buzzsaw.gamedesign.net has dkt wads.

metlslime has rubicon in some sub-basement of his site; i forget the exact link, ask him.

planetquake.com/fatty has a few. frib has some that you probably already have.

others? get some q3 packs and convert your own. 

the lighting program with some calculated reflections. haven't found with google. fat controller's site had a link but it was old. I had it on the old hd... 

http://icculus.org/homepages/riot/q1rad.zip 

speedy has some, and rpg too i seem to remember. 

 

Speedy's textures I already have (and had them listed in my post) and RPG's site doesn't seem to have any textures. I now got the Daikatana wads as well (thanks Bal!) and am looking for Rubicon and others. 

There are no texture wads housed at my site. What I meant was, I could e-mail them if necessary, or I could upload them somewhere if someone pointed out an archival site that I could access. 

You can call me lazy, but I was wondering if there was a program to create simple brushwork from a diagram? For example, 2d blueprints would create the whole level in brushes 128 units tall, which could be used as a "base" for making the map?


I am trying to easily translate doodles into maps :) 

inertia, I think I know where to look the program. Give me a moment. 

ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/idgames2/utils/level_edit/converters/bmp2map6.zip

It works but is by know means perfect. No Z plane beyond the 1/2Z implementation of the original Doom. Any curved line will be translated into ugly blocks. It's worth messing around with though. 

u rock, thanks

too bad i am on a mac and would need the src code to use it on here... oh well, will mess around with it later! 

OK so I'm trying to create a decal for usage in my HL2 map. I basically just want it to be "weathered" looking text -- that is to say, the texture is just a word that has some slight erosion.

So I read this tutorial : http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Creating_Decals

And I read some other tutorials.

And my final result is this : http://blitz.circa1984.com/help_alpha.JPG

Looks like it will work, right? Wrong. It doesn't work. I'm exporting as a .tga, checking off the option to save the alpha channels, and generally doing everything else right as far as I can tell. But for some reason it's just not recognizing the alpha channel, and only showing the "diffuse" part of the texture.

Please help me if you can because I have been trying to figure this out for a while now, but I can't pinpoint where I'm going wrong.

Thanks 

but do you need to make a shader for that texture or something? I have no idea, just taking a stab. 

But that doesn't matter, because it's not even working in a regular image viewing app -- Ifranview, Photoshop itself, etc. 

You have your alpha channel at 100 percent opacity. Is that recommended in the tutorial? 

Looks like a different version of PS than my PS6.
Your pulldown window says 'normal channel.' 

try adding a bg to your text and flatten the image, having transparancies in your only layer/rgb channels might mess things up for you. 

What are the size limits for Quake maps?
a - total area
b - total size / length of a single brush or brush-group
c - max faces / polies
d - what is considered reasonable for poly counts for an SP map

Is there a way to have a "global" light setting? I have some completely dark shadowed areas with no logical reason to place a light source in them, I hate unsourced lighitng... So?

Is it "ok" to have several small maps as a unit as opposed to one HUGE map? That seems like an obvious question with an obvious answer but the terrian bits I am making are choking the engine a bit it seems and breaking my ideas down to small pieces is a proper solution, eh? I just wonder if fighting only twenty of so monsters before a map change is a bit unusual.

Oh and anyone have a really decent lava texture that they could point me to?

Just a pick...

http://www.maricscabinet.com/m1.jpg 

That screenshot is looking nice. I think water or slime would look better in that area, but if you absolutely insist on it being lava, I suggest the quake 3 lava texture. Do a google search for "q3wad.zip" and "q3test.wad".

As for "global" light, you should look into minlight. I am assuming you are using Quake compile utilities from Aguire (which seem to be the standard these days) - look for minlight in the documentation here: http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/readmevis.txt (the main site for the utilities is obviously at http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k ). Personally I think minlight makes maps look washed out and ugly, but hey, it's your map!

As for your other questions, I am sure other people here can provide you with better answers then I can. 

As for breaking up maps in smaller pieces, I would be against it. This is not HL we're talking about. See if you can tune your brushwork to not cause major slowdowns. You can have big rocky outdoor areas in Quake, they're just tricky to do right.

About acceptable polycounts: I am sure you are going to get lots of different opinions, but my personal belief is that a map build for Quake in 2005 should run well on a 1 ghz CPU with 256 mb ram and a GeForce 3-class videocard. If it does, who cares about polycounts? 

a - same as Q2; +/- 4096 in all directions.

b - I haven't encountered any such limit.

c - Dos/Winquake.exe has limits that are changable in the console. Otherwise the r_speeds limits are...

d - r_speeds are up to you. After a certain number you start getting artifacts in dos Quake and Winquake engines. If a mapper is conscious of r_speeds, he usually tries to keep it around 600-800, or maybe 900 at the absolute max. 

Go for it. You might want to check "no_intermission" on the trigger_changelevel, though. 

That looks funky neat.

As for terrain, I recently found a very easy way to do it, of course using the triangle method - but the way I used to try it was create a brush at a time, clipping it on one face into a triangle, Copying it, manipulating it and blah blah... I often ended up with wanked terrain.

Now what I advise is something like this, viewed from your Z plane, I'll try best as I can to represent it:

_________________
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
---------------

Each \/ and /\ is a triangle. Thus you have a wall of them. Drag 'em from there, and/or use varying sized tris, but keep this simple pattern generally. Hope that made sense o_O 

Great responses and thank you.

Jago
-Yes, I was referring to minlight (Arghrad for Q2 is -minlighta) and I am not a huge fan of the washed out look either but the question is whether that is a tad better than completely dark shadows in SP. This will be my first venture into the Single Player realm... Opinions?

-I am not locked in on the whole lava thing, water or slime would be fine but I am not planing any underwater routes.

R.P.G. - Nails struck firmly upon the heads, thank you. That info makes me a lot more comfortable with moving forward.

Phait - That is precisely how I am working it, that was / is the process I used in my Q2 terrain mappage.

I did not plan to turn this into a picture posting bit but here are a few more simply to demonstrate my "issue"

This one shows an all but finished small map, two major areas, about 21 critters to fight, 1 key to open the second area...

http://www.maricscabinet.com/m1a.jpg

When I add this section,

http://www.maricscabinet.com/m1b.jpg

I can no longer get the whole mess to compile, Tread (yeah I know but I am used to it) does not trace down leaks for Quake as it does for Q2 and Q3. I get the impression that the .map file is not being written when I have a leak after it has reached a certain size.


This third exemplifies what I am trying to do. I end up with 8581 faces from 1587 brushes, that is why I inquired about the limitations...

http://www.maricscabinet.com/m1c.jpg

I even tried the "unthinkable and threw a large box around the whole thing just to see if it was a leak, no joy there either. Thus I was of the mind to break it up. As parts of a whole the r_speeds are very decent, it is just very, very brief per part. 

I am not a huge fan of the washed out look either but the question is whether that is a tad better than completely dark shadows in SP.

I'd say completely dark shadows are fine, but this depends on the style of the map, and your own personal preferences. I used lots of completely dark shadows in could.bsp, but there weren't many, if any, in rpgsp1.bsp.