thanks for the help/explanations guys, I think I have it solved (am about to test map).
I imagine negke (side note: negke weirdness rules) could do some interesting stuff with invisible movers (although it seems like a func_whatever can't be ONLY clip brushes and has to have some normal brush component). 

I just deleted a giant rant, but if anyone is willing to help me with a map or two, deadline QEXPO 2011, I would really appreciate it. Hell log the hours and I'll pay em back next fall. Once I finish my characteristically-Tronyn-stuff, I'm interested in checking out weirder ideas regarding Q1SP. I've loved the ULTIMATE DOOM ULTRA VIOLENCE view til now, but there are many other views. 

 

I am bad at some things and worse at others ;) 

negke would use skip brushes to define the bounds and go nuts with clips within. Remember, it takes only two tiny brushes to make it work.

negke weirdness 101: clip maze!!!

Tronyn: Yeah, what kind of help are you talking about. I mean, not that I would want to help a RANT DELETER... 

I tried the door setup, but it worked even less. When doors and relays had the same wait/delay, the doors wouldn't move at all, changing delay to 0.2 worked but then the animation wasn't smooth. Or something. Pretty messed up stuff. After three hours I gave up and flagged them out. 

tronyn: email me about whatever and we'll see what's up.

negke:
doors have to have a slightly longer time before the next triggering than their waits. 0.1 is enough i think?
you could try adding more frames (doors) to the animation to get that extra time.
also: MOVING clip maze. ha! 

Maybe Glquake just sucks ass and should have been banned from every computer years ago.. 

to edit finished bsps again? I only need to change a trigger_changelevel. 

extract entities from the bsp (which are in plaintext format), save as a .map, edit the .map, then recompile using -onlyents, and remember to also run light.exe -onlyents so the switchable lights will work 

you can edit the bsp itself with a hex editor, this works as long as the total number of bytes doesn't change. So if you're replacing a string with the same-length string, it would work. 

this does it pretty easily too 

Hindsight protip: Tronyn, load all your maps on all difficulties with developer 1 and fix the items that fall out. With your newly-learned skill "-onlyents". 

i've got a .map file that needs to be edited but it can't be loaded in QE3 (radiant) because the brush lines are incorrect.

i'm guessing this is the WC extended texture alignment stuff. here's what it looks like:
( 472 -504 160 ) ( 472 -424 160 ) ( 472 -472 144 ) WM1_3 [ 0 1 0 0 ] [ 0 0 -1 0 ] 0 1 1

and a normal line should look like this:
( 32 256 0 ) ( -272 256 -16 ) ( 32 256 -16 ) wall9_8 0 0 0 1 1

is there any way to fix this? or will i need to get WC somewhere and do changes in there? (would strongly prefer not to as i have 0 experience in that editor and it would take me 10x as long to do stuff). 

something like replacing
"\[.*\]"
with
"0 0".

And that's why I love the Linux commandline. String manipulation is so incredibly easy.
cat file.map| sed 's/\[.*\]/0 0/' > newfile.map

Going to bed now, could run your file through this in ~10 hours if you want. Alternatively use a good editor like jEdit. 

thanks for reminding me, i had to do something like this before and i already have jEdit!

i'll try out some stuff with it... 

jEdit is crazy good. 

using jEdit to strip out the extended texture info allowed me to open the map in radiant just fine, but is there a way to preserve the texture alignment at all? i think the four number thing is quaternion or something? is there a one to one method of converting that to simple x,y offset?
keep in mind, i don't understand quaternions at all. :S 

Those of you who map on linux, what version of radiant do you use? I've been building netradiant from git, and it's been very unstable (expected, though, it is the git version). The official releases don't see to be much more stable than the git versions. 

I use GTKRadiant 1.5 from svn, and fixed a problem with newer gtk versions manually (popup messages).

Works well enough. 

Do enable autosave, of course. 

Oh also with the svn version you get some useful plugins, like Polygon Builder or whatever its name was. Comes in very handy for rings etc. from brushwork. 

what is the editor more similar to Quark but not so heavy? 

want to map again at work... but quark runs to slow in this new system... need a software that record a map file and quit fast!

in case someone shows up :p 

WORLDCRAFT!!!!

BSP Editor i think Trinca ;)

http://www.bspquakeeditor.com/

Has a lot of cool features, and I think its open sourced and in development still (possibly). I installed it the other day to have a peek, and it looked quite cool :D