Re: an attempt at using the new id tools

Raphael.Quinet@eed.ericsson.se
Thu, 27 Jun 1996 14:52:49 +0200 (MET DST)

Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 14:52:49 +0200 (MET DST)
Message-Id: <199606271252.OAA16144@chapelle.eed.ericsson.se>
To: quake-dev@gamers.org
Subject: Re: an attempt at using the new id tools
From: Raphael.Quinet@eed.ericsson.se

On Thu, 27 Jun 1996, jschuur@onlinemagic.com wrote:
[...]
> upon running qbsp 'johnc99.map' i get the following output:
[...]
> ---- MergeAll ----
> 6 mergefaces
> writing johnc99.prt
> Bus error
>
> suggestions? might this be because i don't actually have the textures
> in base.wad or is it terminating abruptly due to something else?

I get exactly the same results during the "MergeAll" phase for
dm1.map. I ran gdb to find out what was wrong, and... I found
nothing. It crashes during an operation on vectors and I see nothing
wrong there (the pointers point to valid locations and there are no
unaligned data accesses). Maybe this is a memory problem? I had
Emacs, FrameMaker and Netscape running at the same time, so maybe it
ran out of memory and swap space? I will try to run the program on a
machine which has 128 Mb or 256 Mb of RAM (mine has only 64 Mb of RAM
and 70 Mb of swap) and see if it makes any difference.

> - what is the correct order for running the tools? qbsp -> light -> vis?

You have to run qbsp first. I'm not sure about the order of the other
two. Maybe vis, then light? Maybe it doesn't matter?

> - i placed dm1.bsp in id1/maps and ran it as 'map dm1' from the console
> and it worked. i thought add on levels weren't supposed to work with
> the shareware?

Yeah, I was also a bit surprised about that.

> - textures... how could i legally (assuming i don't redistribute them)
> compile a .wad of textures using what's in the .bsp files?

As soon as I have the time to finish it, I will release my little "miptex"
utility, as part of QEU 0.4. It takes a texture from BMP or PPM file (8
or 24 bits), does the rescaling and anti-aliasing and saves it in a WAD2
file. Well, I also have a tool called "stealtex", which steals textures
from a BSP file and puts them back into a WAD2 file, but I don't think I
should release that one. Hmmm... But it looks like this is the tool you
want, so maybe I will release it after all. But with a big warning about
copyright issues, derivative works and such.

Also, I wrote a program called "palcvt" which converts a picture (taken
from a BMP, PPM, WAD or WAD2 file) to the Doom or Quake palette and does
optional dithering (bidirectional Floyd-Steinberg dithering). This is
very useful for taking textures from Doom and storing them in a Quake
WAD2 file. Maybe I will merge "palcvt" and "miptex" into a single
program.

I told Bernd that I would release QEU 0.4 and the GAEL library this week
because the small tools were almost finished, but I would like to improve
"miptex" and "palcvt" before releasing them. I probably won't have the
time to do that before the middle of next week. I hope that you will be
patient enough.

Also, GAEL (GAme Editing Library) is probably what several of you are
looking for: it provides simple routines for loading and saving data
from/to WAD and WAD2 file (among other things). I decided to split QEU
in two parts (GAEL and the tools themselves) so that anyone can use the
functions provided by the library without having to deal with QEU stuff.

-Raphael
(Gee, why am I wasting my time writing this instead of finishing my work?)