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. 

you need to copy and paste line 527 so we can see what's wrong with it. 

that is to say, in the .map file. 

can't whenever i try to buld it cancels the build with the error. 

you need to open the .map file in a text editor that displays line numbers (such as TextPad) and find line 527. 

you can open the .map file in a text editor (eg. notepad); i believe this is what necros and willem are referring to. you will see blocks of text that look a little something like:

{
( -2608 -520 640 ) ( -2608 -520 704 ) ( -2608 -608 704 ) wizmet1_2 0 0 0 1.000000 1.000000
(some more lines like the above)
}

each chunk between the squiggly brackets is a brush and each line is a face. so whatever is on line 527 will be the problematic face 

..which is basically what kinn said. crosspost :| 

have been super helpful for me in the past.