Sonic's White Glove Diaries -

Updated and maintained by Johnny 'Sonikku' Wallbank and A.J Freda

Wednesday 27th October 1999

Make your own characters

I know Ku said that this was supposed to be about level designing, but I'd rather make it about how to make your own players to use in SRB2! If you complete a "skin" using this tutorial, and we like it, we'll include it in SRB2!

Now, first, you need a WAD editor, such as Wintex. It might require you to have Doom or Doom2, I'm not sure.

Download this template WAD and open it up in wintex.

You should see something like this:

Ignore the SS_START and SS_END entries. It's the PLAYxxxx entries you want.

Each of the xxxx after PLAY defines the character's state. If you click on an entry, I have stuck in a "dummy" picture that tells you what it currently is for. Those that say "reserved" mean we haven't decided what to fill them with yet. This is the way it works:

A whole animation 'frame' is defined by a letter. A is frame 1, B is frame 2, etc. the numbers define the direction at which you are looking at the sprite:

1 = Forward

2 = Forward-left

3 = Left Side

4 = Back-left

5 = Back

6 = Back-right

7 = Right Side

8 = Forward-right

The numbers can be combined so that it "mirrors" another, such as PLAYA2A8.... The frame will be displayed as it looks for 2, and it will mirror itself for the 8.

To center the sprite in a frame, hit the little green man icon near the "apply" button.(Then make sure you press APPLY to keep the changes!) This sets the ground state. You always want to have your character's feet about 5 pixels below the crosshairs.

To import a BMP, select the frame you want, and go to Edit/Load Entry from File...  The BMP MUST BE 256 COLORS! If you use a 16-bit or 24-bit image, the program will try to convert it to 256 colors but it won't work.. the result will be a very stangely colored image.

For multiplayer, each person gets to choose the color of themselves to be put on a "Team". Teams are either defined as all having the same character, or all having the same color. The changeable color is "GREEN". That's why Sonic above is green, so you can choose your player color.

Once you're all done, rename the PLAY to something else, usually the first four letters of your character's name (like MACHA3A7, etc.). There is an additional text file that needs to be inserted, but you can leave that to us for now. E-mail your completed character , tell us the name, and we'll finish it up. If we really like it, you might even see it in some development shots!