GtkRadiant 1.6.4 to officially support Mac & Quake

[Wixen1 [Q2C]]

" Submitted by jdolan on July 9, 2013 - 8:28am

I'm very happy to share that GtkRadiant will support Quake2World and Quake II on 3 major platforms starting in version 1.6.4, which is already in testing."

Link:
quake2world.net/

Attachments:

[jaydolan]

Thanks for the bump, Wixen1. I've been working quite hard on making GtkRadiant a competent editor for older idTech games, specifically Quake2World and Q2. FYI, compiling Quake2 maps with this version of Radiant will require q2wmap to be installed. This compiler is vastly superior to the stock tools in a number of ways. The only downside to using it is that it lacks support for "lightstyles," as these were removed from Quake2World ages ago.

More to come as we get closer to the release

[knightmare]

Any possibility of KMQ2 support as well? It's a slight alteration of the Q2 profile, with some new surface flags and a coordinate range that currently goes out to +/- 16384. I had been considering forking Q3Radiant or IonRadiant for this purpose, but support in GTKRadiant would be better.

A nice usability improvement would be to make clip/hint/skip/trigger brushes transparent, like you did with caulk surfaces shown in one of your screenshots.

Is only q2wmap compatible with the .map files produced by GTKRadiant, or is it the only Q2 map compiler that hooks into GTKRadiant?

As far as lightstyles in Q2 are concerned, the performance issues with these dynamic lightmaps in multitexture mode were fixed by MH, who devised a way to batch-update them. Q2 engines with his fix run great even on systems with Intel GPUs.

[jaydolan]

Hey knightmare,

Your coordinate system requires no change. GtkRadiant doesn't enforce max bounds on .map files for any game. That said, to officially support a game, TTimo is requiring an active volunteer maintainer take ownership of the given game pack. Now, I don't think, given what you've described, that KMQ2 would truly require its own game pack. The changes I've made to the surface inspector to support all idTech2 games will allow you to use all 32 surface flags -- and you can even give them meaningful labels by providing a default Radiant "project file" template with KMQ2. You can see an example of the project file format here:

github.com/jdolan/quake2world-data/blob/master/target/default/scripts/default_project.proj

Not the cleanest syntax, but .. I didn't create it :>

The Q2Wmap tool works with standard .map files, and I'm in the process of hooking it up to Radiant for BSP Process Monitoring. The main reason I'm hinging Quake2 support on my compiler is that I know that it's readily available and stable on all 3 OSes that Radiant now supports. The older tools do not currently compile in the GtkRadiant tree. The older tools also lack proper multithreading support and are riddled with Valgrind errors and memory leaks. So, while Q2Wmap lacks lightstyles, it's in general a much better compiler for the majority of Quake2 maps. I don't remember the last time I saw a lightstyle light on a deathmatch level.

If you wanted to contribute patches to GtkRadiant to get the stock tools compiling and working well, I would definitely be in favor of that and could maintain them moving forward, tho. Let me know.

[knightmare]

That's good to hear. GTKRadiant 1.5 allowed changing this in the game pack for each game.

By id Tech2 support, will you also be including support for the m32 textures used by SOF and Daikatana's 9-mip .wals?

One issue I had with 1.5 was that when I enabled TGA/JPG texture support in Q2's game pack so I could see the skins on MD3 models, it also loaded the (larger) retextures for Q2 maps, causing them to be misaligned. Would it be possible (for id Tech2 games) to scale down the rendered size of 24-bit textures if a .wal of the same filename is found?

A handy thing would be support for previewing models for the Lazarus mod's model_spawn, model_train, and model_turret entities, much like id Tech3's misc_model is supported.

Switched / styled lights are actually disabled in deathmatch, but they're an important element of ambiance in Q2 SP maps. However, MH's Q2 optimization also improves performance with dynamic lights.

[jaydolan]

I would encourage you to download the latest test builds of GtkRadiant 1.6.4 and file any bugs / feature requests on Github so that I can bounce them off TTimo and proceed from there. Other contributors might step forward with ideas or solutions, too.

Test build release announcement:
icculus.org/pipermail/gtkradiant/2013-July/011859.html

Mailing list subscribe page:
icculus.org/mailman/listinfo/gtkradiant

Github project page:
github.com/TTimo/GtkRadiant/

IRC channel:
#radiant on QuakeNet

I'm not familiar with MH's dlight optimizations. I moved Q2W to hardware light sources years ago.. it's been a long time since I've looked at the lightmap streaming code

[jaydolan]

Just an update on this, GtkRadiant 1.6.4 is in release candidate right now, and is available for download for Mac, Windows and Linux. Q2WMap now has support for BSP Process Monitoring, so it can give realtime feedback through the GtkRadiant user interface. So to map for Quake2 using GtkRadiant 1.6.4, you'll want to install Quake2World in order to have q2wmap. At some point, I may make a q2wmap "standalone" package, but not in the immediate future.

Download GtkRadiant 1.6.4:
icculus.org/gtkradiant/downloads.html#binaries

Download Quake2World BETA:
quake2world.net/pages/downloads

Don't forget to run Quake2World's Update utility to ensure you have the latest.

Here's a video showing how to setup GtkRadiant to map for Quake2World on Mac. The concepts, in terms of the file paths you must point Radiant at, are universal:



More details on all of this are available on the Quake2World Level Design guide:
quake2world.net/books/documentation/creating-levels

Knightmare, have you had a chance to try this out and / or create a project file template?