I meant more specifically, an uncompressed archive format(.zip) with the same directory structure as .wad files. Then they could be manipulated by the OS natively. Obvious Ex: Q3A's .pk3 It was just a thought I had while reading the comments above my post. 

1- The editor can deal with plain file textures;
2- A little program that packs texture files into a wad, just to feed qbsp. The wad can be deleted afterwards;
3- The engine deals with plain file textures.

It would take changes in the editors we love, like Jackhammer and Trenchbroom and this new compile step before qbsp. 

If you have to make a wad anyway for bsp, what's the point of making the editor and engine read individual texture files? 

There's something else that individual texture files don't have: mipmaps. You probably want these. 

If you're using GL engines you don't need mipmaps, right?

If this wad is made automatically out of your sight during compile process, you don't have to know it even exists and you don't need Wally or TexMex. 

Personally I can only see the point of bypassing the .wad process if you are making your own textures and don't want to keep remaking a .wad every time you add/change/remove a texture. Having an editor and bsp compiler that works with image files directly, not wads, might be a small timesaver/convenience.

But...if you still have to run a tool to generate a .wad before you run bsp.exe, then what do you gain exactly? And again, I dunno why you'd need the engine to read the texture files separately when you are baking them into .bsp? 

You only have to add another command to your automated compiling batch.

I'm pretty sure you can't have a TGA alpha "fence" texture inside BSP. It has to be an external TGA file.

I can provide 24bit versions of my textures in plain files. 

in theory the GL engine could use the mipmaps from the bsp, but in practice most don't, they just recalculate the mipmaps at load time in 32-bit color (which probably gives a better result.) 

If it's really important to you, you could script it all with some commandline tools. Quakeforge for example has uptodate texture tools 

While I can't actually claim I've ever produced anything useful from it, I have had a couple of tries pottering about with a graphics editor called Grafx2. It's designed to work with 8 bit (or fewer) palettes, so all the tools are focused on that kind of work. It has support for different gradients within your palette, and will dither them in a variety of ways. On the downside, it's originally a DOS tool and the interface is still pretty retro, but it's an interesting alternative to a classic photo editing tool. 

At work a couple of years ago, I designed and wrote a bespoke pixel-pushing tool in Unity, for making proper pixel-art 8-bit textures (that use a specific palette with defined gradients and whatnot).

Had some crazy features like painting relief maps, and then lighting them to get realistic highlights and shadows. That was probably a bit OTT, as I found the hand-drawn painterly stuff always had more charm.

A useful feature was the ability to paint on a tiled canvas. Really sucks that you can't do that in photoshop.

At some point I'd like to get permission to release it into the wild. It was PERFECT for quake textures, as I made double sure :} 

You have my permission to release it. Thanks! 

I think I mentioned finding that Grafx2 thing here a year or two ago. I've played around a bit with it, but never tried using it to actually make anything.

I mainly use it as an accessory to look at things such as which colors are actually used in a texture and how many pixels there are of each color used.

The interface is hard to get used to, but it does work. 

To make a new art tool and call it TrenchBrush 

how do I give a static entity a damage exposure? 

you cannot, it is static! 

 

 

Go code! 

...for all the answers to my texture programme question way back in #15383. I guess the discussion has since taken on a life of its own, but I still wanted to say thanks. :) 

forget the static entity, let's say I want to give a place a damage function.
Would a door that's blocked someway, and made invissible be a manner? 

the thing you want is a trigger_hurt

I think 

I'm currently working on a new map, and I keep getting a leak message. When I load the pts in Trenchbroom, the line squiggles all over the level, and is nearly impossible to find where the leak is coming from. I tried zeroing in on the coordinates that the compiler pops out, but of course, its just the player entity.

Also, I'm getting a lot if clipping warnings, but I'm not getting an outputted .por file.

Does anyone have advice for this?

Thanks.

Ruin 

Also, what causes clipping warnings? I'm guessing it's when two brushes intersect in the same space. Is this correct? 

Have played about making a tiling texture in grafx2. It does support this, but the interface and documentation is really hard to follow, so a quick guide:

Imagine we want to make a 64x64 tiling texture, but while we work on it we'd like to have a 2x2 array of our texture to see how it tiles. Start a new image in grafx2 and click on the screen size icon. In the box you can edit the dimensions of the texture to be 128x128 (the size of the 2x2 tiling of our desired texture). How to do this was certainly not as obvious to me as to the developers!

Next click on the FX icon, and click on Grid. Set the grid size to be 64x64, but turn off Snap. Now click FX again (confusingly the Grid icon will not appear active if you have turned off the snap feature, but it is working). Click tilemap and then close the FX box. Now you can draw on the texture and all four tiles are altered at once.

This is great until you want to edit a texture, where you need to do things slightly differently. Load the original texture and then resize the image to fit a 2x2 grid. But before you turn on the grid and the tilemap, you need to copy-paste the tile into the other four quadrants, or it won't work.

Why? Well, the program is a bit too clever for its own good. When you turn on the tilemap, it looks to see which grid squares are currently identical to one-another, and connects matching patterns of tile for simultaneous editing. This lets you paste an entire screen from Mario Bros, then edit all the bricks at once, then all the grounds at once etc. But when we have an existing texture and 3 surrounding empty tiles, the 3 empty tiles are tied together, but the actual texture is kept separate!