Necros expressing a contrary opinion is going to set the community back. He is just giving advice concerning what he feels is the best method for achieving decent looking terrain, and he is not trying to lead a counter-revolution to dismantle the last six years of Quake mapping history. That is the rhetorical component in the previous argument. 

If the terrain is done in half the time, but is twice as shit, who wins? 

Just to confirm, all of Marcher's terrain was build by hand (one of the reasons it took a while to make!). This was essential so that I could have complete control over the geometry, polycount, and to ensure that the terrain elements matched up vertex-for-vertex with the adjoining castle architecture.

Using an automatic terrain generator like gensurf would have made it a hideous compile nightmare, as the terrain would intersect with the castle brushwork. Also, I don't believe there is a satisfying way to make hollow terrain formations (like caves) with gensurf, so you might get problems there as well.

(PS: greetings from Minnesota :D) 

Like I said in #3181, regarding the previous posts, I now really think it's for the mapper just a trade off to find between speed and design, and clearly, it also depends on his experience..
Some prefer using generator, other prefer using hand-made terrain... Anyway, do we really care how the terrain was made if the map is good in the end ??
I have now a clear overview of the pros/cons about terrain generation/hand-made and now I just have to test the stuff, and see what will be the "good" method (in my opinion) when I will use generated terrain, or not, etc.. etc.....
Thanks again for this interesting discussion, and all the precious advices I can found here... 

...as it was ME that was disagreeing with the implication that terrain SHOULD be done by hand.

I am saying that it doesn't need to be. And the point about moving forward to avoid going backwards is supplemented by the fact that certain editors now provide 'displacement mapping' built-in. But hey, I'm not after an argument here. If you don't like my generated terrain, and if it spoilt your enjoyment of my maps, I am sorry.

(Spend an extra week building some terrain by hand or an extra week compiling - who's paying my wages anyway and where's my fishing rod?)

JPL: I also use Nem's Terrain Generator. It took me about 2 minutes to build the main cavern in Fmb_sm40 (behind the silver-key door) and import it into the map. And (wait for the screams) I used subtraction, although I don't use Quark.

I will surely be hung, drawn and quartered for this outrage. 

I will surely be hung, drawn and quartered for this outrage.

I'm sure nobody will blame you for a good map, in anyway the terrain has been generated, so don't worry ;) 

no problem, I've enjoyed your maps quite a bit over the years, Mike, and I thought the terrain in your Rogue-ish map was quite decent.

I just fealt some points could use a little clarifying to avoid things getting ugly, but, hey, if they did, it may be the first flame ever sustained around a Quake map making issue without delving into politics or ego. 

GTK 1.5 gives me this error:

.\plugin.cpp: 316
runtimeerror: Parse Primitive Quake: invalid primitive type

What is this, why did it just start happening (working on my Lost Chapters map) and how do I fix it? 

Have you recently installed a newer version of GTKRadiant? I've heard of something similar to this cropping up in newer builds, try the most recent build and see if SPOG has fixed it already. 

No sweat. 

I did download the latest version, I still have a problem. :( 

Argh! Textures are fine in Worldcraft 1.6, but when I compile with aguirre's utilities, some small textures are out-of place. (They are textures that have offset and scaling.)

Check shots from:
http://www.hut.fi/~tmaja/temp/

This must be a bug. And there must be way to correct it.

The map is Czg's terra6, I've modified it a bit. The original has the textures perfectly, but if I just open the given rmf or map in wc and save it again to map, it's fucked up when compiled. (Of course i can't compile the original .map because I don't know where Czg keeps his wads or their names, so I can't test if its Wc's or qbsp's fault.)

I've extracted the textures straight from the map using bsp2wad so that should not be a problem either, they should be identical.

All the material is here.
http://www.hut.fi/~tmaja/temp/ 

Seems compiling works allright with old id utils (and iklite)... (see _oldutils.png at the same address)

What's the best qbsp to use? Or should I have some wacky options in treeqbsp so it would work right? 

try -oldaxis? or -alternateaxis, or whatever the hell that option was renamed to 

It worked! Huge thanks!! 

Does anyone know how to get this sucker up and running in Windows XP? I got it once on an old machine but it is behaving like a bitch on my new one :(

Thanks in advance :) 

it...

there are better solutions like gtkradiant... 

Install it and run it except it won't run, but rather it will crawl on any medium to big sized map (unless you have a monstrous CPU). What Vondur said, use GTKRadiant. 

Thats what visgroups are for. 

but it's a pain to be obligated to use them. if i wanted to load up a big map in gtkr and glance at everything at once for last minute checks, i can. it's nice to have the capability, even though you may not use it very often. 

Obligated to use them? I choose to use them, as they make adding new brushes and finding what the hell you're looking at in any 2d view much easier. To each his own, I suppose. 

well, in response to Jago's comment on wc running terribly slow on medium to large maps, you said that you can use visgroups, thereby reducing the amount of stuff on screen.

the point i was trying to make was that gtkr doesn't slow down to a crawl as jago was implying so that, you can still map even on large or medium maps without having to use visgroups to overcome slowness.

in wc, you can choose not to use visgroups yes, but the implication is that the program will run too slow to map properly without them.
thus, you are, more or less obligated to use them if you want to be able to use wc without slowdown. 

No one has Worldcraft 1.6a up and running in Windows XP?

That sorta sucks :( 

and it would probably help if you described in more detail what was wrong with wc, instead of just 'behaving like a bitch' which tells us nothing. 

well, in response to Jago's comment on wc running terribly slow on medium to large maps, you said that you can use visgroups, thereby reducing the amount of stuff on screen.
I probably should have mentioned I havent had this problem since along time ago using my old old p3 550 box. Then again, these days I have a somewhat beefy cpu and lots of memory. Use what you want. I just see alot of digs against worldcraft for *rad, and almost all of them I've never encountered or seen. Maybe I'm just lucky.

--
No one has Worldcraft 1.6a up and running in Windows XP?
Err, what? Lots of people do, myself included. What the problem is?