"Basically, I'm trying to figure out why the only ambient sound in my map is from the sky. There's no water or lava noise. I think this is caused by the texture names I used."

That's the cause of that problem. Water, slime and lava texture names have to be the same as the originals (including any numbers such as *water04). Using any other name (say, *water07) will still get you all of the physical properties of the liquid (swimming, drowning, and fullbrights in that example. Replace *water with *slime07 or *lava07 and you will get those physical properties instead) but the sounds won't get cached because the engine wasn't told to look for them because the texture name didn't match the correct parameters.

This "Can" work in your favor if you have a secret that has water but you don't want the water ambiance noise to give it away because you have a different clue leading to the secret for the player to find instead 

I was guessing that was the problem with the lack of ambient sounds. I'm using *lavakell and a *rk_water that I made.

I guess I'll extract all the textures I'm using and put them in a special wish13.wad so that I can rename the custom lava and water to match the original id texture names. 

http://celephais.net/stuff/texturefaq.htm

your *lavaXXXX should work, but the water needs an name that starts with "*water" or "*04water"

But, isn't there an engine bug where either slime or lava don't generate ambients at all? my memory is fuzzy. 

Before I was definitely getting no lava or water sound. I've renamed *lavakell to *lava1 and *rk_water to *water1.

I now get sounds but it seems to be the same sound everywhere (still using -noambientsky).

Does water and lava use the same noise? Maybe because I didn't do a full vis the game just thinks I can see water everywhere and there's no lava sound at all. I'm doing a full vis now just to find out. 

Seems like you were right, there is no lava sound at all. Water and sky seem to be working okay.

Just realized my trick of using sky brushes to hold the lights and seal behind func_wall windows is a problem because I can hear the sky noise everywhere I did that, even though there is actually no sky visible to the player in those areas. 

IIRC, vis is what adds the liquid ambients to the map, as the engine uses the portal information to determine if you should be able to hear 

Is there a way to increase a spotlight's fov just like the one that was used in Backstiengotic?
(I'm using trenchbroom BTW) 

In Backstiengotic, is it possible to make a built in skill selection part that changes the player's starting point when triggered? 

Not real sure what you mean by fov, but if you mean how wide the spotlight's beam is you just need to set the angle key/value. There isn't one by default and I don't know how or if you can add one in Trenchbroom. I think the default is some thing like 25 or 30 (degrees). 

http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/tooltips.txt

It explains it all, but is mostly focused on bug fixing. There's a light section in there that explains the values and how to use them. 

Quake Lighting Basics by necros


http://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/guides/lighting-basics 

I might try that. 

Tronyn snuck another 2PSB map past my filters so I updated the BSP2 page at https://www.quaddicted.com/tools/bsp2_format 

What is the best way to compile a map with the newest MacOS? I'm using trenchbroom to make levels and it says there are compilers built in but I don't see any way to actually use them, which I don't understand. 

built into TrenchBroom (unless you're using the very old version which I released for Mac OS only about two years ago). You need to download the binaries yourself, for example from here: http://disenchant.net/utils/

Then you need to figure out the command line parameters (see the manuals in the downloaded zip file) and call them from your terminal in the correct location. 

Use necros compiling tools.

http://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/ne_q1spcompilinggui-update-1-0-1-and-quake-stuff/

It will make your life a whole lot easier. 

Here's a tutorial on how to do the initial set up, once it's up and running you'll be flying.

http://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/ne_q1spcompilinggui/ 

I believe that those are for Windows and not Mac. 

Did he say mac? I wasn't paying attention at all. 

Does anyone have tips for defeating the unsigned short integer limit of 65535 faces or verts in a bsp file?

I currently have in Worldcraft map info:
Solids: 14828
Faces: 90024
etc.

This number will probably reach around 150000 faces as I finish the map (I'm about 70% done). I have not compiled in over 10 months as it would probably take that long for vis to finish. Is it possible that I could still compile and beat the limit? I would like to stay within BSP if possible and avoid BSP2. 

try tyranns vis 

Tyrann's qbsp never works for me. I just tried his latest version 0.14 and it still crashed.

Most of my brushes are created to break up an otherwise boring wall into interesting textures. I have an idea to create a couple dozen textures for specific walls to be able to make just one brush instead of I dunno 5-10. But that raises this question:

What are the texture limits for standard bsp 29?
# of unique textures?
Max texture size (e.g. 4096x4096)?
# of instances of each texture?

I can't find the limits anywhere. Google has failed me. 

With Tyrann's tools?

I've been using them exclusively so might be able to help. 

Making Textures For Quake

Be careful about the max size, I once made a texture that was 320 units tall and for some reason the alignment was off at the top by a small amount, as if the texture height had been changed by a pixel or two. 

Actually, after reading that page again for probably the 10th time, the following finally sunk in:


OpenGL requires that all textures have dimensions which are powers of two (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.) When GLQuake loads a texture with non-power-of-two dimensions, it resamples it, very poorly, and passes it to OpenGL with power-of-two dimensions. So it's a good idea to make your texture dimensions powers of 2 to begin with, to avoid ugly resampling.


Guess what? 320 is not a power-of-two. Duh.

I was probably a victim of the poor resampling.