http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa373208(v=vs.85).aspx 

anyone know some things that might cause bsp to go totally bananas?

In this shot, it decided to cut a series of thin bands right through the map (this craziness slices through the entire map, even into areas that are not (yet) spatially connected:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Quake%20Stuff/bananas1.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Quake%20Stuff/bananas2.jpg

It's not due to that light fixture, 'cause I func'ed it and the issue was still there.

Here's an area where it decided to subdiv these bars for no reason:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Quake%20Stuff/bananas3.jpg

Anyway, there's shit like this everywhere in the map. 

Take stuff kut of the map systematically and see if it goes away. Maybe there's a fucked up brush somewhere or something. 

i have seen that; often it appears in a leaky map and the problem goes away if the map is sealed. If your map is already sealed then i don't know what will help, but it might fix it self later from geo changes in neighboring areas. 

try rebuilding a few brushes in that area? but yeah, not much else you can do. qbsp will even cut up stuff that's already in triangles and smaller than 480 units (i think 480? that's supposed to be the max face size). 

See a couple of posts above.
It doesn't make any sense - seems to be some inexplicable qbsp hiccough. Though maybe BJP could explain. The weird thing is that in most cases no direct modification will get rid of it, like upscaling the texture, trisouping the brushes, and so on. Sometimes it just goes away as you add more stuff like metl said, sometimes even if you make a seemingly unrelated change elsewhere. You can try moving the whole structure 64 units to the front so as to 'hide' the random splits. This sometimes works, but it's a surrender. 

i have seen that; often it appears in a leaky map and the problem goes away if the map is sealed.

Might be that actually :} *blushes* - i'll have a go sealing it and let you know 

necros: max face size is 240 for software quake. 

heh, was 2x off :D 

Why 240 and not 256? 

binary is too mainstream.

Anyway - cheers guys, the problem actually went away when i transfered a whopping great section to another map. Also I realise I should probably not pay too much attention to bsp's vagarities whilst dealing with an unsealed map :} 

it's 240 because the max lightmap size is 16x16 samples, and lightmaps don't repeat like normal textures, so you can only interpolate between samples (imagine 16 fenceposts spaced one every meter -- your fence would only be 15 meters long.)

So you have 15 "segments", and in quake the lightmap samples are one per 16 pixels on the texture, so if your texture scale is 1.00, that's 15 x 16 = 240 units.

(someone who has actually read/written lightmap code please verify or correct me on all of this.) 

 

I have an explosion that the player sees from a way off and the standard sprite is not visually effective from this distance. Does anyone know of a bigger exposion sprite? (I don't have the tools to manipulate sprites) 

The quake sprite format doesn't allow sprites to be larger than a certain size, although I can't remember what that size is, but i think it's still fairly small.

If you need the explosion to be impressive from a fair distance, some sort of "firework display" made of lots of explosions might be in order. 

http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/explosions.zip

bigexp.spr is a larger explosion sprite from descent
draflam2.spr is a gigantic explosion sprite from freespace (needs to run at 20fps, or just skip every other frame) 

That's much better, thanks. 

draflam2 is 256x256 which is a shitload bigger than i thought quake sprites could be. 

I think when sprites exceed the maximum size they end up getting scaled down rather than just rejected or cut off. This is something that fitzquake handles better than the stock engines, in that it would draw the sprite full size instead. 

do you know what that max size is? 

You can always cut it up in four pieces and display them back together. 

It's not an area I know much about, it's just something I've happened upon when trialling tree models for quake. Usually when there's a quake engine mystery like this I take a peek at the source to try and find out what's going on, but the copy I look at is the Fitzquake source, which we know behaves differently in this case. 

D:\Program Files\Quake\hipnotic> "D:\Program Files\Quake\Qbsp.exe" maps\a_kvss.m
ap

TreeQBSP v2.05 -- Modified by Bengt Jardrup

Input file: maps\a_kvss.map
Output file: maps\a_kvss.bsp
---- LoadMapFile ----
*** ERROR 03: Line 527: Invalid brush plane format

Elapsed time : 0:00

Peak memory used : 0.5 MB

!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!
Build failed, because it did not create the (+BSP) file: D:\Program Files\Quake\
hipnotic\.\maps\a_kvss.BSP
Build failed, because it did not create the (+PRT) file: D:\Program Files\Quake\
hipnotic\.\maps\a_kvss.PRT

using Quark with enhanced build tools. 

And what does line 527 look like? 

it's a QBSP error whenever i try to build the map.