Need help in rebuilding some maps

Forceboat · 09-07-2007, 07:10 PM

I hope I am posting this in the right section. I need a little bit of guidance here. I downloaded a SDK of the leftover stuff that Sebastian Barz (sebcrea) did for the Episode II Mod for Jedi Academy. I already e-mailed him about some of the assets and stuff, and he gave me the impression from his response back to me that he is no longer interested in finishing the mod or in turning his stuff loose. Now, I'll get to my point. Last night (real late), I put everything in the correct folders in the base folder, however, there were at least two textures needed for the map I was trying to compile that weren't included. What's worse, when I compiled to .bsp, first I got a max_visbility_exceeded error, and then several errors about missing images and/or shaders. Okay, here's my question: is there a program or something that can repair this unholy mess of a map that he made, stripping out the missing stuff and repair all of the messed-up brushes and whatnot? I am about ready to give up, because I really wanted to compile and play this, but how can I when it is such a godawful mess??

Please, if anyone can help me out with this, that would be great. Thanks in advance.

Thor the Bassis · 09-08-2007, 07:15 AM

Could you be more specific in what u've done.

Do you have GtkRadiant? This is the mapping program for the quake engine and it will allow you to edit stuff in .map files. If you dont have it get it now. If u're compiling in radiant you should be able to fix all those errors in radiant and make some new textures and it should be fine.

The visibility error means there's too much visibility data in the map. Make any brushes which dont touch the void detail brushes and this should fix unless you have a collosally complex map. If you dont understand this learn radiant then look back at it coz it'll make sense then but for a quick answer the vis data is what tells the game what parts of the map the player can see at any time. This means the game only has to draw the immediate surroundings of the player and doesn't have to bother with whats miles away - thus speeding up game play and frames per second (fps).

The textures is just that different people have different textures on their system so you may not have some of his custom textures if he forgot to release them. You can make some textures with a program like THE GIMP or photoshop if you pay for that. If its a shader you need to find the .shader file in the shader folder and see what texture maps it uses. Shaders are special textures which have qualities such as movement, glowing, water, forcefields, transparency etc.

There's quite a lot of simple modding stuff there but if you haven't modded before you need to look at some tutorials and learn radiant, shaders (in the quake specific engine) and texture creation.