Picture format

Many of the Doom engine graphics, including wall patches and sprites, are stored in the WAD files in a special picture format. Notably excepted are the textures for floors and ceilings, which are known as flats.

Details of the picture format in Doom are given in the Unofficial Doom Specs.

A picture header gives its width and height, and offset values. Following the header are pointers to data for each column of pixels; the number of these pointers is equal to the picture width.

The data for each column is divided into posts, which are lines of colored pixels going downward on the screen. Each post is described by its starting height (relative to the top of the picture) and number of pixels, followed by a value for each of the pixels. Picture descriptions can (and do) skip over some pixel positions; these pixels are transparent. (Since transparent pixels are not changed when drawing a particular picture, whatever was drawn into the frame buffer previously will show through.)

Each pixel is given as an unsigned byte (and thus is valued from 0 to 255). The pixel value is first used as an index into the current COLORMAP, which gives a new pixel value (from 0 to 255) adjusted for the desired light level. (At full brightness, the pixel value is unchanged.) Then this new pixel value is written into the frame buffer. The actual red, green, and blue values corresponding to the palette index in the current palette are stored in the VGA graphics card's 8-bit hardware palette.

Note that gamma correction, a user-adjustable setting that can lighten the colors for dark-looking monitors, is handled when setting the game's palette and not when actually drawing the graphics themselves. This avoids an additional indirection.

Converting to a doom picture
This small algorithm will convert some pixel data (eg, from a windows bitmap file) to a doom picture.

Notes: --

Byte = 0 - 255 Word = 0 - 65535 DWord = 0 - 4294967295

dummy_value = 	Byte, those unused bytes in the file (excerpt from UDS: "..left overs from NeXT machines?..") picture_* = 	Word, the maximum width for an image in doom picture format is 256 pixels pixel_count = 	Byte, the number of pixels in a post Pixel = 	Byte, the pixel colour column_array =	array of DWord, this holds all the post start offsets for each column

Algorithm: --

begin

write picture_width to file write picture_height to file write picture_top to file write picture_left to file

while loop, exit on x = picture width increase column_array by 1

write memory buffer position to end of column_array

y = 0

operator = true

do while loop, until y = picture height get Pixel value if the pixel = transperant_colour and operator = false then dummy_value = 0 write dummy_value to memory buffer

operator = true

otherwise, if pixel != transperant_colour and operator = true then row_start = y			pixel_count = 0

dummy value = 0

write above post data to memory buffer

offset = current post position in memory buffer

operator = false

otherwise, if pixel != transperant_colour and operator = false then increment current post pixel_count

if offset > 0 and pixel count > 0 then previous_offset = current post position

seek back in memory buffer by offset - 2

write pixel_count to memory buffer

seek back to previous_offset end block write pixel to memory buffer end block

increment y by 1

end block

if operator = true or y = height then Pixel = 0

write Pixel to memory buffer

rowstart = 255 write rowstart to memory buffer end block

increment x by 1

end block

seek memory buffer position to 0

block_size = picture_width * size of dword

allocate block_memory, filled with 0's, with block_size

write block_memory to file, using block_size as size

offset = current file_position

free block_memory

seek to position 8 in file from start

for loop, count = 0, break on count = number of elements in column_array column_offset = column_array[count] + offset

write column_offset to file end block

write memory buffer to file

end