Wally: the freeware texture editing program

Good News (and a belated Happy Thanksgiving!)

Ty has emailed me; he wants to work on Wally again! That means that there will likely be a new version. I have no idea when it would be released, so there's no point asking me in an email. Check back here in a few weeks (or months), hopefully, details will be available by then.

If you would like to mirror the current and future versions of Wally for us, please let me know via an email with the subject "Wally Mirror". Also, when emailing me, please make sure to include "Wally" in the subject line, otherwise your email is likely to get mistaken for spam. Thanks!

- Neal

No, I'm not dead...

I'm just too busy to work on Wally right now. Sorry.

The main reason for this post is to announce that the Half-Life game engine, as used by CounterStrike, no longer supports animated decals. Sorry, but this is out of my control. This has actually been the case for some time now (because of a game patch). Unfortunately, some Wally users have gone to the trouble of making an animated decal, only to discover that they can't use it in-game. Then they email me. I hope this post saves someone the wasted effort of creating a unusable decal.

Also, many of your Half-Life engine texture questions are answered HERE.

- Neal

The forum is gone...

It looks like they've removed our forum. I'm not surprised, since there were so many requests for cracked game CD codes and such posted on it.

I'm sorry that I did not have time to properly moderate the forum, but ultimately it was the abuse of the forum by a few users that caused it to be deleted by our host.

Also, if you're having trouble downloading Wally, here's another link to try: http://jono.xantaxnz.com/files/miscfiles/wally_155b.exe

- Neal

Just a short note to let you know where things stand...

I don't seem to have time to work on Wally these days. I don't want to give up either, so I guess I'm just going to wait and see. I'm still answering email, but I'm sure I've missed some in the last few months. Sorry.

Ty, if you read this, please email me with your current email address.

- Neal

I'm going on vacation...

I'll be out of town for a couple of weeks and it's unlikely I'll be checking email, so don't expect a quick reply. I also have several weeks of backlogged emails, which I'll try to answer tommorrow. When my life settles down again, I'll try and spend some quality time on the Wally code.

'Til next time...

- Neal

Yes, I'm still alive...

I'm sorry I haven't been able to update this site or work on Wally lately. I've been completely overwhelmed by work and personal issues. I would like to continue working on Wally, but right now, Wally will just have to wait. Sorry.

I've cleaned out a bunch of the old messages in the forum; it should load a lot faster now. Please do NOT post requests for CD keys, hacks, etc. Thanks!

- Neal

Download problems...

Someone sent me an email. There seems to be a problem with the downloads.

I'm not sure whatthe problem is, but here's a link that works:

http://www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?planethalflife/wadfather/tools/wally_155b.exe

You don't *have* to sign up for the personal server file service, just scroll down to "FilePlanet Public Servers" and select one of those. Wally is still being worked on occasionally by Ty and myself, but right now we just don't have a lot of time to spare (due to real-life issues).

- Neal

Wow! It's a whole new year!

I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately. I'm being "slammed" in real-life, to quote a good friend of mine. A few of you have emailed me recently to report bad links or ask for help. I'm sorry but I just haven't had the time and energy to work on Wally lately (and that includes answering email).

However, I have not abandoned the Wally project. I fully plan to continue to develop Wally; just as soon as I can spare the time. Part of my time problems are due to a flakey computer. I've spent *way* too many hours trying to fix it, lately.

I haven't spoken to Ty in a while. I know he's busy in real-life too. He's still supporting Wally though; I occasionally get CC'ed on an email to Wally user. Don't worry, we'll eventually get around to releasing an update. Please be patient.

- Neal

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'd like to wish all of you a happy thanksgiving. For many of us, this has been a difficult year, but there is still much to be thankful for. Personally, I'm thankful for my wife, Alaine, my friends, and that I still have a job in this troubled economy. I'm also thankful for you patience. Ty and I have been very busy in "real life" and have not had as much time to work on Wally as we would like. I sent Ty an update a few weeks ago and we should have a new version as soon as he has a chance to finish what he's working on and make a new version.

- Neal

Having trouble downloading Wally?

The Mighty Pete (of WadFather) sent me an email about his Wally download mirror. If you're having trouble getting a good download, why not use this link to grab the latest 1.55B version of Wally:

http://www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?planethalflife/wadfather/tools/wally_155b.exe

They've also got an older version, in (the unlikely) case you run into problems with the version above.

http://www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?planethalflife/wadfather/tools/wally_154c.exe

Be sure to visit him over at the Wadfather (with its *new* IP Address):

http://www.planethalflife.com/wadfather/

- Neal

I've finally had some time to spend on Wally!

I've written a bunch of new code and fixed some bugs. I also updated our TODO page.

If you'd like to see what I've been up to, just click the link in the left margin and look for "Recently Completed".   :-)

- Neal

New ActiveX Control for Developers

I just posted a new ActiveX control download. This ActiveX control is called WADDisplay, and as you can guess by the name, it allows you to display images from a WAD in your own GUI application. If you're not a programmer or have no interest in programming, this won't have much use for you. But if you're a VB or VC++ programmer (or you'd like to learn,) this new control makes it incredibly easy to add WAD display functionality.

The control will enumerate through all of the images in the WAD for you so you can display them in a list or do as you please. I've included sample projects for both VB98 and VC6.0. Both samples do the same thing... they're a simple GUI with a listbox on the left, the control on the right, and a method for selecting the WAD file. When you click on an image from the list, the display will change to that image. A readme file is included for more details on all of the methods and properties of the control.

- Ty

Tutorial Updates

I just posted a new tutorial to the Tutorials Section... Working with WAD files in Wally. This tutorial is very comprehensive, covering everything from adding images to exporting images to filtering and display options. If there was anything you ever wanted to know about editing WAD files in Wally, this tutorial will cover it.

In addition to the new WAD tutorial, I added a section to the Decal Wizard tutorial which covers animated decals. If you've attempted to make an animated decal before and couldn't quite get it, the tutorial should help you out. I've also included a link to a sample animated decal that I created for the tutorial which is fully functional, and a nifty little calculator that you can use to figure out what size images and number of frames you can successfully build. If the calculation results in an ERROR statement, then you know that combination just isn't going to work.

Work on the next version of Wally is coming along nicely. Neal and I have a few really cool things already finished, and we're working on even more. This next release should be a fairly good-sized one, so keep an eye out for it in the next few weeks. If there's something you've always wanted but were afraid to ask, send us an e-mail or post a note in the forum and we may just consider it.

- Ty

Version 1.55B is out!

Bug fixes/enhancements:

• Image|Blend filter was not blending properly (thanks Lagbert!)
• Attempting to save over a read-only file was causing unhandled exception (thanks Sickama!)

Improved:

• Added Blue-Shift to the Half-Life derivatives that the color decal wizard recognizes
• Tweaked image-loading code to improve performance

New Stuff:

• Serious Sam TEX file support

The bug fixes alone were pretty important, which is why I pushed this out with only a few additional items. The Serious Sam support is preliminary at this stage. We only support 24-bit editing of individual images right now, and some of the Serious Sam TEX files are 32-bit. If you try and open these types of textures, you'll get a warning suggesting you should close the file immediately as the alpha mask will be lost if you try and save over the original.

The main thing I think people working on TEX files will benefit from with this version is Wally's batch conversion tool. I tested it out pretty thoroughly, and didn't run into any problems. Not that I can guarantee there aren't any, of course :-)

Since many TEX files have alpha masks, and since TEX files can actually store more than one image (multi-framed animation files, like animated GIFs,) I'm thinking about building an editor similar to the WAD editor in Wally. I'm envisioning an editor that would allow you to add/delete/edit individual frames, edit greyscale alpha-channel masks for any of the frames, create/edit multiple animation sets (define which frames belong to a particular animation, set the animation speed, etc.) and anything else that might be of use to someone working on Serious Sam levels. If you're developing a Serious Sam level/mod, and are working heavily with textures, send us a note and let us know what kinds of things you'd like to see. Now is the time to offer suggestions, before I get too far in coding the interface.

I think the whole story behind Serious Sam (Croteam) is pretty amazing, not to mention the game is just cool, which is why I wanted to get this game done. My next goal after Serious Sam is to nail down the Lithtech file format, which is used by the game No One Lives Forever. They recently put out the mod development SDK, so I'm guessing there might be some people looking for useful conversion tools. And as always, Unreal, SWAT3, Tribes, and others are on the list of things to do.

- Ty

Bug fix: Version 1.54C is out!

- Ty

Version 1.54B is out!

Bug fixes/enhancements:

• Total re-write of batch conversion code to fix annoying problems (streaky images, missed images, etc.)
• Added ability to create a new WAD file when doing batch conversion
• Fix for upside-down 16-bit TGA files
• Fix for retail version of Counter-Strike for the Decal Wizard
• Can now do a File|New and choose PAK as the type
• Adding text files to a PAK at the root node will now appear in the list
• Updated library for PNG files
• Rewrite of I/O code for nearly all image loading routines, making them faster with more OS-level buffering

The Batch Conversion routines themselves were completely overhauled, as noted above. There were many multi-threading issues that were frankly just poor coding on my part back when I was first learning how to code a multi-threaded app. The new routines are much more stable and robust, eliminating many of the "weirdness" factors that were occuring. Specifically, the PNG and JPG libraries were not thread-safe for any version previous to 1.54. It was very possible to see weird anomalies with batch converting either of those types.

The new stuff is pretty cool. The WAD Merge Tool is an item that many people have asked about but has never materialized in the mod community (at least that I've been able to find.) So I built one in Wally that offers a full suite of functionality. In brief, it lets you take any number of source WAD files, specify image name wildcards for each WAD file, restrict the merge by the size of the image, and specify duplicate image name options. You can merge the images into a brand new WAD, an existing WAD on your hard drive, or into an existing WAD already open for editing in Wally. For more details on this cool new tool, head to the Tutorials Page.

That's about it for this release. For the next few releases, I'm going to try and concentrate on branching out into new game types.

Will you run a mirror of the Wally download?
Many people have e-mailed us complaining about 3DDownloads.com, and how they have not been very successful in retrieving any downloads. As a result, I think it's best to have a couple spare mirrors that are outside of 3DDownloads.com. If you run a FTP server, or a web site, and you're willing to help us out and store a copy of the latest version of Wally, please e-mail us and let us know. This is purely voluntary, and we can't offer anything for it other than our warmest thanks, appreciation, and a good link. Oh, and the Wally user community will thank you :-)

- Ty

Anyone want to win a GeForce2 MX 400?

- Neal

Counter-Strike Issues

"... a lot of people are having problems with the Retail version of Counter-Strike and Wally's HL-wizard... The wizard wants the hl.exe but in the retail it's been replaced with cstrike.exe ...

Solution:
Tell them to make a copy of cstrike.exe and rename it hl.exe...
Now the mod-selector isn't greyed out..."

- Neal

A few things

The next item on the agenda is a belated Happy Birthday to Wally, who turned 3 years old this past month. His official birthdate is January 16th, 1998. It's hard to believe we've been coding on it for that long. Well, obviously not the entire 3 years, but you know what I mean :-)

No One Lives Forever

Okay, now for some fun stuff. No One Lives Forever. Oh my God! I bought this game last month and just finished it this past weekend. It is possibly the best game I've ever played, and that includes Half-Life. If you haven't checked it out yet, you don't know what you're missing. It has been receiving tons of positive reviews. Built with the LithTech engine, the game is basically you playing the role of Cate Archer, a "super spy" for British Intelligence set in the 1960s. Sort of like the female equivalent to James Bond. The graphics are simply stunning. The gameplay is fantastic. The character interraction and cut-scene dialogue is very professional, humorous, and a perfect match to the overall gameplay. I can't really say much more other than "you have to buy this game." They released the LithTech collection of tools, so you can build your own maps and textures. I'm investigating what it would take to be able to create a GUI tool for manipulating their game format files.

Other game support

I'm currently looking at not only Unreal texture support, but also support for Tribes2 VOL files, and even SWAT3 stuff. Add to that the NOLF files if the LithTech people respond to my query. I'm currently attending night school at DePaul University here in Chicago, so my time is even more limited now than it was a few months ago, but the class I'm taking will be finished in March. So keep an eye out for upcoming versions that include support for some additional games.

Linux port of the WAD3 source code

Holger Kremss sent me a Linux port of the WAD3 source code I published last month. He wanted to have a version that detailed the format without having to deal with the Windows stuff. It's also pure C instead of C++, so if you're more comfortable/familiar with C, that might be a better starting point rather than having to figure out what I'm doing with file I/O, exceptions, and the like on the C++ side. The code looks good all on its own, so I've just posted it as another download for you to grab. Head to the downloads page, and scroll down to the middle of the page where I've put the WAD3/texture stuff.

- Ty

Version 1.53 is here!

The second part to this file assocations nightmare is that we are now going to be storing away the old assocation for you before we'll actually make the change. This is to keep people from losing a file assocation that they really didn't want to override. It will probably make their parents much happier, which in turn makes us happier, and gosh darnit if the world doesn't love that, then I don't know what else will. So if at any point (going forward here, this isn't in any older version, unfortunately) you decide that Wally is going to handle your JPG or BMP files by making Wally the default assocation, and later on you decide that's not really what you wanted, we're going to be super-duper nice to you and we'll actually put things back. All you do is uncheck the box, and POOF! You're back in time. I don't know of any other program that bothers to go to that length :-)

This version also fixes a bug with the editing tools that use decals. Changing to the images tab on the decal toolbar would cause an unhandled exception, which promptly dumped the app. It was a long and arduous battle finding that bug, but it has been squashed. I enhanced the debugging information as well, so that we can get a little more info out of the exception.

- Ty

WAD3 Source Code

WAD3 Source Code

Speaking of cool new things, I mentioned earlier that I had downloaded the Unreal texture format specs from Epic. I received a few responses about it, and so I wanted to ask you, the Wally user, whether or not you think support for Unreal textures (UTX files) would be a useful thing to have in Wally. I don't want to duplicate efforts from what UTX Viewer is doing unless there's a strong demand for it. Send an e-mail, or post a message on the forum if you have an opinion and you want to share it :)

- Ty

Beta Version 1.52b is here!

However, the wait is no more! I'm happy to announce version 1.52b was just posted to the ftp site, and should be mirrored to those other places in a short time. This new version contains a cool little wizard that should make creating Half-Life color decals MUCH easier. The keyword is easier, for both you and us, since we've been flooded with e-mails and forum postings from people totally new to game textures asking how to create these color decals.

Q. Uhh, so how do I make color decals again?

A.

• Download 1.52
• Run the downloaded self-extracting EXE, and extract the program to your hard drive
• Start Wally.exe
• Go to Wizard|HL Color Decal Wizard:

• Select your Half-Life folder (use the little [..] button to bring up a GUI)
• Choose the mod you want to put the decal in (IE cstrike for Counter-Strike)
• Choose where you're going to provide the image for the decal
  • Clipboard: you must already have an image on the clipboard
  • File: IE a BMP, PCX, or JPG file sitting on your hard drive
  • Let me edit: you can make the decal yourself using Wally's editing tools
• Click on OK when you're ready to have Wally create your decal

What you'll end up with is a brand spanking new WAD file, named PLDECAL.WAD, and your image of choice will be named appropriately inside that WAD... ie {LOGO. For those of you who aren't overly familiar with Half-Life textures, a WAD file is a collection of game images. It's like a ZIP file that contains nothing but images of varying types for the game to use.

Please Note: Once Wally builds the WAD file, it won't automatically save the file to your hard drive. We're giving you a chance to back out of the decal in case something went terribly wrong... like you picked a picture of your sister instead of Latetia Casta. So... in order to finalize the deal, you're going to have to save the new decal. You'll be told of this as soon as you try and close the WAD, or close Wally. Just click on Yes when it asks you to save and Wally will put the decal in the appropriate directory. Or, just shortcut the whole deal and hit Ctrl-S. Of course, if something did go wrong, click on No and start over.

Also of interest: I've fixed up the color translator tool for manipulating palettes. It will now actually swap indexes the way you'd expect them to. Some people were having problems moving around index #255. If your only intention with using Wally is to make color decals, the wizard will make your life much easier. It handles this index 255 thing exactly the way you want it to, and will automatically map your pure blue pixels over to that index. Of course, you can always choose to do it the long way and just build them from scratch. Just note that Wally won't make any assumptions about your intentions outside of the wizard, and as such it won't handle the pure blue index mapping at 255.

Oh, there are also a few bug fixes and some debugging stuff I put in for troubleshooting major problems. Luckily we haven't had too many, but this version will make it easier. This is also the very first version we've compiled with Visual C++ 6.0.

Looking for an Unreal texture editor?

I found this site the other day, looking for a place to point an inquiry:

It looks like they have some basic functionality that will let you manipulate Unreal textures. I found out at the same time that Epic has released their file format specifications, so something like this would be possible inside Wally. I'm not sure whether I'll attempt to put UTX support in, however, since they've already got something useful in place.

-Ty

Happy Holidays!

Check it out if you're having any kind of problem getting color decals to work properly. I'm going to be spending some time putting together some better support inside Wally to make this easier on people, as it seems to be QUITE the popular thing to do at the moment :)

-Ty

Not dead yet!

Promotion stuff. As Neal mentioned, I started a new job function earlier this year. That came right around March, which coincides nicely with when I fell off the face of the Earth. I'm coding 100% of my time at work now, and am one of only a small handful of programmers here where I work. We can't seem to hire any quality programmers. Suffice it to say, there is more work to do than people to do it. Toss that in with the load of work that was put off last year because of Y2K, and well, you get the idea. I've basically lost 2-3 hours every day because of it, and things don't seem to be letting up.

There is a bright side to this, however! This lovely thing called winter. Winter sucks here in Chicago. During the summer months, the last thing I want to do when I get home with only a few hours of free time left is to spend it on the PC. I'm not just avoiding coding... I don't even play games anymore. I haven't touched Half-Life, Counter-Strike, or any FPS in over 3 months. And if you know me, I live for the FPS genre. Now, with winter rapidly approaching, there isn't much to do outside. No golf, no basketball, notta. I love to ski, but Chicago is a "carpenter's dream" if you know what I mean. It is a perfect time to get back to coding on Wally. Sounds like a weird motivational factor, but hey, I need something!

So... we'd love to hear some ideas from you, the Wally faithful. We have our own ToDo list, but right now I really need something fun and interesting to work on. What would you most like to see added to Wally... is there something you've always wanted, but were afraid to ask? Something that you think would be so cool to have? I have my own ideas of things to work on, but I don't want coding for Wally to turn into a "job." That's part of what caused me to lose interest for a while. So if you have an idea, open up a discussion on the forum, and I'll start gathering them up. Don't be afraid to ask for something big!

- Ty

P.S. If you live in the Chicago 'burbs, can code in Visual C++, and are looking for a job, send me an e-mail! They've got a nice referral program going now :)

Good news...

Valve's Texture Tutorial (converted to HTML)

The Forum message board is up again...

The Forum message board seems to be busted...

Where to find tutorials...

ERR Network has posted their new Tutorials section, which contains 530 tutorials for Half-Life, Unreal/UT, and the Quake games. Some are there own and the others are on other websites. It's not just level editing, but coding, and art tutorials among other things. More tutorials will be added in the future. It looks like a good one to bookmark.

The Download Page Is Fixed...

Download Problems Will Be Resolved Soon...

Download Problems...

What's this? An actual update!