Yeah, the sepia colour is intentional, to make it look like old film rather than strict black and white. Proper black and white would be easy to achieve, and wouldn't have the problems of slight dithering/off colour pixels. You'd just have to desaturate all the entries in the palette. 

With some luck I have found an easy solution today. I can't remember to ever see it in this thread so I want to share. The "Remove Brites" functionality in TexMex is buggy and it doesn't work even if you uncheck the "Use Full Brites" option in the preferences/workspace tab. But you still can remove fullbright pixels in TexMex easily. Here is what I did. I unchecked the "Use Full Brites" option, opened the wad file with fullbright pixels, opened a new wad, copied all textures to the new wad. That's all. Fullbright pixels are gone :). I hope I could help anyone. I had many many problems with this issue and couldn't find any easy solution for a long time. 

does have a lot of issues, but it's pretty easy to work with for the things it actually can do.

I just recently managed to figure out why TexMex often seem to have problems loading the conchars texture in gfx.wad. Ugh, what a mess ... this also explained why several modern engines (e.g. DP) have problems playing the OUM pak. 

As all the textures in a set are not polluted by "fullbrites", I guess correcting fullbrite pixels in a texture can be done as describe below:

- Load the wad file in TexMex
- Select the polluted texture
- Use remove fullbrites command (fullbrights appear then as red-purple pixels)
- Export it to a bmp file
- Remove it from the wad
- Open the exported texture with an image editor, and change the fullbright pixels in whatever color you want (normal pixels is prefered !)
- Import the corrected texture in the wad
- Save the stuff and validate the changes by a test in-game

I've done this many times, and even if it seems very long, it works fine.. and you really manage what happened...

Nevertheless, thanks a lot for your tips, it might help for massive fullbrites removing ;) 

Try it out my way. It takes 5s to remove all fullbrights. You can also copy affected textures only to new wad but it will take more time since you have to look up the old wad for them. The whole export and edit part is skipped. 

I beleive you man, don't worry...
I started a map (1 month ago, in paralell with other tasks..) using DKT2 texture sets, and most of them are white, so here I will need massive conversion... So I guess I will try first your method... :) 

I've searched Mapping Help (via the Google sitecelephais.net-board idea) but can't find the answer:

what are the max verts allowed on a static (no animation) model?

I've probably asked this before but as I keep reminding myself, time dulls the... the... er... um... hazelnuts, Bob. 

1000 to be compatible with every engine. Strangely enough it was originally 2000 in dosquake/winquake, but glquake only support 1000 - maybe back in the early days of 3d cards 2000 a model was considered just too taxing. It's possible that the released source codes reverted back to 2000, but if you want to be compatible with everything that doesn't help. 

it's 1024 to be exact. But I think pretty many engines have raised that limit to at least 2000 (same as WinQuake); Fitz, DP, my engines, Joe, Tomaz ...

Shouldn't be a big problem. 

Ah, so 3656 verts might be the problem then! Ooops. 

Very helpful ;) 

Anyone knows if it is possible to find some custom medieval/gothic/horror textures for doom3? 

A q4 map which uses versions of Undulation's Gnosis texture set, with normal and spec maps added. Other than that, there's nothing other than bits and peices out there that I know of. 

I have recently started building a new map. It is always a pleasure for me to work on a map that is at its beginning. The compile time takes few second only and everything is simple and fast. I would like to know how you deal with your map as it grows bigger:

1. Do you split it in parts and work on them separately? I'm always afraid of exceeding the engine limits when doing so. The problem will get visible only after joining all parts together and will be very hard to correct then.

2. How often do you run fullvis on your maps while building them? I do it from time to time to check if I don't get into problems with performance and r_speeds. Is there any other way to check against those problems? I have a slow computer and vis (even fastvis) always takes some serious part of the whole time I spend on a map.

3. What about lightning? Do you prefer doing the lights on the way as you proceed with the map? Or is it wiser to implement lightning after the whole brushwork is done and save the time for running light.exe when doing brushwork?

4. What about using prefabs and copy/paste. I guess this shouldn't be overused.

5. What else can be done? There must be many things I didn't think of right now. Certainly a good computer, big monitor and the right editor help a lot. (I'm still stuck with Hammer since Radiant doesn't work on my laptop). 

what is the version of hammer that supports hl2?

any link? 

Install the HL2 SDK via Steam and it should appear in a magic folder in a magic kingdom. 

My main trick is to create giant black brushes that enclose the parts of the map i'm not working on. This doesn't save on QBSP time (all brushes still get processed) but it does save on light and vis time (fewer lightmaps, fewer visportals.) 

Enclosing map parts with big solid cubes saves a lot of qbsp time actually. Thanks to Tyrann's logic all brushes inside the cubes are quickly removed already in the CSGFaces stage. 

cool, good to know. 

i compiler when i go to bed or when i go to bath room, eat, go to beatch e.t.c. 

I'm with Trinca there. Just use bsp only when the map gets too big, and vis/light/both when you have a break from your computer.

If you don't have one of those ultra noisy graphics cards that will keep you up all night*, you can even do it when you go to bed, and wake up to a freshly baked level every morning.

*they usually aren't noisy if you aren't playing an intensive game. 

you can even do it when you go to bed, and wake up 2 weeks later to a freshly baked level every morning.

fixed 

Err... I tried your method on DKT2 texture set... and unfortunately it didn't work... Either I missed something on your explanations, or TexMex v3.4 is not suitable for your method..
Any idea ? I need help desperately.. :( 

What pc are you compiling with? I know it runs doom 3, so it can't be that bad. How come it takes so long?

My 10k brush map takes 40 minutes to do everything full.

Mind you, it's not a big open level, and I did make a void speedmap that took ages once. 

including vis? dear lord, that's awesome :o

man, my vising takes forever, even with my current machine (mind you, the cpu isn't anything to scream about these days, just an amd 2500+) so likely that's slowing down compile times a lot.

the nice thing is that i usually don't need to vis the maps for me to test them. :P i just use aguire's engine and chug along at a decent 40fps with 13k+ wpoly :P but that doesn't help when it comes to working out vis and blocking.

also, it makes prepping a map for final release a right pain, esp. when you notice some minor structural defect the minute you load up the freshly fullvised map >_<