someone at Valve also had a terrible idea

what NO 

Does anyone know if there are any WAD tools for OS X? Want to extract a WAD from a BSP, maybe make my own WADS, etc. Or am I being ridiculously optimistic and should just fire up a virtual machine? 

will do the trick for extracting a wad from a bsp:
"bsputils --extract-textures e1m1.bsp"
(from http://disenchant.net/utils/ )

for other things, I just use wine for OS X (http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/) 

many thanks ericw, just what I needed 

Anyone know of some particularly useful/interesting/advanced/silly/stupid bsp tuts?

domes, concave semi-cirles, anything not exclusively right angles, rules-of-thumb for unusual multi-faced polygons, etc...

I can already hear the cacophonous chant "just use meshes!"

but yeah, bsp stuff plz :) 

 

...but looking now 

Very valuable resource for beginners; I always refer to it when I map ... err, I mean when I incompetently mess around with TB. (Not sure how useful it would be for you, KillPixel, seeing as the finished parts of kpcn2014 are better than anything I could hope to complete in this lifetime.)

But for other newbies who may stumble across this thread and have trouble finding the guide in question:
http://www.quaketerminus.com/hosted/happymaps/curv_tut.htm 

 

CZG's tut is nice but making those pipes in TB isn't too easy IMO, I end up doing a lot of vertex work instead. 

yeah, the tutorial is based on having a specific skewing mode in WC which surprisingly does not get replicated in a lot of other editors.
specifically, this skewing mode will rescale all brushes in the selection. 

I expect you could get similar results by rotating and clipping maybe. I don't tend to do pipes too often. 

@total_newbie - Thanks for the link, and I have seen that tut before. Also, that's very flattering (really), but I have difficulty believing you couldn't do something just as nifty, or even more so ;)

Anyway, ANY bsp tuts would be nice at this point. I feel like maybe I missed some fundamental technique or understanding that could be making my life a lot easier...

My mind is not very mathematically oriented and texture projection is kind of a headache for me. I'd like some formula to use when figuring texture size for angled surfaces. I think for a 45 degree angle the texture sure be like 33% bigger and fitted so there is no visible 'stretching'.

That ease of vert manipulation in that tut doesn't seem possible in radiant, or is it? 

Just use Jackhammer or something that has automatic texture alignment. 

it's the best editor out there. In terms of alignment I rough out most of my geometry whilst having texture lock OFF. That way your textures are aligned by TB default (and faces will be cut properly). The only time you will be doing a lot of texture aligning is when you add in details, and most of this work can be shortened by building prefabs.
I have prefabs for pretty much all texture themes now, building maps is fairly rudimentary. 

I'm talking about texture 'stretching' on angled surfaces as a result of texture projection. AFAIK this is something an editor can't 'fix'.

I'm pretty sure the only way around it is by making a texture a certain percent longer/wider, that percentage is determined by the angle of the surface. Maybe I'm wrong, was hoping someone knew more about this and could clearify. 

if you don't wanna use jackhammer you can figure out the stretch ratios with some simple trig. 

You can also use the face editing mode in Jackhammer to align one face to the edge of another. It compensates for skewing and angles and all that jazz so it looks crisp and perfect. 

i'll check out jackhammer 

or you could just reduce horizontal scaling.
on 45 degree angles, I usually reduce to 0.75 which seems to look right. There's probably a mathy way to get the exact number, but I just tend to wing stuff like that. 

The correct value can be computed using pythagoras' theorem - on a 1:1 ratio triangle 1� + 1� = 2, so the 45 degree side is longer by a factor of sqrt(2).

1/sqrt(2) = 0.707...

That gives you more accurate matching of pixel density, but 0.75 is probably preferable as it will tile better: 3 texture widths on the orthogonal axes will make exactly 4 on the diagonal.

One more worked example: on a 1:2 slope we get 1� + 2� = 5, so the side is sqrt(5) times longer than the shortest side. However, we need to find the ratio of the longer side to this value, because orthogonal projection starts on the longest side.

2/sqrt(5) = 0.894

0.875 is an interesting choice of approximation here, 7 tiling-widths of the texture on the long axis would give exactly 8 repetitions on the slope. Also 0.9 is an option, where 9 tiling-widths gets you 10 repetitions, and standard texture scale isn't a bad approximation either.. 

Or ALT+R_CLICK in Jackhammer. :P 

Thanks for the maths Preach! I just wing it but that takes so much time.
So used to radiant now, WC editors seem so clunky in comparison. 

yeah, ~0.71 is correct but 0.75 is what i use because if you do a standard 12-sided cylinder, the straight sides are 4:0 and the angled sides are 3:1, that "3" means a 0.75 scale will fit perfectly. 

Use the 'fit' tool in Radiant. I've only recently started using it (with my Q3 map), and I've learned to really love it.

Takes a little getting used to, and you still have to input the correct rotation (Arctangent of Rise/Run, ATAN(-1/2) = -26.5... here), but it takes care of the scaling for you!

http://scampie.net/etc/angledtexture.png

Took me 30 seconds to make and align the texture with the fit tool.