that this is with a modified progs.dat. Correct? 

aww man.
yeah, it's a modified progs. it allows you to play any sound you want and i've got lots of machinery that all have unique sounds along with lots of new ambient sounds. i must have went over this limit at some point.

between maps, are precached sounds cleared, so that, say sounds that appear in one map and not in another don't carry over so that the 256 sound limit starts from 0 every map that gets loaded? 

the precached sounds get cleared between maps. 

I've just downloaded gensurf at office, and I would like to try it this evening. I'm currently using QuArK 6.4 (I know that someone here think it sucks... errr.. but it woks fine for me.. bleh.. anyway...), and I would like to know if there exists a cool tutorial/getting started for gensurf use with QuArK, or something like this... I didn't found anything relevant on the web... Thanks in advance.... 

I made a quick test on gensurf.exe at office, and it seems it doesn't support Quake.... but newer games (Q2/3, HL, etc..) Does it make sense to use it for Quake2, and import the generated map file into a Quake map ??? Or not ?? How do you use it in fact ?? 

I don't think using something like gensurf is recommended for Quake, probably better off doing the terrain yourself... I think most Quake mappers make it themselves anyways... no? 

I don't think so... Just aking a look at Kinn's "Marcher Fortress" map for example. I really don't think he build the outside castle terrain manually... ;P... So how did he do ?? 

I mean they for sure use a terrain meshing tool, but if it's not gensurf, what is it ?? 

Marcher's outside area is definatly doable by hand with a bit of patience, but he might have used a tool I guess, dunno. In most cases I wouldn't recommend it anyways for a game like Quake.
Just takes a bit of practice with vertex and edge manip... Then again if your using Quark, good luck, cause it's hell for that kind of stuff if I remember correctly.
<insert pimpage for radiant here>. 

kinn's map terrain was built using hands only 

OK, if you say it I trust you, because you have for sure much more experience than me... BTW, I've read many tutorial for terrain meshing, and it frightned me (due to the amount of work it seems to be while doing it manually..), and I'm very surprised that it seems no terrain tool exist for Quake... or perhaps I didn't know it.... Is there any terrain tool for Quake so ??? 

The thing is, technically, you can very well use gensurf or any other tool for Quake, but chances are it'll cause alot of bsp problems, and you'll end up having to rework it so much that in the end you're better off just doing it manually.
As I said, quark might not be the best editor for this kind of stuff... =\ But with a bit of patience and training it isn't so long (but it is pretty boring yeah, hehe).

Quake just doesnt handle very funky brushwork so well, so it's good to keep things pretty simple and cleanly built (bleh, if only quake had detail brushes -___-). 

... so according to you I only need to be patient and take my time to build terrain... hmmmmm.... So, it will took me many years to be able to match Kinn performances !!! ;P
Anyway, thanks for your feedback... 

begin with e1m1 type o terrain, then make things more complex until u end up fighting with bsp/vis errors. 

Thank for the advice...;) 

Mike Woodham uses generated terrain in his maps. 

I used Gensurf ( as it's included as a plugin for GtkR ) to create a very sizeable chunk of terrain for a map I am currently working on ( not related to the chapters event ).
The main advantage to using a heightmap generated terrain tool like this is it makes creating and also modifying very large - i.e. the whole map - terrains much faster and clearer.
However, the absence of detail brushes in Q1 makes the compile times for Gensurf material absolutely astronomical. A few months ago, aguiRe did a full compile on a nearly-complete version of my map - it took just over a week. For comparison, that's about 25%-30% more than Marcher o_O
I also supplemented this heightmapped terrain with hand-built terrain.

So yeah, unless you have a very good reason to be chucking out vast areas of terrain, work by hand for now. 

I've dabbled a bit with generated terrain and I've found Nem's Terrain Generator to be the easiest to use. You set how big the triangles should be, and how many on the x & y axises, then you manipulate it using built-in tools to raise/lower/smooth, all in a 3d view. It exports directly to .map. It doesn't do a great job of optimizing the output, so you may have to do a bit of that yourself.
See:
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=2838
for download and info. 

i prefer making terrain by hand... simply because terrain generators don't create the edges of terrain, only the height. you also get a more personal touch to terrain you make yourself, and you can easily start splitting up areas to create more of less detail depending on what's needed.

when you generate terrain, it's all uniform, and although it's faster, you don't get as nice a 'feel'. you can, however, always modify the generated brushes after, i guess. i just like doing everything at once. :P 

there's a bug in info_intermission description in the entities.def that goes with gtkrad 1.4.

here's the right part, replace it if you want less puzzlement with info_intermission:


/*QUAKED info_intermission (0 1 1) (-16 -16 -16) (16 16 16)
This is the camera point for the intermission.
Use mangle instead of angle, so you can set pitch or roll as well as yaw: 'pitch yaw roll'
If there is more than one info_intermission in the map, Quake will randomly pick one.
If no info_intermission entity is in the map, Quake uses the player start.
pitch -10 (look up10 degs) yaw 10 (look 10 deg left) roll 10 (tilt 10 degs right)

Keys:
"mangle"
set 'pitch yaw roll'
*/


gl 

Cool information you give here guy !!! Thanks as well for the related link...
BTW, I agree with necros when he says generated terrain can be perhaps too much uniform... but at least it's a good starting point, in order not to do the all work manually... 

Doing the work manually builds character. 

For a few unreleased Day of Defeat maps I worked on months and months ago I created all the terrian by hand. Using the popular triangle method you can have good looking terrain in no time by vertex maniping them. I tried using Gensurf but found it to over-complicate the process and wasn't worth the hassle. Just sit down, copy/paste a bunch of triangles, and goto work. It's simple, and quick once you get into it. 

Sorry, but I disagree with the suggestion that terrain should be built by hand: it just is not necessary.

No doubt people will pick holes but look at these screenshots - the terrain took less than 5 minutes to create, and I haven't even started to tidy it up yet (I'm not going to as I only did it for this post). It's hardly uniform.

http://img41.exs.cx/img41/2810/quake179fo.jpg
http://img41.exs.cx/img41/9215/quake184yv.jpg
http://img41.exs.cx/img41/7899/quake198zg.jpg
http://img41.exs.cx/img41/7433/quake203zc.jpg

All of the terrain used in Fmb_sm40 was generated and I bet nobody noticed... because that's the point, if it doesn't blend in to the map, it doesn't matter whether it was done by hand or not.

Sure, it is not perfect but if more people embraced it they would help improve what is, after all, just a tool to aid a task.

And yes, I am anti-Luddite. So, JPL go ahead and generate your terrain. 

well, to my eyes it is kind of uniform. it's good, but it's not something i'd do with my own map.

all the subdivisions are the same size, and the edges of the terrain start and end on those uniform subdivision sizes.

if there was a way to change the subdivs so that some areas got more attention than others and to promote more than just height maps with outcroppings, overhangs, etc...