Trying to explain but words are failing me...
(in a hurry)
You know in halflife you get those wire fences, and grills/grates etc, also stuff like vines and sometimes hanging cables which are made from brushes using textures which are fully opaque, except for one 'colour' which is fully transparent (i believe in the HL Quake Wad its a sort of blue colour)?

Can this be done in Quake?

Im thinking JPL is doing glass, Trinca did some in Wicked Base etc, but what I mean wouldnt be like that (func_wall with ".alpha" key).
I seem to remember one person say "why has no-one done this for quake yet, cause a lot of modern engines support it"

Does anyone know what I mean, or even better how to do it, i.e. what colour in the palette is "invisible"?

(I always thought it was funny in Halflife cause say the fence brush was 4 units thick, if you stood on one side then the other you could see the fence move four units cause the nearside of the brush would be the only visible side)

DOUBLE HARD QUESTION - I CHALLENGE THEE TO HELP!! 

You mean like this?

http://kell.leveldesign.org/screenshots/ss-grill.jpg

It's done as a sprite, instead of a texture, but it's pretty damn close.

It's in the next Quoth pak. 

But isnt there a way of doing it with brush-models? 

I managed with Fimg to make a sort of drags-sprite like hexen2, only it moves to fast.
It is half transparant, but for making it with brushes I heard of a glass thing in the base pak developpement. See BasePack #252.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/drags.gif 

you have to use sprites.

Unfortunately sprites can't be lit by the level's lighting calculations or by dynamic lights, and in any GL engine other than fitzquake you get pink edges around the sprites, plus in glquake the sprites are upside-down, plus glquake doesn't support oriented sprites, only camera-facing ones.

I actually have sprite grates in rubicon 2, but removed them from my levels after realizing all these problems. 

Oh Oh Oh ! Nice !
However, it seems to be applied only on a single face, and there is no thickness... Well, the visual effect is damned good !! Cool ! 

why not just use the alphamasked textures (fuck old engines compatribility, 90% play with the engines that support alpha) 

...Could you ellaborate?
What is an alphamasked texture?

:D

Kell: - Honestly, "what JPL sed!" :D :D 

I've always enjoy the solidity of the Quake engine. Single polygon alpha textures have a paper thin quality that doesn't really appeal to me. I know I don't speak for everyone (obviously) but give me old school heft any day. :) 

Cannot connect to database - post lost. 

I wander what you were gonna say?

(ironic you managed to post "bah" post) 

I agree that Quake looks better with chunky geometry rather than flat alpha textures, but for foliage there's nothing better. Also thinking if animated flames would be possible to replace the old rotating models, but that'd probably involve some sort of prefab creation.

Kell / Preach have eliminated the annoying HL1 effect of seeing both sides of the brush mentioned earlier, which is a good move.

Alpha mask is a black and white texture applied over the top of a diffuse texture - white is visible and black not, with shades of grey being semitransparent.

Quake uses colorkey, which basically defines a single specific colour as invisible (since it's just a string of numbers). The problem is that you get hacky edges from the image compression and there's no transparency gradient.

>> lucky I copied it this time. 

I guess the color choice has been done with a little bit of clue: like a nice pink flashy gay color :P 

its usually either retro gay pink, or modern gay purple. 

I want to convert Quake bsps to a format that Maya can read along with all textures and the lightmap. I wonder if anyone has already made a converter to do this. Anyone know? If not, then I wouldn't mind having a go myself sometime, does anyone have a copy of the bsp specs for Q1? 

Reading the BSP files directly takes balls of steel. :) Are you sure you wouldn't want to maybe convert MAP files instead? It would seem a lot easier. 

Right.Hemisphere.Deep.Paint.3D.v2.3.0.9
it can convert .map to .obj or .ma. without lightmap of course. 

And force the guy to write a thing that will dump the data you need. 

I think you'd want to read the bsp since it's been processed to create a continuous mesh with no t-junctions, no inter-penetrating polygons, no hidden polygons, etc. A map file is just a bunch of boxes all touching each other, with lots of wasted faces pointing outwards to the void. Who would want a mesh that looks like that?

Regarding reading a bsp file and getting a UVs and stuff; the code in the engine that does this should provide a good starting point. I believe it's gl_model.c that you want (can't recall for sure.) 

One down-side to bsp as a mesh is that surfaces are overly subdivided compared to what you'd want as a mesh file. This is becuase of the needs of the software quake renderer. Probably you could try to merge as many faces as possible during your import process, with the only problem being that otherwise mergeable faces might not be adjacent in lightmap UV space. 

yeah, I wanted to use bsp because it contains the textures and lightmap and also because, as you point out, it's a continuous mesh.

I probably won't end up doing anything though, because I have a lot of other stuff I want to do and I'm lazy :) 

Just discovered this - might be useful for someone (if there's ever going to be another Zer map):
There seems to be a bug in the bloodcube code preventing its time (30sec) from running out if there is more than one item_bloodcube in a map. This can be used as a feature. 

Trying to map for DarkPlaces with 1.5, and for some reason it won't load the jpgs and tgas I'm wanting to use as textures. I've checked the game file and everything, and even LordHavoc was stumped. 

Do you think it's related to gtkr 1.5? I made my map with it and i could load high-res textures fine. 

As far as I know. I could try a reinstall and see if that helps.