale of the image
with a pcx file that is of the exact same dimensions as seen under width and height.

Rebuild

The Rebuild button will rebuild the smaller scales of the mip texture using the 1/1
scale image. Note that you must be viewing the 1/1 scale to rebuild the others.

Dimensions

As explained above, there are four different scales of the mip texture's image
in a mip texture. Quake displays a smaller one the farther away you are from it.
This is a drop-down box that lets you display which scale you wish to view.

Name

The name will automatically be changed to what is in the name edit box when
you exit the mip texture. Look at the description of mip textures above to determine
what effects can be achieved by changing the name. Note that the name's length
cannot exceed sixteen characters.
Table Of Contents Editing Index