Is development still happening on this project?

I'm looking for a new Q1 editor to try out, as QuArK has been completely buggy shit for me, unfortunately. Constant errors doing the most basic things, and hell with textures. I love QuArK's grouping of map items, that just rocks. So easy to hide various areas of the map, or make them visible but unclickable and so on. But it is just too buggy for me to use.

This after giving up on GtkRadiant learning that it is incapable of doing Q1-style shapred brushes (spheres, cylinders, etc.) as it only handles Q3-style meshes. Lame.

I miss the days of using Qoole in the 90s, as it "just worked" almost always, and was really easy to use. 

thats what I use :) 

i don't think sikkpin is working on this anymore. shame as there are a few minor but annoying bugs, but it's an excellent editor and i recommend it over gtkr. 

@RickyT23:
I don't think I've ever used WorldCraft, as at the time it was popular I was already using Qoole and liking it. I went and looked for WorldCraft a few days ago, and found that it stopped development a few years ago, bought out by Valve. How "complete" is it? I'll go try to find 3.3 to download, thanks.

I also found a Qoole download, and while it has a bug with rotating objects allowing leaks, I can easily work around it. I'll see if it's as good as I remember it being from the 90s! :-P

@necros:
Well, I have downloaded it and will give it a try. Qoole also used the one-2D/one-3D/one-texture layout, and I got really accustomed to it, and prefer it to the three-2D layouts, as I tend to only focus on one of them anyhow. 

Forgot to include my "Samus Aran" nickname in the last posting, oops! I'm surprised this message board lets it post without at least filling in a nickname. 

Its basically Hammer editor, fully developed and stuff. Customizable views, easy to use interface.

It was used for Half-Life levels, and there is a tool which converts Quake .wad files into hlwad format included in the Quakeadapter package, and the TxQBSP tool compiles Quake maps directly from this format. Its a good system, and the Quakeadapter makes it all work with no fuss at all.

http://quakeone.com/qadapter/

A couple of people had troubles getting it to work on ATI cards, but some other people had no problems, I would give it a try ive been using it for years with no hassle. 

Are there any tools good for converting high quality JPEG/Targa textures into the very strange Quake 8bit palette? I run into issues where auto-conversion disregards the special fullbright entries in the palette, making the resulting textures look horrible.

Also, is there any way to use a custom 8bit palette for Quake? I am not using any of the official Quake textures, though the default monster/item skins are still being used. I am currently working on a very bright level (office building taken over by monsters) with 100% custom textures, so it's a pain when they look so awful in-game.

I use the Dark Places engine for actually playing levels, and it has support for 24bit texture overrides in .pk3 files, but I would still like the stock Q1 to look acceptable when distributing the level to people not using Dark Places. 

Log in and it fills in the name automatically.

I use photoshop and TexMex for textures, you'll have to convert textures to indexed colours and load in the Quake palette if you go that route.

If you haven't got a big pile of money lying in the corner then you could try using Paint Shop Pro, which is free and apparantly has automativ palette conversion in the latest version.

TexMex is basically a decent frontend for Quake textures and can do some useful stuff, like extracting from .bsp. 

I use GIMP for pretty much any image editing I do, and it's free so there's no barrier to entry there. The first thing I did was created a copy of the quake palette with all of the fullbrights changed to black. This way when you automatically convert textures, the fullbrights are never mapped, as the program always uses the first colour for black pixels.

In order to get the best texture conversion in GIMP, you need to know about a strange, seemingly undocumented feature: pasting a 24 bit colour image from the clipboard into an index image performs an automatic conversion which matches colours better than any of the "mode->indexed..." conversion methods. It isn't always the ultimate answer though, because it performs no dithering, meaning on subtle gradients you get banding.

My current favoured method is to take the full colour texture, copy it to the clipboard, then apply "positioned" dithering to convert it to the quake palette. I then paste the contents of the clipboard to get the better colour matching version I described before, and convert the pasted layer into a regular layer with an alpha channel.

Then it is a matter of experimenting with portions of the two version by painting on the alpha channel of the top layer. Usually I look for areas which display banding, and expose the lower layer to see if the dithering is an improvement. Sometimes areas on textures which are meant to be noisy end up too uniform without dithering - rusty areas are often examples of this. So paint them out on the alpha channel as well. The nice thing about this is that you don't need to worry about undoing anything; if exposing the lower layer doesn't improve it any, then you can easily paint the top layer back in.

I'll admit that usually when I'm doing this, I am converting textures I've created myself for quake. When I'm doing that, I'll work in full colour to blend/dodge/burn etc, but only paint with base colours from the quake palette. So I'm stacking the deck in my favour there. If you're starting with an texture which was never intended for quake, you may have to perform some colour adjustment to it. Trying to adjust specific channels to nudge an image towards one of the quake palette ranges has never worked well for me, but reducing saturation can help for vibrant images. It's a balancing act though, wash it out too much and you'll be worse off as everything maps to the limited grey ranges.

It is possible to replace the quake palette entirely if you can't get good results
http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/planetquake/chopshop/utilities/quake/wad_utils/newwad14.txt
has the details of what you need to do, using
http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/planetquake/chopshop/utilities/quake/wad_utils/newwad14.zip
You still need everything in one palette though, and there might be a trick to getting glquake to play along. I remember making "noir quake", which just mapped all of the quake palette to sepia tones, and having to mess about to get glquake to forget the standard palette. 

Everyone's got their preferred methods. Knowing how methodologic you are Preach yours are probably better.

I tend to do alot of modifying existing textures so my method works for what I'm doing.

And yeah, converts from brand new textures typically have alot of issues, it's rare that you won't have to repaint some once they're in the game.

As opposed to merging two different versions I tend to try pixel painting now. I find it's alot easier than you'd think to achieve reasonable results - especially with cloning tools.

A recurring problem (I haven't found a decent yardstick to solve it yet) is that artists get too focused on what they see in the art program and don't develop the conceptualisation of what it will actually look like in game. 

Thank you all for your helpful suggestions, it's very much appreciated.

@Preach:
I have been using Gimp for my image editing for the past 9 or 10 years, so your tips are great. I was trying to figure out how I could get a copy of the Quake palette into Gimp, as I only see a file called palette.lmp or something, and I have no idea how to open or convert the .lmp file into something usable -- could you post your Gimp palette somewhere for me?

Basically what I am doing is using the full size 24bit JPEG textures for the level, but want to make the ones appearing on standard Quake at least not look totally awful/broken. I was experimenting tonight with using the texture overrides, and it looks great when it works (I've run into an issue where the overrides are working in Dark Places on one OS, but not on another, no idea why).

One thing I have noticed even with the 24bit JPEG textures, is that Quake (at least my Dark Places) expects textures to be a bit dark, as light cast onto fairly bright/vibrant textures makes them way too bright and washed out to see clearly. So I think I'll be darkening most of the textures a bit. 

palette.lmp can probably be loaded as a RAW image, if you specify 3 bytes per pixel, 16 pixels wide, 16 pixels tall (for 256 pixels.) With the image loaded maybe you can generate a palette file from the colors in the image? I know in photoshop you could switch to indexed color and choose "exact colors" for the palette generation method. 

I know in photoshop you could switch to indexed color and choose "exact colors" for the palette generation method.

this is what i did. in fact, i went even further: i created palettes for only fullbrights, without fullbrights, only flame fullbright, etc... also, when converting, it pays to sometimes make a custom palette with say, all blues removed (or maybe only bright blues removed) to make it look right with the dithering.

also, the type of dithering you use has an impact as well. some textures will look good with a pattern dither, other times varying levels of diffusion will look better, and noise is good for smooth, but non-repetitive stuff. 

i created palettes for only fullbrights, without fullbrights, only flame fullbright, etc...

what i meant was i'd take the full palette image with all 256 colours, and then change all the colours i didn't want to black. then i'd go back to index mode and save the exact palette photoshop made. 

Yeah, you can create a palette from an existing image, find something in quake colours, then right click on an existing palette, select import palette, and choose the image as your source. But for ease of use:

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/zzquake.zip

Both palettes included. 

"Also, is there any way to use a custom 8bit palette for Quake?"

Yes.

The Half-Life map format.

Supported engines: DarkPlaces, ProQuake, Qrack, FuhQuake, ezQuake, Telejano, FTEQW

Tutorial to add HL map support:

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1358 

tik,kulo 

in spite with this particular as bathing may be also enjoyable, in no way get far from your toddlers within of the bath tub by themselves. ordinarily attend for the little one to stop petty accidents <strong>bottes ugg soldes</strong> 

here's a list of bugs that i've found during the use of the editor.
http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/qe3_bugsAndWishList100.txt

also a few features i'd love to have, but aren't absolutely required.

Mostly for baker, but Sikkpin, if you ever swing on by again... ^_^ 

I can't promise any fast action on this.

But we damn well need a good open source map editor and I'm a stubborn bastard and have no intention of going anywhere. 

At some random time, I may be asking you questions about how to "tune" this editor.

And I'll make some sort of grand Windows installer for it that sets it up all nice and neat [like the Quake Adapter for Worldcraft 3.3 that I made in '06] or maybe I'll recode QER a bit to make it happen. 

It installs worldcraft in c:\program files, and not c:\programs files (x86) in windows 7. Not so grand. 

Sheesh! In 2006, who knew what the future held. No Vista, no Windows 7, 64-bit existed in the fringe. It was a creation of that era and I didn't know better nor did I know what the future held. 

either ask here or just go ahead and send me emails. i don't mind discussing this kind of thing.
thanks. :) 

I'm happy that someone is interested in continuing the work on this editor. I felt bad for leaving it out to dry like that (especially for necros who put a lot of time into the editor, mapping, documenting bugs and all that) but I've just never had the time to get back into it, and any free time I did have was used for idTech 4 stuff.

Anyway, I have a build here that may be newer than the last version I put up, but I'm not sure. It's been years since I've touched this shit. If anyone's interested, I can zip it up and upload a raw dump of my files. It may not have anything new but who knows...