ANIMATED

Warning: This page describes a feature created for Boom that is maintained in ZDoom for backwards-compatibility purposes only. It is not recommended that new projects make use of this feature. Everything that can be done with the ANIMATED lump can be done better and more easily by using ANIMDEFS.

The ANIMATED lump was originally BOOM's method of defining additional animated textures and switches. The "swantbls" tool can be found here to convert a plain text file into an ANIMATED and SWITCHES lump. The format of the plain text file prior to conversion is as follows (I quote defswani.dat):

# This file is input for SWANTBLS.EXE, it specifies the switchnames
# and animated textures and flats usable with BOOM. The output of
# SWANTBLS is two lumps, SWITCHES.LMP and ANIMATED.LMP that should
# be inserted in the PWAD as lumps.
#
#switches usable with each IWAD, 1=SW, 2=registered DOOM, 3=DOOM2
[SWITCHES]
#epi    texture1        texture2
1       SW1BRCOM        SW2BRCOM
...

#animated flats, spd is number of frames between changes
[FLATS]
#spd    last        first
8       NUKAGE3     NUKAGE1
...

#animated textures, spd is number of frames between changes
[TEXTURES]
#spd    last        first
8       BLODGR4     BLODGR1
...

---

The ANIMATED lump makes the names of the animated flats and textures known to the engine. It consists of a list of records, each 23 bytes long, terminated by a record (not used) whose first byte is -1 (255). The terminating record does not need to be complete and may be only the first byte; the rest will be ignored.

Length	Description
1 byte	255 to terminate list, 0 if a flat, 1 if a texture
9 bytes	Null terminated string naming last texture/flat in animation
9 bytes	Null terminated string naming first texture/flat in animation
4 bytes	Animation speed, number of frames between animation changes (little-endian)