Texture prefixes

WAD textures do not have any metadata for special textures. Instead, the first few characters in the texture's name are used to dictate what the texture is used for. Some prefixes also affect brush contents; mixing contents will result in compile errors.

Prefix	Texture type	Contents	Description
{	Alphatest	Default (CONTENTS_SOLID)	Texels using the last index in the palette (index 255) will be treated as pure black with an alpha channel value of zero. If tied to an entity with a rendermode other than 0, said texels will be transparent.
!	Liquid (water)	CONTENTS_WATER	A liquid, usually water. The face will be drawn with ripples in the software renderer or waves in the OpenGL renderer. If part of worldspawn, it will be swimmable. If tied to an entity, only the top face will be drawn. Workaround:If the liquid brush doesn't need to move, use an entity that supports the angles KV, such as func_door_rotating. You will need one entity for each rendered face. Palette index 3 is used to control fog color, and the red value of palette index 4 is used to control fog thickness (with 255 being maximum fog). Bug:Liquids are always fullbright in the vanilla renders, but most compilers still generate lightmaps for them anyway, due to expecting Quake's prefix of * instead. This will not affect the engine's allocblock limit, as they aren't actually loaded[confirm]. Tip:If there is a significant amount of water in a map, the BSP size can be reduced by flagging the water surfaces as "special" in newbspguy, then recompiling RAD. Alternatively, use ericw-tools and add _splitturb 0 to worldspawn. For func_water, VHLT's zhlt_striprad can be used.
!slime	Slime	CONTENTS_SLIME	Like water, deals damage to the player and some monsters when touched (if part of worldspawn).
!lava	Lava	CONTENTS_LAVA	Like slime, but deals double the damage (if part of worldspawn).
!cur_0	0° current	CONTENTS_CURRENT_0	Acts like water combined with a trigger_push with a speed of 2048 in the given direction (if part of worldspawn).
!cur_90	90° current	CONTENTS_CURRENT_90
!cur_180	180° current	CONTENTS_CURRENT_180
!cur_270	270° current	CONTENTS_CURRENT_270
!cur_up	Upwards current	CONTENTS_CURRENT_UP
!cur_dwn	Downwards current	CONTENTS_CURRENT_DOWN
+0 to +9	Animated/Toggled	Default (CONTENTS_SOLID)	Plays all textures in this set in sequence (at roughly 10 FPS). If tied to certain entities, such as func_wall or func_button, the sequence will toggle between numeric and alphabetic when the entity is targeted.
+A to +J
-0 to -9	Random tiling		Each time the map loads, the engine will randomly assign one of the textures in this set to each appropriate surface. In software mode, the texture changes at the edges of the texture, whereas in OpenGL mode, the texture changes at the edges of the geometry it sits on. Tip:This feature does not work well on surfaces which are not 240x240 texel quads. Consider combining the variations into a larger megatexture instead.
@	Nonsolid visblocker	CONTENTS_TRANSLUCENT	Non-solid, but still blocks VIS. Does not have backface culling.
scroll	Scrolling	Default (CONTENTS_SOLID)	Scrolls horizontally based upon func_conveyor speed or other entities' rendercolor
sky	Sky	CONTENTS_SKY	Not drawn in-game, but tells the engine to render the skybox behind all geometry in the current PVS. Bug:In OpenGL mode's non-multitextured renderer, rendering bugs occur when using multiple sky textures.
xeno_grapple_	Grapple point	Default (CONTENTS_SOLID)	Textures with this prefix can be hooked onto with weapon_grapple
~	Self-illuminated (has fullbrights)		Deprecated:Support removed before release; only functional in Half-Life Alpha 0.52's software renderer. Nonetheless, many of the vanilla base game textures are still properly formatted for this feature. The last 32 colors in the palette are supposed to always be rendered at full brightness, regardless of lightmap brightness and rendermode. Unlike other prefixes, this prefix can be used in conjunction with the animated/toggled texture prefix (ex +0~).
__rad	Generated by HLRAD		Textures generated for brush entities using VHLT's zhlt_embedlightmap feature are given this prefix.

See also

• Tool textures (GoldSrc)