[discussion] improved handling of textures and special texture effects

[elf-alchemist]

Textures in Doom are handled via the use of individual "patches" (graphicaal lumps) being listed on a PNAMES binary lump, exposing its indexed list of lump names, which is referenced by TEXTURE1/2 lumps.

While this system can be very useful for deriving new textures from preexisting graphics in an environment with limited storage space (e.g the DOS PCs of yesteryear), their benefit is minimized by the abundant and cheap storage of today.

A new system for simplifying this way of handling textures must be defined to skip the step of adding patches by instead adding graphics directly as textures.

Currently the simplest and most straight-forward way to solve this problem is to add support for the TX_START and TX_END markers, and their respective lump namespace.

TX_START
WALL_101
WALL_102
WALL_103
WALL_104
WALL_105
[...]
TX_END

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Another related issue, is the limitations of the SWITCHES and ANIMATED lumps. As they only allow for new SwAn entries that are otherwise identical to the vanilla behavior.

Defining a new lump (or an improvement to the current lumps) would be needed to add more room for possible new customization features, e.g (mod-defined) different sounds being played on a given switch texture, swirling effects for flats, or other possible changes.