What will yours do that will set it apart from others? Or is it just a fun personal project to learn programming stuff?

this is the first thing that came to me mind.

as grahf said, good brush manipulation is a must. rotating groups of brushes by arbitrary angles (with intelligent vertex snapping onto the grid). more powerful automation of texturing over curves (being able to propagate texture alignment as if multiple faces were a single one, for example). mixing between the straight forward regioning of gtkr and vis groups of WC.

basically this late in the game, it'd take a lot to make me switch editors. 

I have always wanted to create a mapping program, but the interface bits is my more immediate concern.

I would like to get this to a level of making maps for Nexiuz.

I also would like to model the editor to be more like Wings3D, where there are commands that can be done on vertex, edge, face, object.

And concerning the convex nature of brushes I would like to be able store a complex brush while editing that gets decomposed as multiple brushes when saving to a .map files.
That should solve many problems with brush editing I think. treating it like a 3d model rather than a convex object.

for curve texturing, that sounds possible with the internal representation of the brush I have decided to use. And it annoyed me as a mapper that I had to manually adjust texture offsets to get them to match.

This is not the best time for me to start a project (getting married in a month and I travel alot) but this will defiantly sustain my attention. 

"And concerning the convex nature of brushes I would like to be able store a complex brush while editing that gets decomposed as multiple brushes when saving to a .map files.
That should solve many problems with brush editing I think. treating it like a 3d model rather than a convex object."

This is something that I wanted to do for ToeTag but, brother, it's a bitch. If you can get it working it'll be great but I haven't found a nice, reliable way to break down meshes into convex chunks yet.

Although I haven't tried my octree idea yet... that one had promise. 

In fact, if you've got a handle on things like how to do texture locking and breaking down meshes and that sort of math in general - we should get together and maybe do a cross platform version of ToeTag or something. 

concave, not convex, right?
That feature would be a true killer feature. 

dunno if this is what you mean, but it would be awesome if you essentially build a 3d mesh out of n-sided polys just like in 3ds max and the editor would automatically split ngons into tris. afterwards, it would look at the face normal and whichever direction is closest, north, south, east or west, it would simply extrude the face backwards, keeping it parallel.
ie: you make a collection of faces that face upwards, it would extrude the face down allowing you to make cool trisouped terrain easily. the same could be applied for caves. 

Madfox looks very nice the frogman :) 

Type of advanced brush treatment you're describing isn't in any bsp editor I've seen (anyone else?) so if you need testing then let me know.

I'm pretty busy so testing to destruction I probably can't do, be an update a week wouldn't be a problem. 

http://groups.google.com/group/maperl 

 

Yeah, all the mappers are here. :) 

all editors are there....

preach, you've got email. 

Does Toetag work in Linux, since Apple's current operating system is mostly Unix based ? 

Would using a GPU for VIS be a possible (and sensible) idea? 

"Does Toetag work in Linux, since Apple's current operating system is mostly Unix based ?"

No, it heavily relies on Cocoa and Objective-C. The underlying OS isn't really a factor. 

Radiant is probably your best bet, either the venerable GTKRadiant or the somewhat newer fork NetRadiant. 

What went wrong with your building outside the limits experiment? I don't remember :P

I'm thinking of a similar sort of thing, a brushwork skybox. 

99.60% and it takes longer than forever even on a quad core machine. At this rate, I estimate it will be done in around five days. However, the problem is that I will be out of town for a month tomorrow (I'll still have a computer available, but a slow one).
So, does anyone here by chance have a really fast machine and is willing to help me out? Willem, that 16 core thing of yours - would it be possible to use it for this or is it only for work stuff? 

ijed: absolutely nothing! you can build outside the +/-4096^3 playable area to your heart's content, just don't ever let the player walk past that boundary because they 'loop' back to the opposite side of the map (like in pac-man) but the collision behaves as if you hadn't looped back.
also, don't let the player shoot projectiles past the boundary because they loop back too. if this is for RQ, it would be a good idea to place triggers along those boundaries to remove projectiles.
also, as a side-effect to this looping, you can't place any point entities outside the boundary, but bmodel entities are ok.

there is a hard limit though. you can't build past +/- 8192. anything beyond that doesn't get displayed at all. in fitzquake, it looks like you have farclip on-- it's just cut off at that point and you see the void (or hom).

this behaviour is attributed to the fact that the coordinate system of the server runs on variables twice as large as that of the client. 

Play russian roulette: Set up a script that zips and uploads the file in 120 hours, then shutdown the pc. 

negke

I could try and run it but it IS a work machine. I can't tie it up endlessly with a VIS process... 

with 16 cores, just keep like 4 for you and the rest for vis. :P

well, unless it's used for cg rendering or something and let me tell you, 16 cores rendering would be pretty damn badass. 

 

are you could just make a script upload the file every few days along with it's .vis file to the same spot and you can keep checking to see when you have a complete map by starting the vis process up on your slow machine. 

there is a hard limit though. you can't build past +/- 8192. anything beyond that doesn't get displayed at all. in fitzquake, it looks like you have farclip on-- it's just cut off at that point and you see the void (or hom).

this behaviour is attributed to the fact that the coordinate system of the server runs on variables twice as large as that of the client.

this is not quite right. Both server and client use floats for their coordinate system, but the network protocol uses a special 13.3 fixed point format when sending coordinates. This means 13 bits devoted to the integer part of the number, and 3 bits devoted to the fractional part. So the precision is 1/8th of a quake unit, and the highest possible number is 4095.875 (lowest is -4096)

so when a client is rendering anything with coordinates that come from the server, it will never be outside that range. But the server side location and physics are actually working, just what you see is wrong.

The question of how far quake can draw world polygons should just be covered by the gl_farclip distance, which is configurable in some engines. Not sure if there are any other factors besides that.