About | News | Archives | Downloads | FAQs | Contact | Forums
» News
avatar
Date: 12/10/07
Posted by: Black Monk
Mappin' to the oldies
So in our quest to replace the baseq3 content of the maps, we came across someone quite keen on PASTORAL. NoSy, aka NoSympathy, popped back from his time as a graphics designer and really liked the gameplay of PASTORAL. So he offered to help retexture it and has been relearning gtkradiant and all that fun stuff. Of course, we don't have the .map file so he had to disassemble the map to play around with it. It's a bit less cumbersome to play with the textures in a map editor rather than swapping them around and reloading Quake 3 every time you want to check things out.

So, I says to myself, I says, maybe we can get the .map file. Shmitz made the map originally, maybe he's still got some of his assets. Heck, we've already lost some RQ3 assets to time and failed hardware, so I was hoping this bloke who we've not talked to in years happened to keep some stuff around.

As it happens, he does! I tracked him down at http://www.horizonscape.com/ and noticed that he's actually been a rather prolific mapper. You can see some of his TF2 and Portal maps (among others) at http://www.horizonscape.com/portfolio//?action=level-design

I shot him an email and he mentioned that he had just recently come across some of his old RQ3 .map files and assets. I guess the stars aligned on this one! Once he sends that fun stuff along our way, we can help NoSy out with that original, non-decompiled .map file.

Coding-wise, still slow going. I used to have much more time to devote to this stuff. Like, literally, one of my old IT jobs during RQ3's heyday had me sitting in a server room with no one else in the building for hours at a time. And this was a backup site, not even a live site, so I didn't really have to do anything except make sure the servers were turned on. Other people "read" or "bettered themselves" but I worked on RQ3! However, now I'm at a job that actually requires me to, you know, work, so that cuts down on those 6-hour uninterrupted windows of RQ3 time. Ah well!

I have been able to procrastinate semi-productively, though:
http://ioquake.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=50 (compiling ioq3 with mingw)
http://ioquake.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=55 (compiling ioq3 with vs2005)
http://ioquake.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=60 (compiling ioq3 with vs2008)

I'm anal-retentive and want to make sure my coding/compiling environment is set up and working before I really start getting into making my brain-meats work. Hell, it was much easier with Turbo Pascal 7 for DOS--just set the directories, graphics mode, and you're DONE. Now with Visual Studio, to remove some DLL dependencies (you can see it in other ioq3 projects compiled with vs, like Evolution Quake 3) I think I need to figure out how to static build some vs libraries into the ioquake3 binary. All the quake3 coders use unix-style stuff so they don't run into these problems. The ones who use Visual Studio either test on their build machine (so they have the DLLs already) or have people install the redistributable packages to get the DLLs. Blah, I say!

Anyway, I'll stop yammering on before TTI accuses me of using these newsposts as a blog again!