What is the error saying? 

I just noticed today that an area of my map that I "finished" a while ago had a leak in it. Which is strange, because it's sealed, and I can run vis on it. Here's what I mean:
Exhibit A
And here's what it looks like in the editor:
Exhibit B

Now, like I said, the map is still considered sealed. It won't generate a pointfile, and although I haven't let vis finish because it takes a while now, that will start and complete the base vis without any issues.

So, I ended up fixing it by adding a new brush to cover the area over, but the whole thing made me curious as to what it was that caused this in the first place. Any ideas? Has anyone seen this before, any way to reliably reproduce?


As a side note, how concerned should I be about warnings about things such as efrags and marksurfaces? My map breaks both of those limits and gives warnings on developer 1. Same for missing textures; the console reports 20 missing textures, but I've never encountered them playing the map so it seems superfluous. 

That happens reasonably often - bsp just sharts out a harmless random HOM for no real reason. Best solution is just to slightly change the brushwork in that location and see if it goes away. 

If I create a custom wad for a map and later add more textures to that wad in order to enrich my map, will the map still use the wad's old textures correctly without glitches or errors? 

the only thing that matters are texture names, so you can add later as many textures as you want. 

I have a map in Tesseract. Not having to worry about breaking my map by adding textures anywhere other than the end of the list (so basically deciding everything you want to use at the start) is such a nice difference in Quake mapping. Only issue here is name conflicts but I'm pretty sure they're resolved based on the order they're in then which is fine... 

 

Or just ignore and release anyway. Stupid steps in my terracity map never could get that missing tri to show up. It's like qbsp thinks the face is invalid.

It could be the .map exporter. I never have trusted it in any single bsp style editor I've used. Hammer/Source Engine, Worldcraft, J.A.C.K, all of them I distrust for providing accuracy of each vertex. Just create some wierd angle geometry, export to .map. Import the map, and you may notice some brushes are invalid or missing. 

I similar thing happened to me at one point in making my map. No holes, but after I compiled the BSP there was a nice fat hole where a rock should have been. I just adjusted one of its vertices in the editor and it went away next compile. 

So, I've spent a few hours in PhotoShop, customizing colored textures into pure black and white versions without greys, Sin City style. But when I try to import them in TexMex, the program sends a "file type not supported" message. I've tried with jpg and tga versions but it refuses them both. Ideas? 

generally i do a ctrl-c from photoshop and then ctrl-v into texmex, for each image. 

I use gimp and export as tga.

There are some wonky ass tools out there for quake asset editing, mostly because of the age of the tools and the formats. 

so much errors in my qc files, but I remember so much "not a name" 

"generally i do a ctrl-c from photoshop and then ctrl-v into texmex, for each image." Yeah, that works, but it's tedious to say the least! I have several dozens of textures to import and TexMex is supposed to support batch import. 

So, recently I got a demo of my level (thanks ericw!) and in it the player missed a weapon that they pretty much need to have.
See it?

The problem is entirely my fault, as far as i'm concerned; it's just too damn hard to see the nailgun as you're moving through the area. Unless you spend enough time there to notice it, the approach and subsequent movement paths mean that you have a higher chance of finding it by accidentally picking it up than actually seeing it.

Eric suggested that I use a flickering light to draw more attention to the area, which I might try, but I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone else has some suggestions for me to try. 

I tend to overlook them because they're much more often used as simple decorations rather than hints at goodies/secrets. You could try a light of a different color, maybe? Or if it's not a secret there are many solutions. You could for example point a spotlight at the nailgun, or place it on some sort of pedestal. 

It's already under a spotlight and on a "pedestal" of sorts, although I may give it a proper pedestal rather than a different style of flooring as it is right now.
I'm planning to increase the brightness of the spotlight to hopefully make the model stand out a bit more.

I feel like a strobe flicker would definitely catch people's attention, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet and it might be too intense an effect. 

Or put a brighter texture behind it so it stands out more against the background. Almost black on almost black is evidently no good for visibility. 

Create a huge fullbright red arrow pointing on this weapon. Add func_train on it, so it's going up and down. Additionally huge trigger covering half of your map, announcing every 2 sec, that there will be a very important weapon to pick up soon.

Utilizing this techniques, you posses all the knowledge needed for professional LD in 2017. 

Tone down the blue lights - they cast a lot of light but the actual light source is dim. Are you using delay 0 on them?

Then, when the area gains contrast and shadows, put a torch next to the nailgun. Nothing extraordinary, just something to provide extra light and stand out from the blue. 

Sort out your Quake resolution, it looks like you resized your screenshot in MSPaint. 

How about a pulsing (rather than flickering) light, placed exactly where the weapon is -- so that that emanates a pulsing glow? Then you kill the light as the weapon is picked up (that's possible in standard Quake, right?).

Another solution (which I suspect you would not want) would be to just move the gun so that it lies unavoidably in the path of the player...

PS: The map looks beautiful, judging by this and other screenshots (in the Screenshots & Betas thread). 

Lol, khreathor. So true.

I think it has made for some very dumb players also. 

A compromise

I tried a few suggestions, but I ended up just moving the gun so that it's in a slightly different area. Hopefully this works better for players, they'll probably at least see the health which should help draw them to the NG. Flashing lights seem too severe for this, and besides, they can't be toggled in vanilla quake as far as I know.

otp: I'm not really sure what happened to that screenshot. Ericw sent it to me, and the version he sent me is a much higher resolution. No idea how it got all mangled like that when I reuploaded, oh well. I tried your advice on relighting the area, but there just wasn't any way to get the NG to stand out against the rock of the background, and changing the brushes too much in this area is a really big pain since it was the first rockwork/trisoup I ever did and it's a mess. Ended up moving the gun, like I said. 

Maybe I should make a recording of me chanting "Nail Gun... Nail Gun..." and load it as a custom sound in the map to play next to the pickup. Or I could teleport the player to the nailgun if they try and leave it behind. Maybe I'll write some custom QC to make the nailgun follow the player until they pick it up.

Maybe I should just let people fuck up \o/