Nice polygon builder plugin, rather.

I agree that different circles have their uses. In arches specifically I like to see more than 12 sides to the hypothetical circle though. Personally. 16 work quite well there.

The cylinder you criticized was done for demonstration purposes more than anything, that's just how it came out of the polygon builder. I agree that it doesn't look so good. 16 sided circles do normally look good, but the proportions are wrong on that one. 

I know this is supposed to be an error that occurs when you have surfaces in your level with textures that are hugely stretched (over 10x)... the biggest that I have in this map is 4x though... anyone know any other causes for this? 

run bspinfo - how many vertexes and clipnodes do you have? How many marksurfaces? Anything over 65000? 

Inspect the area around the coordinates the compiler gives you and try to narrow it down to a number of brushes. It could be a back face somewhere that got stretched by accident. It seems kind of strange that a huge texture scale can cause problems (too small is another thing) - I presume this is only the case when one axis is stretched a lot while is other isn't.

If it was caused by vertexes, qbsp should have displayed a warning about the limit being exceeded.


On a completely unrelated note, can anyone check if boss2\death.wav is looped? 

to the most recent quoth .fgd? 

i've gotten this sometimes, i think, with hugely large brushes. 

brushes stretched beyond normal sized, like 999999 wide or something, usually from an editor malfunction. 

Is where its at. I've experimented some, but I'm not that good at the math and also haven't put together any type of tutorial to the effect.

The best I've seen recently was made by Rj - I trisoup double helix spiraling down as a lift shaft. It's an unreleased map and could arguably have been done with a texture, but was one of those things you see as a mapper and have to appreciate the time it must have take.

For a really good example of curve brushwork (the best I've seen personally) look at SPoG's spogsp1 for Quake2 - there's all sorts of amazing brushwork in that.

No link, sorry. 

fun fact... the dam in rub2m1 is based on a 48-sided cylinder. 

I was suitably impressed. That was some impressive brushwork. 

Spog is a wizard. 

I was actually wondering how the dam was created with such a smooth, natural curve when I first played that map, and knowing the method it was based on now, it makes a lot of sense. Nice. 

if boss2\death.wav is looped?

CoolEdit tells not. 

I had an issue where it wouldn't stop looping. Which is even more incomprehendable now. Fortunately I could work around it. 

The best I've seen recently was made by Rj - I trisoup double helix spiraling down as a lift shaft. It's an unreleased map and could arguably have been done with a texture, but was one of those things you see as a mapper and have to appreciate the time it must have taken.

shame it got ruined by those hundreds of ugly lighting triangles!! 

ugly lighting triangles!!

i HATE those! 

What'd be the solution?

Just increasing the lightmap texture size? 

By slightly increasing the texure scale on it or changing the offset. If necessary split the face half manually and change one half of it.

I hate those too. Fixing them is annoying and time-consuming. 

How were the support beams underneath the walkway created? As seen in this screenshot.

I've tried making beams extruding from the middle of curved corners before, but when working with angles that are anything other than 45 degrees and using vertex manipulation, I find it impossible to maintain the correct width and angle of the brush according to the curves, and rotating it just makes it go off grid. Something like this is what I've attempted to create with no luck.

And how about the sloped curves going along the side of the dam? I checked out the map source and they fit the curve of the dam perfectly while having an angled slope, but when I've attempted this I always get invalid brushes and have to cut each brush into two triangles for it to work. Are there any decent tutorials for any of these methods online? Also what editor was used for the map?

Thanks etc 

Mans i need help with quark please :(
It says : Didn't Split The Polygon and Build Failed :( please :(:(:( 

here's what i do:

you have two identically ratio'd curves:
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed1.jpg

in radiant, and probably most editors out there, edge selection will show the center of a brush's edge:
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed2.jpg

choose the width of the cross piece you want to add (here, it'll be roughly 32 units)
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed3.jpg

remember to keep in mind that making a diagonal this way makes the brush slightly thinner. however, that's less important than making sure you choose points that line up on the grid:
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed4.jpg

skew your cross piece brush so the side that buts up against your curve is parallel.
use the edge handles to align the centers so that your crosspiece sits in the middle of the brush:
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed5.jpg

now, simply stretch that brush outwards to meet the outer curve, again, using the edge handles to align the crosspiece to the center of the outer curve brush.
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed6.jpg

boom. done.
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/ed7.jpg 

i left the brush offset by 1 unit so you can see the relative positions, obviously in ed7.jpg, i slid the edge back the 1 unit to connect it properly. 

That's quite ingenious. Maybe one of the reasons I haven't been able to do this is because there is no skew function in QuArK as far as I know. Maybe I should just switch to radiant or something... 

if you're working with 12 sided curves, it makes things much easier too, because you know that every 1/4 ratio'd vertex will be on the grid, so you have a lot of selection when it comes to deciding where you want to place the crosspiece corners and then the middle bit of the curve that's on 45 degrees is of course simple, because the whole edge is on the grid. 

Yeah I figured, been using mostly 12 sided curves throughout my map. As I mentioned I've had to cut slopes into two triangles if I want to place them alongside a curve, otherwise this happens when using vertex manipulation in QuArK: from this to this. I imagine being able to use the skew tool would circumvent this as I've seen sloped curves that are a single brush and not cut in two, again using the dam as an example.

Could you confirm if this works in radiant? If so I'll just switch over immediately as it would make working with such architecture a hell of a lot easier, and QuArK has a few annoying quirks and bugs anyway. Also, how good is WC for mapping with Quake and advanced brushwork vs radiant?