It looks pretty easy to support both, but I'd like to see if there is some kind of consensus out there as to which one is bsp2 and does everyone call the other one bsp2rmqe or something else. No time this weekend, but I'll look into it more next week. 

personally I'd go with -bsp2 and -2psb. Call a spade a spade sort of thing. Hopefully the 2psb format will die just as soon as someone bothers fixing rmqe... 

The "BSP2" variant was intended to replace the "2PSB" one after RMQ consultation with Lord Havoc, who requested these changes for BSP2 support in Darkplaces. From RMQ side, I agreed to those changes - in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have. The situation is simply due to the mod (and the engine) dying before the change could be implemented. At that point in time, the mod team had mostly trickled away, meaning the people in key positions were just absent. There was nobody left who could do tool and engine coding, and thus the RMQ BSP2 toolchain uses 2PSB to this day.

The RMQ engine is dead, as far as I know, since MH has no time and is exclusively working with DirectX now, and to my knowledge neither of the RMQ successors use the engine anymore.

It's kinda sad, because it is a kick-ass engine that's in so many ways ahead of its time. I still love the engine and I might yet do something with it.

If you're looking for a standard, I suggest BSP2 - like Spike says - since it was the intention and it might just make sense.

For the specific set of changes between 2PSB and BSP2, people should consult the Darkplaces and FTE code, or LH and Spike, respectively. I'm not an engine coder. From the tools side, I believe hmap2 and the Quakeforge tools support "BSP2". 

there is always q3bsp, which is supported by DP and FTE, and last I heard most Quake players use DP anyway. It's just the logical conclusion, really. BSP2 is an iffy compromise to begin with.

You can make Quake maps using q3bsp just fine, you'll just need to convert your wad textures to TGA or something. And viola, low resolution textures in q3bsp. You don't even have to use those horrible curves and shaders, except for things like sky and liquids. But I guess this will be seen as heresy :) 

I love the RMQ engine, but it doesn't work on my surface pro.

Is there a point to using BSP2? I thought most of the features had been ported over anyway (like func_detail brushes etc)... 

You can make even bigger maps than the standard extended format. Which was only double. This is double again, isn't it?

It's kinda cool :)

I still see the engine side and the new tools that mh provided (Aguire + BSP2) as the new pinnacle. RMQ is (to the layman anyway) Fitz+++. This is why I would love to see Fitz Mk5 support it. Because it's such a cool engine, but I wanna make maps with 128k marksurfaces and crazy awesome coloured lighting, thank you very much. :) 

Fixed flickering entity (admittedly now a moot feature with detail brushes).

The engine also has various under the hood optimization a for multiple animated light styles and running big maps. And I mean big - even Tronyn's maps haven't yet pushed the limits of the engine in terms of massive open world.

In theory, using Tyrann's detail brushes as your structures and a giant trisoup of the terrain courtesy of trenchbroom a Minecraft in Quake level is possible.

Might even give it a go when I get back, with Preach's flyer vehicle as an enemy.

Even if it fails horribly it'll still be an interesting challenge... 

Can be fixed with one line in progs.h:

#define MAX_ENT_LEAFS 64 

I'll look into the Q2 map format - I think there's just some extra fields to ignore?
I am not sure, I know it is a Q3 format because it has a lot of extra surface information. If you need a sample map file, let me know. 

are the additional directory in the texture name and three additional values at the end of each face definition: surface contents, surface flags, and surface value. You can just skip those. 

New version is up with support for the newer/better LordHavoc version of BSP2. Qbsp will create BSP2 files in this format with the -bsp2 command line. All other utils understand both kinds of BSP2, so you can still light and/or vis your '2PSB' maps if you want to use another Qbsp compiler.

Changelog:

* Implement the Darkplaces (LordHavoc) style BSP2 format and use as default
* Still support the RMQ style BSP2 format (but don't create any new ones)
* qbsp: Fix bug causing sky brushes to be non-solid

Download from the utils page as usual (Win32 / OSX / source). 

It seems 0.12 (didn't test 0.11, the last version I used was 0.6) no longer automatically adds the entire animated sequence of textures to a .bsp. If you use +0blah, the .map has to include faces with +1blah and +2blah for tyrqbsp to include those textures. Was this intended? 

I mentioned this in one of the emails a while back, but maybe it got lost in the shuffle. Or I didn't.

By the way, the error message change as opposed to critical stop fixes the .map I sent a couple of weeks ago?

Miss mapping, have a few random ideas I'd like to experiment with as well... 

It's not ridiculously huge but it does break a lot of limits. By the time I've finished detailing it will definitely break limits.

Good news - tyrqbsp compiled the map. Didn't get warnings either, and the map ran in darkplaces (latest windows auto build), and the map also compiled with TxQBSP but only after a mit of messing around with leaks n stuff. It tried TxQBSP first, by the time I fixed all of the leaks I was still getting about 50 warnings.

tyrqbsp just compiled it fine (with the -bsp2 option). 

I really mean mh's TxQBSP branch 'TxQBSP2'.

So, are there any Fitz-branch engines that support the Darkplaces BSP2 format? Ir is Fitz still on RMQBSP2 only, via MH's RMQEngine?

Does DirectQ support it, or anything like that?

Too lazy LMGTFY 

That post was more of a direct question for Tyrann since I've been throwing wip stuff at him for a while now. Aside from making a level / mod my ulterior motives we're give some feedback on both these tools and Trenchbroom. 

The os8 update seems to have locked my email accounts on the tablet since I'm currently overseas - which is why I didn't send one. 

@scampie: hrm, that's a bug. I'll look at that today.

@ijed: I'll take a look at your map today. 

Ricky: Nope and nope. DP and FTEQW support it. 

I'll be back in a week or so... 

This one should fix the issue with ijed's map and the animating textures bug that Scampie pointed out.

Changelog:

* Fix handling of func_group/detail entities with no solid brushes
* Fix automatic adding of animated texture frames 

I wasn't aware trenchbroom also had an issue with no-brush func's. It's a common error with worldcraft levels so hopefully the same fix here will also serve for that editor.

Something to be added to an error checking / entity management system in later TB editions possibly. 

Yeah, it wasn't just no-brush func's, but I had a bug in my qbsp where if the func_group or func_detail had only liquids (and no solids) the brush list would become corrupted (brushes would go "missing" during the compile. 

@sock: You want to test this quick hack up of Q2 map compatibility? No extra command line needed, it will just ignore the extra fields and texture paths:

tyrutils-0.13-3-gf972f19-win32.zip 

So all I was doing rebuilding areas was changing the brush order in the map file.

Good to know it's fixed, hope to wrap this one up starting next week and have a few other ideas to get done.