Well jeez, I admit I was not planning on looking at light.exe for the solution but that spells it out as clear as mud!

MFX, haha eh I am okay with hellish landscapes. ;) 

TexMex can create a wad file from the textures in a bsp. It doesn't even need to be "installed". Just unzip to a folder and run it. Best texture wad utility I've used. 

Is there a tool that lets you view a bsp file? 

Is there a tool that lets you view a bsp file?

Quake? 

http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=83 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OFpXBZGi-zM/UcSDRbUu4KI/AAAAAAAABNY/DkS-Pr6cjus/s1600/efdm12_large.jpg 

Neato 

Is there a tool that lets you switch the version of a BSP to 29, the one that Quake uses? There was a tool called QVER, but it no longer works on modern systems. 

Seriously now, I want to do a tech level with some few small spaceships shooting at a large one visible through one of the station's windows. It's merely aesthetic, but I want the spaceships to appear flying around and shooting the large spaceship. 

 

func_trains and lots of triggering. 

You'll need to become rather proficient in QuakeC before you can start slicing that particular sausage.

I have no idea if there are any decent QC resource sites still online.

Leaving all the QC aside for a minute, you will find that you don't have much room in Quake's map bounds to have a very large scene like that, so you'll also need to do some tricks to fake perspective to make everything look bigger than it is.

The simplest way to make an object look arbitrarily large is to keep its displacement from the player constant.

A simple example - let's say you want to create the illusion of a planet or a huge spaceship - you create a small model that fits in a sky-textured room outside your window, but you will have to update the position of the model every frame so that its relative displacement from the player never changes - that way it will appear to never move in the player's view and will always seem very far away. 

What wad editor is good today? 

or Wally 

can be used portable for a hard disk? 

https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/texmex_34.exe 

 

 

No, not directly. They need to be changed to bitmaps and the colors converted to the Quake palette. That can be done in a graphics/image editing program such as PaintShopPro, Photoshop, GIMP, etc. After that you can copy and paste them into a wad with TexMex. 

 

https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/texmex_34_portable.7z 

I'm not sure if the textures are sourced from the game files, or if the textures are actually compiled into the map. I ask this, because you can extract textures from a .bsp, but if you don't own the full game, textures from the full game don't load. 

The bsp compiler takes the .wad textures and embeds them into the .bsp

The .wad is not actually used by the game.

No idea why they decided to do it like that. Anyone know? 

Textures from wad get compiled into the bsp. The wad files did not ship with the game (except gfx.wad), it always loads textures from the bsp itself.

What sypmtoms are you seeing when you say "textures from the full game don't load" ? 

That the maps I put on there that use full-game textures have invisible walls. When they come back after getting the full game, they can see the textures. I have no idea if it's just the client or my server. It's actually pretty weird.