seems to be pretty shitty as a level editor. Who uses it? Madfox, trinca -- who else? 

JPL, too... Bring on the inquisition!

It seems it's a matter of proper configuring. The established Quark users here seem to have no problem with floats. So it's probably some bad default setting.

Most editors have a snap-to-grid function. This should take care of these things in one quick swipe - selecting the whole map and snap. Though there's still a small change some vertices might snap wrong and invalidate the whole brush. 

Quark is the most user friendly and feature rich editor out there. Period.

It fails sometimes on non-cubic brushes though. It is also rather slow and Windows only. 

I actually think it's a pretty good editor with a pleasant and user-friendly interface, and the tree-view is very handy, but because of some annoying quirks I'm contemplating on switching. Tried out WC with the Quake adapter but because of an extremely finicky setup (like needing Quake installed on the c: drive and I already have it installed on d:), I'm gonna try out radiant. Shame though, as the skew/vertex manipulation features are quite easy to handle in WC.

...although I still couldn't bloody figure out how to create those support beam things along a many-sided curve with correct width and perspective, the brushes always end up slightly disproportional and with an odd angle, even when using skew. It's fine and dandy when only working with 12-sided cylinders, but from 16+ it starts getting problematic. 

All right, I finally figured out how to skew with QuArK, but how the hell do you skew a single brush? The bounding box with the middle selection handles that allows you to skew (like in this screenshot MadFox posted only appears when selecting multiple brushes. 

Worldcraft I mean. It's not a difficult editor to set up. I deleted the prgram All_wads_To_HLWads.exe in favour of using TexMex to convert wads to Half-Life format. It's worth downloading the Hammer 3.5 executable, and dropping that in place of the Worldcraft .exe.

But as much as the QuakeAdapter makes it easy, fast and convenient to get you started, there is nothing stopping you from running Worldcraft from any DIR. You can easily configure it, and although I'm sure at the time Quakeadapter was put together it's compilers were the best current compilers - well, they aren't anymore. I have long since replaced them with better compilers (with the exception of TXQBSP which is *THE* best compiler. evar.)

I compile my maps from the command prompt anyway. Worldcraft gives the full location of the wad files in the .map file header too, so you can export your .map file to anywhere on your HDD and compile it from there, and as long as you leave your wads where they were when you were building your map, the compiler will find them.

If I were you, I would try running Worldcraft again.....

And there's always .BSP editor........ 

would copy pasting the same brush twice at the same spot, skewing and then deleting the spare work? 

Still didn't make it much easier to work with though unfortunately, as when I'm dragging vertices in one view the editor always seems to compensate for it, like here where I tried to align the vertices along the curve in the top view and the lower edge got dragged downwards. That was just an example image that I threw together to show what happens and not a serious attempt at creating a curve, but this is what happens no matter what I try, and skew didn't seem to work around this either. Oh well, time to try out WC again then I guess, where this is unproblematic... 

I think Quark is also a great editor, but has some purposely corrupt coding is in the export to .map - This problem is easy to solve with copy and paste. The arches in func_city_04-13-11 are set at 2 unit resolution, something trinca said he avoided. On export, Quark goes through "extra software mutilation code" to get to it's .map file.

So forget the float precision, Quark doesn't even let you get 2 unit precision on angled brushes. 

I work with Quark since it was an early Qmap version in the late 98, so I'm very contributed to it. Skewing with one brush only goes by setting angle of a brushside.
But then you miss gridclipping of course.

My simple outcome is when I make a map In Quark with complicated brushes the leak error grows.
When I import the same map into WC1.6 and it compiles well with the same compilers it reduces Quark in compare to the WC1.6.

I'm doing with QRadiant and it is a RTFM job to get familiar with.
My interest grow to BSP which has an update to 96, since I learned to know it in QBSP94b. 

sorry i didn't reply earlier, but it appears necros did a pretty good job of explaining everything you asked. 

Yeah necros got me on the right path (thanks again), just fiddling around with different techniques at the moment.

Also got Hammer 3.5 to work with Quake, had no idea it was even compatible, so thanks for the tip Ricky! Although I did encounter something strange... made a test map, saved as .map and it compiled fine, closed the editor and later when I opened the map again it was completely empty. I guess it's not much of a problem as I can save as .rmf just fine, just found it a bit odd.

And bear with me here, but how do you make the extra parameters for the compile tools work in Hammer? In the advanced compile menu I wrote "-soft -extra 4 -gate1" without the quotes as a parameter for $light_exe, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Light 1.43 by Bengt Jardrup. 

I would keep to using the .rmf format rather than the .map format. The .rmf contains a lot more data than is outputted into the .map file, like vis-groups for example, as well as containing the extra texture information generated by the valve 220 protocol. This is a pain if you plan on using other editors to make your map, because the data seems to corrupt when loaded into editors which dont support the 220 protocol.
The good thing is that the Hammer editor's texture lock feature works really well - you can really speed up texture alignment because of it because you can clip, copy, paste and most importantly rotate as much as you like, and the textures stay aligned. 

You have to press F9 to compile your map from the editor, and that is where you add your commands. You have to press F9 then click on the button "expert". 

Didn't get around to trying this out before now, but yes, apparently putting the commands inside quotes work. At least, the compiler seems to recognize the parameters "-extra4" and "-etp" as "Extra 4x4 sampling enabled
Enhanced Texture Positioning enabled" appeared in the compile process window, but "-soft 1" and "-gate 1" gave an "unknown option" error for some reason.

Also it didn't seem to make any difference whether I compiled with these parameters or not, here's two comparison shots from compiling with and without:

http://i.imgur.com/IlsWS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/36dNX.jpg 

try compiling from batch files/command prompt, or try my ne_q1spcompiler thing.
i seem to recall running the compilers in the editor console wasn't good for some reason. maybe someone can confirm/refute? 

I think the options are -soft1 and -gate1. 

Your compiler thing did the trick necros, that's quite a nifty tool you got there! Though I noticed I couldn't choose a map saved as .rmf to compile, and due to the oddity of maps saved as .map in Hammer turning up empty, I'm thinking it wouldn't be a problem if I just save the map (from .rmf) as .map when I'm ready to compile? Or would crucial information stored in the .rmf get lost?

jt_, soft1 and gate1 also gave the "unknown option" error. Guess the in-editor compiler isn't all that.

Also, while I'm at it - know if it's possible to list textures after which wad it appears in with Hammer, like with QuArK? At the moment every texture (1000+) from all the wads I've imported appear at once in the texture browser, which makes it quite tedious to find whatever I'm looking for. 

no, -soft # and -gate # are the correct syntax.

as for textures, hammer has a filter where you can type in to just show textures with that string.
you could rename all your textures from one wad with a prefix of some kind?
i don't know much on that score-- hl2 has the filters all set up via scripts as well as filename. so you type c17 and you get all the downtown textures. 

Yeah I tried adding a suffix to all the textures so I could just type in the suffix and sort them that way, but I'd have to search and replace each texture I've already used in my map with the renamed ones, which I haven't been arsed to do yet. Eh, I'll probably work it out. 

there's a program out there that, i think, will batch import tgas into a wad. you could extract the wad, use a batch file renamer (google) then use the batch wad importer. i think baker made it? i just remember seeing it a while ago somewhere, probably i3d. 

Yes - work in .rmf format, save in .rmf format. When you want to compile, export to .map and compile. 

What is it that scrags are such fucking divas when it comes to the simple task of flying into a teleporter towards the player??? 

negke what is your problem specifically? 

They are awake and fly back and forth in their closets but they carefully avoid the (touchable) teleport trigger most of the time. And then, when it's too late, they sometimes all teleport in at once.