i would be incredibly bad-ass if you could, for example, modify qbsp so that if you cover an area with a 'fastvis' textured brush, any portals (or whatever they are) that are touching that brush are ignored in the full-vis process. :P 

Maybe placing bsp's as entities could work. How it'd not get screwed by vis (flickering entities) would probably depend on dividing it up into chunks with some trial and error though. 

lighting something like that would be a nightmare though. :S 

depends on the engine i guess. with a shiny swiss army tool like darkplaces it should work fine. for some fun copy some map to progs/player.mdl and do chase_active 1 plus chase_back 3000 (or something like that). a piece of cake for dp.

proper lighting (for the "external" objects "in" the terrain map) would hard though,yeah 

Where can I find a suitable add new weapon qc?
I searched at Inside3D but all there is are modified already ingame weapons. 

It's just a matter of finding the right tutorial:

http://www.inside3d.com/showtutorial.php?id=60

This one is about adding new weapons. You do have to pay attention to some of the slight cheats they have to use. One is that rather than setting up a new key to press for the weapon, they make it so that pressing 2 twice brings it up. They also don't make a new entity in the map for it, which is something I expect you'd do if you're making a custom map. 

Building http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/bsp_pak_tools/qeu03.zip on modern Linux is easy, just remove the lines containing the del and coff2exe references.

And now I'll continue the search for a commandline mip2saneimageformat tool. Could not get MIP2BMP.EXE from http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/bsp_pak_tools/qmaphack11.zip to work with Dosbox. 

Niels Froehling's QuakeTools-library would be an epiphany but compiling is just not possible without a tremendous amount of work I guess. http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/bsp_pak_tools/qtools0.3-src.zip 

the right tutorial indeed, but after covering all errors I just keep
drawing 2 untill I too error.
Seems as if replacing v_shot.mdl is an easier way for testing.

Strange to conclude these tuts are so wicked in error messages.
Although they added my EathQuake. 

i've been trying something new. essentially, working only from the top view, i'll drag out brushes 32 units high of varying width and length creating floors. i create a significant portion of the map at a time in this manner and i specifically try *not* to pay much attention to the size of those floors, other than keeping them on a 32x32 grid for texture alignment purposes.
i'll make the decision that, say, a generic hallway is 192 units wide, but everything else goes. a room can be any dimension (and any combination of brushes to create the final shape).
after doing this, in a side view, i'll semi-randomly move connected sections of floor up or down up to 256 units (in either direction).

this can lead to some pretty weird and convoluted shapes with that sort of 'tumor growth' mapping look. 

pics to demonstrate, please? 

I just installed GTKRadiant to try some Quake editing, and I set up the paths all right, but it won't load any textures other than the SHADER NOT FOUND one. When I look in the console it says:
Texture load failed: "textures/"
Any hints on what could be going wrong? 

In the latest version of GTKR 1.5, I just put the .WAD files in C:\Games\Quake\id1 and point the editor to C:\Games\Quake for the game engine path. 

How do I extract the WADS from the PAKS? I've tried several programs but I can't see any .wad files anywhere... 

the wads aren't in the pak files at all, but you can get the textures from the individual BSP files.

But you can also get the wads here: http://www.quaddicted.com/wads/ (look for "quakewad" i think") 

Downloaded the quakewad file and put it in id1... Now works perfectly! Thanks! Although you need to rename the quake101.wad to quake1.wad. 

What light program and command line options? How many light entities? (relative to the number of brushes maybe, just to give perspective). Do you use minlight or skylight or both? How long does it take to run the light part of compiling the level.

I'm real curious about this cause I read a post where Than said the Plumbers Carry Shotguns level took about 25 seconds to light, and my current map is taking almost 10 mins for a high quality pass. There were 2758 brushes and 16621 faces at the time of this run:

----- Light 1.43 ---- Modified by Bengt Jardrup

Extra 4x4 sampling enabled
Soft light 3 enabled
Soft distance 16 set
File: c:\quake\id1\maps\wish16.bsp
Using minlight value 15 from worldspawn
1079 entities read, 625 are lights, 13879 faces, 3.9G casts
4 switchable light styles

lightdatasize: 467 kb

Elapsed time : 9:58 

Many of my maps have taken double that (like 20 mins) in the past.

Plumbers Dont Wear Ties is a detailed map, but not too detailed, but also its not really that big. Its a realistic scale, and its condensed, but its not very big compared to say the Warp maps or Marcher Fortress. Load Bengts engine and load the Plumbers map and type into the console "lightmaps" and try it with your own map too. Lightmaps are if you like "X amount of texture worth of light info", so the bigger the map (so long as the texture scale is 1:1) the more lightmaps.
Also if you have plenty detail in your map that wont help the speed (but it will make the map look sexier :).

I wouldnt worry about it too much! 

I probably should have mentioned I used a Core2Duo e6850 (2x 3.0 GHz) with 2 GB RAM.

I wasn't worried really, it just seemed like 25 secs was way low for a map like that. I ran id's e3m1 this morning with the same settings as I used for my map and it took 2 mins 14 secs.

Anyway, I'm still curious how other people light their maps. 

this is my understanding of the issue...

When you have multiple lights with inverse falloffs hitting the same surfaces over a long distance, the light time tends to go up. With inverse and inverse square falloffs, the light level never completely hits zero, so if a light using those formulas is in a wide open area, all the surfaces within line of sight of that light have to be calculated, even if the light level only increases infitesimally.

APSP2 was a fairly narrow and cramped map, so while it was detailed, none of the lights had to cast very far.

The extra 4x4 sampling and soft stuff increases the time as well. But thankfully, light calculation time is not painfully exponential like vis, it seems to increase fairly linearly. 

Rick: are you sure Than didn't say 25 minutes? to me, that would seem more realistic for a map of that size with the amount of lights present. but maybe he just has a monster machine...

grahf: aguirRe and i had a discussion about this kind of phenomenon with inverse square lights. mostly it was regarding how using that delay type with switchable lights could quickly run up to the max lightstyles on a face warning.
he implemented the 'fade gate' command line. essentially, it will cut the light off once it's light level has been attenuated below a cutoff point.

setting -gate 1 on aguirRe's light util will cut down on lighting times by a large margin because it's disregarding a lot of lighting that wouldn't even be seen.

back to Rick: as for light utils and settings, for preview compiles, i use:
light -gate 1.0 -fast -soft
and final compiles is:
light -gate 1.0 -soft -extra
i don't use extra4 though, because that is just insane and will take millennia to compile. aguirRe recommends -fast -soft -extra4, but i haven't tried that yet.
it's really worth your time to look through all the info aguirRe has on how to use his tools: http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/readmevis.txt the lighting tool has a huge amount of options in there. 

Yeah, extra4 basically takes about 10x as long on my maps, so for a quick look I don't use it, with just -soft it'll light in about one minute.

I did read through all that documentation and it was very helpful, I've been experimenting with a lot of the new stuff.

I wasn't real clear on the Gate thing, but now I think I understand it. I'm also not certain exactly how the -softdist is supposed to be used, but it seems like I get a lot fewer of those abnormally dark faces when I use that option. The documentation (I think)indicated using small numbers like 3 or 4, but I've been using -softdist 16 

i guess it's impossible to change the player model's angle without having to use fixangle = 1 (thus changing the angle the player is looking?

it seems i will have to replace the player with an invisible sprite and then make a dummy model that follows the player's position in order for me to get the results i want? 

but you probably need to use an .mdl, otherwise there might be engine issues (i know the weaponmodel expects to be a mdl, not sure about playermodel) 

i got it working with a sprite so seems everything's ok.

btw, your chase camera is kind of wonky and is prone to being shaky at times. it seems to pick up on stairs and angled floors in front of the player, where the crosshair is pointing or something. just fyi :)
i've also noticed a bug with the camera where, if you are looking down, and the camera is higher than the player, and you enter into a tunnel where the ceiling is lower than where your camera is, the camera goes psycho and starts moving in huge arcs outside the map. (this is with chase_up set at 32, which is higher than the default)