Re: Quake map distribution: speed vs. legality

Bernd Kreimeier (Bernd.Kreimeier@NeRo.Uni-Bonn.DE)
Sat, 20 Apr 1996 19:55:09 +0200 (MET DST)

From: Bernd Kreimeier <Bernd.Kreimeier@NeRo.Uni-Bonn.DE>
Message-Id: <199604201755.TAA17252@marvin.nero.uni-bonn.de>
Subject: Re: Quake map distribution: speed vs. legality
To: quake-dev@gamers.org
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 19:55:09 +0200 (MET DST)
In-Reply-To: <m0uAW7M-0004waC@odin.mdn.com> from "Alex R. Moon" at Apr 20, 96 01:26:00 am

>>Uffe Friis Lichtenberg wrote:
>> 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?).
You are right. That is the idea.

>That was in reference to the .MAP files. I presume he meant that
>all entries beginning with '_' would be filtered out by the
>qbsp/light/vis tools and not show up in the .BSP file at all.
This is not correct.

Please re-read my comments along with the mail forwarded last
week. If I understood correctly, the bottom line is:

- the "wad" and "light" entries are used by qbsp and light,
but not by qtest1 (not sure about this)
- there are currently QuakeC dummies (entities) for these
to keep Quake qtest1 from complaining
(anybody put a undefined key into the entities file already?)
- John Carmack changed Quakes handling of the entities lump,
all "_*" keys will be ignored now
- he intends to change said entries to "_wad" and "_light",
to get rid of the dummies
- he proposes using "_*" key/value lines in the MAP files
for tasks like a BSP completion

Distribution of MAP files is useful if one wants the level to
be modified and edited by others. Automatic generation of
MAP from BSP is a nice task we could tackle along with
generating MAP from DOOM level descriptions.

Distribution of BSP files w/o mipmaps lump requires a lookup
assigning indices (as used in surfaces, generated by qbsp) to
textures (as defined in the MAP file). It is no good idea
to distribute this lookup separately. The current proposal is
to add

"_texture" " 1 WALL54_0"

lines to the entities lump in the BSP. These will not be
deleted by qbsp, and will be ignored by Quake. To use this
approach with qtest1, these lines would have to be deleted
after adding the mipmaps, to prevent warnings or errors.

However, we are far from generating BSP files for qtest1 :-).

b.