Introduction

WadC is an old program, with roots in around 2000, and was originally written (I think) as a semi-private experiment and an opportunity to learn Java.

I have deliberately avoided refactoring or reworking the Java unless I had to as part of achieving something else, so things can be a bit messy.

Building

WadC is now built using Maven. Assuming you have maven installed, simply issue

mvn package

To build both a .jar and a .zip bundle in the target/ directory.

Docs

The documentation is built using Asciidoctor. The Maven POM will attempt to build the documentation when you issue mvn package. If you do not have Asciidoctor installed, this will not work, but you can probably avoid building the docs if you don’t use the package target.

Regression test suite

The top-level Makefile is used as a rough-and-ready regression test tool. Every example wl file in examples/ as well as the test files in tests/ are processed into WAD files via the experimental CLI mode and their SHA1 sums recorded in the file sha1sums. You can check that things are fine via

mvn package                # rebuild WadC
make clean && make -j wads # build all the examples and tests
make check                 # ensure the sums match

If you are making changes to the behaviour of the WadC language, you should use this to ensure that you haven’t broken any of the existing maps.

Updating the test suite

Assuming you’ve made a change which needs to either add or change the sums of an example or a test, and you’re sure that the new versions of the maps are OK, run the following to regenerate the sums file

make sha1sums

Please include updated sha1sums with any changes you submit which change them.

Reporting problems

Please raise an issue on the GitHub project, or failing that, email me, but GitHub issue is preferred.

Submitting changes

Either raise a Pull Request on GitHub (preferred) or email me a patch file, ideally against the master branch.

Things that need doing

constant definitions

The list of constants defined for things, lines, sectors etc. are very incomplete. They need fleshing out, renaming or re-organising. This is quite a good task for a beginner.

In particular the Hexen things are not very much changed from the definitions in the source, and might need renaming.

blockmap

examples/beta/blockmap.wl is the beginnings of a blockmap system for marking so that code that is randomly generating routines can ensure that it doesn’t over draw an existing area.

conveyors

Library routines for constructing and manipulating conveyors. Perhaps a way of converting e.g. a switch to activating a walk-over linedef, and making them trigger multiple effects at once (with multiple voodoo dolls)

missing examples

  • A basic day/night simulator (perhaps with sky switching as well as light levels) via boom features and conveyors. See e.g. "The Last Sanctuary".

more options for water.h

Some things are hardcoded in water.h, or not possible to manipulate easily from the caller. For example, modifying the height of the control sectors to adjust the fake flat height; setting a sector type for either the control sector or the decorated sector.

Internationalisation

WadC has basic internationalisation support. Within .java files, strings that might be translated are wrapped in (), e.g. msg(("wrote file ")+name). Any such strings are looked up in MessagesBundle.properties files within the WadC JAR. These are at the location src/main/resources within the source. For example, the French translations are defined in MessagesBundle_fr_FR.properties.

Adding translations

Add or edit the MessagesBundle_xx_XX.properties files. The syntax is basically

lookup_string = translated_string

Spaces in either string need to be backslash escaped.

Adding words to be looked up

For any strings in the WadC.java file, wrap them in (). For other Java source files, some extension work is necessary to define a () method in that context. I would love patches to extend this.