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. 

Nice bled of materials there. It looks sculpted somehow.

Maric, I'll make you a set of lava textures, if you like. 

cybear that was exactly the problem, but I ended up troubleshooting it with metl shortly after I posted this thread. Thank you both anyway :] 

Lava: to shamelessly blow my own horn ( fnar fnar ) - I'd strongly recommend the lava from the knave wad, which I think you already have. It has a grainier, more interesting look than the old fashioned 'gloop' look of the id liquids. It can also stand being used across larger pool surfaces without repeating so obviously. With respect to repetition, you can also use the HL trick of overscaling the texture to 1.5x1.5 and rotating it by an arbitrary amount, say 33�

Minlight: generally you want to avoid relying on minlight IMO. It's tricky. Lighting always is, espeically when you have the concerns of both gameplay practicality and SP atmosphere to realise. Quake likes pools of light and shadow, e.g. walltorches intermittently down a corridor or shafts of skylight interspersed with roof beam shadows. Always try to keep such things in mind when building - shadowcasting brushwork, such as aforementioned roof beams, are very useful.
From your editor shots, I see you have mostly cavernous stuff, and very nice at that. I'd recommend using walltorches and flames here and there. Use aguirRe's tools and take advantage of the _anglesense value which can be added to light entities individually. Setting it to less than 0.5 will blend the light from a walltorch over the surrounding rockface without showing up the edges between surfaces. Probably the best way to go, at least to begin with. Larger flames can be set inside brushwork braziers for occassional sharp shafts of light/shadow casting.

Map Size: several small maps as a mini-episode is absolutely fine IMO. The important thing for Quake is to not, as Jago alluded to, end up with the Half-Life design of intentionally dull, utilitarian locations that are no more than one place on the way to some other - probably just as utilitarian - place.
Build something in each map as a focal point of the design. It doesn't have to be big and it doesn't have to use a lot of brushes, it just has to establish the character of the map. Think of the maps in your episode as tracks on a concept album, or chapters ( ahem ) in a story. They don't contain everything, but they always contain something that contributes to the overall piece.
I would disgree with RPG about the intermission camera though. Seeing one's kills and secrets racked up at the changelevel is part of Quake and many players like to know this stuff. Only disable the intermission if you're going for a pseudo-seamless level transition, again a bit Half-Lifey. Dario Casali used one to cross from the outer town to the inner castle in one of the sections of his Prodigy SE. You need a very good reason to do a pseudo-seamless transition though, something dramatic which needs to be immediate and thus justify denying the player their glory score. 

I agree with kell on minlight being ugly. If you need to soften a pitch-black area, try putting in some dimmer lights to simulate ambient light. A low light value light will fill in a small area. A low light value light with a lower "wait" value (default is 1.0) to fill in a larger area. With the right balance of brightness and proximity to walls, you can fill in the area with some faint light that doesn't have a hotspot at the center. 

Why does a trigger_hurt brush (dmg 600) placed at the bottom of a pit fail to kill players consistantly on contact with it? What other technique can be used to build a Coagula-style void map?

If a trigger_hurt brush (dmg -5) does not incrementaly heal players on contact, is it possible to build a healing area similar to the one found in Q3DM10? 

placing a trigger_hurt at the bottom does kill the player (unless they have the pentagram or use god mode). you don't even have to set the dmg value that high. the higher the dmg the stronger the gibs get pushed back (ie. fly back up). the trigger brush has to extend over the entire floor of course.

negative dmg values painfully add to the players health - the max health amount of 250 can be exeeded this way. 

About the trigger_hurt thing, often enough, the player drops right through it and doesn't die, not sure why, to make sure it works every time I always put 3 or 4 of them one over the other, to make sure that at least one works... But there's probably a cleaner way to get it working every time...? 

the player drops right through it and doesn't die

This is due to the way Quake calculates the player's position relative to surrounding stuffage. Vertical movement calculation isn't as quick or precise as horizontal ( presumably because the rarity of vertical movement made it acceptable to skimp a bit ).

Simplest way to avoid this is to make sure your trigger_hurt goes all the way to the bottom surface; so when the player comes to land at the bottom they definitely fire the trigger.

The strength of the dmg needs to be high enough to overcome the armour/health combo the player could potentially have at that stage. I would have thought 600 would be enough.

As an alternative to this method of void implementation, I had necros add to Chapters the trigger_void entity. It will kill the player on contact, even if they have the pent, but without gibbage or knockback. It will also instantly remove monsters on contact.
Much more thematically accurate. 

I had no idea you could use negative values to add health! 

It seems to be much easier to gib players with a trigger_hurt brush that is aligned with a regular brush (floor, spike, etc.) than it is to gib players who are passing through one sitting in empty space (falling, jumping, etc.). Can anyone explain this?

More questions. Is it possible, without QC, to use a trigger_hurt to increase a player's health without exceeding the 250 max or triggering the player pain reactions? Can the same be done for armor?

Thanks for the suggestion Bal, it's the best solution I have at the moment.