DCK Texture Limit Workaround
by Lee Killough
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DCK has an artificial limit of 768 textures imposed. It crashes whenever you
try to load a wad with more than 768 textures defined.

This utility works around the limitation, by copying textures in and out of
the wad, before and after editing.

To install: Simply unzip DCKT.ZIP into your DCK directory.

DCKT [wadfile [level]]

DCKT works just like DCK, except that before entering the editor, all
textures unnecessary for the current level are removed from the texture
lump, by renaming the texture lump as something else, and creating a new
texture lump with only the required textures. When the editor exits, DCKT
restores the full texture lump that originally existed, and removes the
temporary one.

If no arguments are specified, DCKT edits the map that you last worked on with
DCKT or plain DCK. If only a map is specified, DCKT uses the last edited wad
but with this new map. If both the map and a wad file are specified, both are
changed.

DCKT needs to know the map you want to edit, in order to perform the texture
copy-in/copy-out. If you load directly from DCK, then unless it's the same
level as you told DCKT when you started, there can be undefined textures.

If you are developing levels with new textures, and need the new textures
to be available under DCKT, add some sidedefs that refer to them in a DCKT
session -- it will warn about them being available, but you can save them
anyway. Then simply exit and restart DCKT, and the new textures will be
available. The new textures will always be available to Doom, assuming of
course they are in the main TEXTURE lump. DCKT always restores this lump
when the editor exits, either to run Doom or to simply exit. The textures
do not actually need to be visible while editing, in order for the levels
to play correctly under Doom,.

Limitations:

With DCK2.2-f, the command-line options for setting wads and maps do not work
well, so you need to load the level from within DCK, even if you specify the
level and map on the DCKT command-line. DCK3.x does not have this problem.

With some versions of DCK3.x, spurious warnings about undefined textures will
occur.

Wads with multiple lumps named TEXTURE*, such as Doom 1's IWAD, will not work
with DCKT. Only one TEXTURE* lump is allowed in the wad.

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Lee Killough
killough@rsn.hp.com
http://www.trailerpark.com/tequila/killough/doom.html