Re: Quake map distribution: speed vs. legality

Uffe Friis Lichtenberg (uffefl@diku.dk)
Sat, 20 Apr 1996 01:28:07 +0200 (METDST)

Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 01:28:07 +0200 (METDST)
From: Uffe Friis Lichtenberg <uffefl@diku.dk>
To: quake-dev@gamers.org
Subject: Re: Quake map distribution: speed vs. legality
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960419232826.6850D-100000@flash.globalnews.com>

On Fri, 19 Apr 1996 jschuur@flash.globalnews.com wrote:

> if i understand correctly, it is being proposed new quake levels should
> only be redistributed in a .map format, since each level contains the
> textures it uses. reditributing quake levels in a .bsp format would be a
> violation of id's copyright.
>
> calculating the nodes to a quake level however can take up to an hour
> even on a 4 processor alpha (according to information from id). surely no
> average home user is going to wait for hours before his level is
> converted from .map to .bsp.
>
> or am i misunderstanding something here? is there an intermittent format
> with calcutated nodes (and lighting and whatever else qbsp, light and
> vis do) that merely needs to be assembled to the finished product quickly?

As I see it destributing a .bsp file does not necessarily infringe ids
copyright, unless you include some of their textures. So what we need is
to destribute a .bsp file without ids textures, that only needs to be
preprocessed before use (ie. copy missing textures from id1.pak).

I remember Carmack stating that all entries beginning with "_"
(underscore) will be ignored by the quake engine. Therefore we could
transport the texture information in such entries (or am I wrong?).

Something _really_ smart would be to have the distributed .bsp file be a
valid .bsp file, ready for play. Only before being preprocessed all
surfaces would have the same texture! And this texture could simply be
black with the inscription: "Don't play this level before running
smartutil.exe on it..." or something similar!

This way newbies could download their Quake levels, play them, and _not_
have to ask in newsgroups or on IRC why the levels never work!

(Cool: self-documenting and all ;)

Zonk,
Uffe. [uphfe]
uffefl@diku.dk

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