                      _____ _       ___ ______ _____  ____
                     /  ___| |     / _ \|  _  \  ___||__ /
                     \ `--.| |    / /_\ \ | | | |__   |_ \
                      `--. \ |    |  _  | | | |  __| |___/
                     /\__/ / |____| | | | |/ /| |___
                     \____/\_____/\_| |_/___/ \____/
                             - It's a Doom Editor -


                               -- ABOUT SLADE3 --
SLADE3 is a modern editor for Doom-engine based games and source ports. It has
the ability to view, modify, and write many different game-specific formats, and
even convert between some of them, or from/to other generic formats such as PNG.

SLADE3 can be considered a successor to both SLumpEd and SLADE - it combines the
features of both, to create an all-in-one editor. Why does it keep the name of
what was previously just a map editor? Because it fits :)

In the current version, the map editor is not yet implemented, but this is
fully planned for 3.1 and work will be commencing on it shortly, which hopefully
won't take anywhere near as long as 3.0 did to develop.


                                 -- HISTORY --
SLADE originally started out as an experimental map editor, based mostly on the
oldschool Doom map editor DEU, but with many modern features thrown in, such as
a 3d preview and line drawing. Over the years, it morphed from its original
command line interface to a more modern looking GTK version, and finally a
wxWidgets version that went all the way up to v2.0 beta1. During its lifetime it
has been rewritten from scratch many times (and version 3 is no exception).

SLumpEd, on the other hand, originally started out as a wad/lump editor written
in Visual Basic, called SWad. After discovering the (relative) wonders of
wxWidgets, I set about to rewrite SWad using wx in c, rather than VB which was
rather slow. And so SLumpEd was born, which saw a relatively short period of
development which brought the last version up to 0.7.

After this, both editors were somewhat abandoned due to a general lack of
interest. But, about a year or so later I decided (yet again) to rebuild SLADE
from the ground up, except this time I'd do something different - combine the
features of both SLumpEd and SLADE. And so now we have SLADE3, which will
hopefully be the last complete rewrite of anything ever.


                                 -- FEATURES --
Here is a brief list of features implemented in the current version of SLADE3:

Basic archive/resource editing:
All the basic resource management features you'd expect: Create/Open/Save
archives, import/export, ordering, rename, etc.

Simple tabbed interface:
Open multiple archives at once and switch between them easily via tabs. This
enables simple copy/paste from one archive to another, among many other
benefits.

Many supported game formats:
In addition to full Doom WAD and ZIP/PK3 support, many other game formats are
supported, including:
- Quake PAK/WAD2 and HUD image format
- Build GRP and ART format images
- Shadowcaster DAT/LIB along with most of its image formats
- Amulets & Armor RES, MipImage and UI gfx
- Many more

Advanced text editor:
The SLADE3 text editor can recognise many text based languages, and provide
syntax hilighting, function calltips and autocomplete for them. It also has
a bunch of other useful text editing features such as autoindent and find /
replace.

Graphic conversion:
All supported graphic formats can be converted to PNG/DoomGfx/DoomFlat and more,
with an advanced graphic conversion dialog that provides conversion options and
previews.

Texture editing:
Edit doom composite textures (TEXTUREx) with the easy-to-use SLADE3 texture
editor.

For a more complete list of features visit the SLADE wiki Features page here:
<http://slade-editor.wikia.com/wiki/Features>


                             -- PLANNED FEATURES --
Here are some of the major features I have planned for future versions of
SLADE3:

- Map editor with features of previous versions of SLADE, and UDMF support
- Advanced archive operations: merging, conversion, cleanup, etc
- Some kind of 'Project' system which abstracts much of the low-level data,
  making development of very large projects less of a headache

For a full list of planned features visit the SLADE wiki Planned Features page
here: <http://slade-editor.wikia.com/wiki/Planned_features>


                                -- DEVELOPERS --
Simon Judd - Project lead, Programming, Artwork
Gez - Programming


							   -- CONTACT INFO --
Preferrably if you have a question, bug report or feature request you should
post it at the forum here: <http://slade.mancubus.net/forum>

I can also be contacted via email <sirjuddington@gmail.com>