Hey everybody,

I'm having issues using Quake Army Knife. It's giving me an error regarding the palette whenever I try to open a WAD for Quake 1, and says that it could not find the palette.lmp file. I don't know exactly how to fix this, but all the textures are unreadable until I do. If anybody could help me figure out how to fix this, that would be great! thanks! 

Sounds like Quark cannot find/read your id1/pak0.pak So check your paths.

Maybe you are using the wrong version of the proggie? IIRC you need a specific version to use it with Quake 1. 

yeah, the only thing you should need to do is set the path for Quake 1. Similar to this screenshot except Q1 instead of Q2: http://quark.sourceforge.net/infobase/intro.configuration.games.specificgames.html

once the game path is set correctly, the texture browser should automatically load all of the textures from the base game. 

Custom Quake 1 Model Doesn’t Show Up Correctly. [EDIT]
Posted by Rizzoislandgame [204.96.25.221] on 2017/09/23 21:47:56
First post yay!

Anyways, I put a static model into the game and no matter how many times I try to make the texture work it has 1 side that shows up, but the other side is completely black. I used blender, used the Smart UV map creator function, used gimp to make the texture, and exported using a MDL plugin for blender. It just doesn’t want to display correctly! I’m at work right now so I can’t post pics, but if it’s necessary to show them I’ll get them out tomorrow. 1 more thing, I made sure the texture was compatible with the quake palette.

Thank you! 

One thing that can ruin your day with skins (especially placeholder skins) is the floor fill feature. Some engines attempt to replace the bright blue background some original Quake models had on their skins, because it looks ugly when seams show. They do this by flood-filling the skin with black, starting from the top left corner of the skin.

This can wipe out actual visible portions of the skin if they are painted with a continuous block of colour which extends to the top-left corner. A reasonable workaround is to paint just the top left pixel in a different colour to the adjacent pixels, so that the flood fill is contained. 

Thanks man! I’ll try that! 

I assume the color has to be on the palette.imp right? 

That's right. Incidentally, what tools are you using to make the model? Most of them enforce that palette thing for you... 

I’m using Blender with the MDL exporter, Gimp to edit textures and I export them to 100% quality, import into TexMex, reverse it for export, export it to TGA, drag it onto the blender model, then export it. I, however, use Pedit to make custom palettes for my maps. I can import the .pal into texmex to convert it. Does the blender MDL exporter also convert textures? 

I think the blender exporter must at least perform some pallete conversion. I've always used Preach's utility to add skins after the fact since the exporter can only handle one. I thought they needed to be .pcx to work right though. 

Is there a way to do Half-Life style level transitions? Presumably with some specific engine or mod required, of course. 

As far as I know, there are no mods for Half Life style transitions. You might be able to use some QuakeC code to make it yourself, but it would be kinda tricky and require mathematical calculations to compare the previous level to the new Level. 

The blender plugin does some least-squares mapping of RGB colours to the quake palette. For a good quality skin you want to do the conversion beforehand, so you can can consider options like dithering, or even manual pixel pushing. But for just testing out a model it should be fine.

I'd recommend grabbing a copy of QME (Quake Model Editor) - that way you can open up the exported .mdl file without needing to boot up the game, and play around with a native editor if you are having problems with an export. Again I'd recommend using it for development, but not the final version, as it doesn't handle models made by the blender plugin well. It's nice to be able to paint the skin in a 3d view. 

To program this yourself you would need the following:

info_landmark entity present in both maps.
trigger_changelevel, probably with a string .landmark with the targetname of your landmark.

Inside the changelevel use function:
Calculate x,y, and z distance of the player from the info_landmark.

Put all 3 distance values into empty parms in your mod such as parm9, parm10, and parm11.

Set a bit inside one of the parms to 1 to indicate level entry point 1 instead of standard start.

In DecodeLevelParms inside client.qc, check if the bit is 1, if so set the player's starting origin to info_landmark's origin plus the offsets from the landmark stored in parm9, parm8, etc.

Downsides:
You only get so many parms for storing values in between levels such as health, ammo, runes, and weapons. This means that corpse remembrance is impossible. You could set a .deadiflandmark value on monsters set to 1 if you want them to be gone when the player returns to that same level again amd check for the same bit you did in DecodeParms and remove (self). So corpses would be gone then

Coop requires you to add some sort of info_playerstart_coop2, 3, 4 for coop players to start near the right landmark depending on how many different entrances and exits you want. You will of course need selarate bits for landmark1,2,3, etc. to check for in DecodeLevelParms instead of just one. 

Sorry that was for Keiya 

It is so weird i have to tell it to someone, and to booth it happened two times. I'm tempted to put it on the drunk thread due to its weirdness.

To summarize, out of nowhere Hammer has deleted all the ''color'' keys from all the lights in a single map, after having put them several days ago, and had worked on the map and compiled it a lot these last days.

It reminds me of the Witchcraft (named by RikyT23 that way if i remember well) that i reported some years ago. http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=12855&end=12866 and http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=14183&end=14186

Now back to put the keys back on around 350 lights ... and hope it doesn't happen again ... 

Hammer can "lose" stuff if you try to open an rmf and save as a vmf and then later open the rmf again by mistake.

JACK can "lose" stuff if you try to open a vmf or rmf and save as a jmf and then later open the vmf by mistake.

You're SOL if you accidentally then saved over your jmf with the old vmf...unless you happen to have your autosave feature turned on in which case check the back ups to see if they still have color. 

As it happens while i am working and not after opening. I know about .vmf files but never cared enough to find what they do throughly, and never used them. Also i have checked, and Hammer doesn't have the option to only save to .vmf (only to only .map and .dxf) and it does it automatically for all the formats at once, or at least with Baker's Qadapter on.

Truth to be told i have a suspect: the only new thing i have done between the two keys' deletes is test the Ignore Groups option, which in Hammer and in Jack probably too gives lots of problems. For example:
- If i select any or all brushes of a brush entity with IG on and edit them in any way, the entire entity can go back to the original world brushes, which can happen too if i try to clone parts or the whole of it.
- Same happens when editing with IG on a group with any world entities in.

Apart from that, my suspicions come from:
- Why it affected only the color keys i suspect is because it is the only key i manually inputed and is not on the .fgd on this map
- Most of the lights where grouped each with a box made out of world and entity brushes.
- After all this weird behavior when editing entities with IG on i stopped completely using it for entities or groups with entities till i edited the alignment of the textures of all the brushes of a entity brush thinking that it wouldn't trigger the bug and a few minutes after that i noticed that the color keys dissapeared.
- What i don't get is why it affected all the lights, grouped or not. My supposition is that it messed with all the entities at the same time and it has to do with the .fgd reason. 

how do i put down blood decals, i think i saw one in map jam 9 there was a death knight body with a blood decal i was wondering how i do it myself 

It might be a {fence texture on a func_illusionary that's one unit tall and textured with skip on the sides.

It might just be a texture that has blood splats on it.

It might be a func_illusionary with a self.model of "progs/s_blood.spr", but I doubt it since it would have to be precached. Not sure, but .angles would also need to be something like '0 0 90'. 

if I were to import my own blood decal, would it get stored in the map file when it compiles, i would really prefer to keep my map releases as a single file. 

If you use colored lights you will have a .lit file next to your map in the maps folder. FYI. If your stain map is a "fence" texture then yes you "bake" it into the bsp file.