Thanks Ricky.
Yeah, it's helpful.
Funny though, I put some Rune fullbrights on the corners and they do show (in supporting engines of course). 

Check the PQ archive at quakewiki.net - maybe they mirrored the Painkeep website.

Ron: Ah, so it's just a lift? I thought it was supposed to be a platform floating through the map. 

Because they're fullbright - basically they ignore lighting completely and always show themselves at maximum illumination.

If the door entity isn't lit it means that it's center (bang in the middle of the bounding box) is inside a solid brush when the light is being calculated.

Try 'Start Open' and trigger it once on map load so its in the right position when you need it. An easier way might be to just give it a recess to fit into. 

Negke, yes, that was the original idea, to have the "lift" go round, and if you stayed on it you'd be moved into a secret area. But the main use was a lift to get up.

Ijed, I did that, create a space underneath, and it worked !

Thanks again, I'll remember to credit you guys when I'm done ;)

2013 or so ...

Only joking, the thing is that I'm always wanting to ad stuff, sometimes causing me to start all over again. The 1st map I ever made used to be quite small. The 3rd remake is quite big now. But also I had to correct a lot of stuff. I used to do a lot of carving, really bad. There should be more information on how to work clean. There is a lot of documentation on how to make a room, but not how to make it as efficient as possible, unfortunately. So before I found this website, I had to learn trough trail and error. 

@negke Thanks for the info - that led me to other Painkeep sites that I didn't know about yet. I've exhausted those and still haven't found what I'm looking for. 

Is a good, and fun, way to map - as opposed to having some rigid plan laid out in advance. 

I'm having trouble getting the textures to display in the texture window when I'm trying to build Quake maps in GTKRadiant...

However, if I set the game to Quake 2, my quake 2 textures show up without any problems, even without the need to extract the files from the paks.

Is there a special way to setup Quake in GTKRadiant? 

Put the texture wads in id1\ 

Do I have to put the textures in a wad file first? There's only 1 wad file in the paks and it doesn't seem to have anything in it... While the "gfx" folder seems to contain all the textures. 

http://www.quaddicted.com/wads/quakewad.zip 

Got it! Thanks! 

Other than avoiding to overlap brushes, is it also necessary to avoid T-junctions when making quake maps? Doesn't seem to matter how careful I am, the compiler keeps reporting "# edges added by tjunctions" in the log...

Take a look at these pics, bear in mind the column or "pillar" is floating.

Avoiding T-junctions:

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/3360/avoidtjunc.jpg

With T-junctions:

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/5436/tjunc.jpg

And is there a caulk texture to use when you want faces on a brush to not be calculated when compiling the map? Only thing I found was a "clip" texture. 

It is not necessary to avoid tjunctions. "X edges added by tjunctions" is not an error, that is just normal operation. QBSP ensures you will not have tjunctions in the compiled level by adding those edges. So you don't need to worry.

There is no "caulk" but there is something called "skip" which might do what you need -- see here: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60088 

I see.

This skip tool will come in handy! Thanks! 

There is nothing wrong with overlapping brushes. Infact overlapping brushes is what the technology was made for. DO overlap brushes!!!

Having 2 faces at the same place on the same plane isnt a good idea because you have no controll as to which face qbsp will choose. 

not overlapping brushes. even though qbsp doesn't have a problem with it it does help towards neater brushwork in general 

At least in the case of BJP's tools, qbsp will always choose the face of the newer brush, the one that is further down the list in the .map file. 

even though qbsp doesn't have a problem with it

seriously, I remember reading an article about how the technology was devised which had diagrams showing how qbsp can take overlapped rough-shaped brushes and subtract everything outside of the inside space. It was what it was designed for! You can get some really neat effects by overlapping brushes, especially with things like rock work.

Things to watch out for which ARE important:

1 - illegally shaped brushes. No concave brushes please.

2 - corners of brushes being off-grid.

I have discovered that you can have overlap points off grid, qbsp completely re-models the brushwork anyway into wireframe. But having corners of brushes off-grid is a real no-no. Likely to lead to leaks, holes in the clipping hulls, homs etc. 

Anything of grid is a no-no. Basically because qsbp snaps them to grid, which might not be where you were expecting. If you've got a load of stuff like that that's intersecting then you get a mess of unnecessary (and probably invisible) polys, holes in between structures and so on.

The grid is 2x2 though, and you can always spawn in models with a scrap of code for detailed stuff. Not many people realise / use bsp model spawning - which is the mutts nutts for rotating detailed stuff. 

I've made a part of a map that was perfectly playable in normal skill, the skill I test on because I'm a lazy bastard, but can't be done at all on Nightmare, the skill I always play on.
The Shamblers reload too fast for the player to have any chance of getting past them. Does anyone know where I can find the exact difference in skill settings ? 

"There is nothing wrong with overlapping brushes. Infact overlapping brushes is what the technology was made for. DO overlap brushes!!!"

Yeah, I wish this myth would go away but it persists for whatever reason. Overlapping brushes are totally fine and completely acceptable. QBSP will cull away the unseen portions.

"Having 2 faces at the same place on the same plane isnt a good idea because you have no controll as to which face qbsp will choose."

Untrue. It will pick the one that appears last in the MAP file. You can control this simply by cutting/pasting the brush that you want to appear last in the map editor. That moves it to the end of the brush list - unless your editor is doing something where it writes out the brushes in an arbitrary order. In that case, it's a failing of the editor rather than Quake/QBSP itself. 

I've found a new way on how to get by them.
Funny how your own maps can bring out the creative player in you, I guess that's why I love Quake so much. 

Enemies fire faster on Nightmare, that's the main difference you cannot influence. The rest is item spawnflags to make them not appear.. 

Or die!!! 

Anything of grid is a no-no. Basically because qsbp snaps them to grid, which might not be where you were expecting. If you've got a load of stuff like that that's intersecting then you get a mess of unnecessary (and probably invisible) polys, holes in between structures and so on

this. like i say, even if it compiles without a hitch most of the time, having loads of off-grid overlap points still leaves your map more susceptible to random leaks & the like, as well as being not very nice to build stuff on (say if you wanted to cut a cave out of the rockface, or build some architecture into it later on).

but hey, personal preference. i used to do it all the time but have much prefered working with natural terrain stuff since i stopped doing it. much prefer using triangular faces now