And I thought HEKTIK was bad!

I've been working on reflux for the past couple hours, and I don't think it can get any worse than this.

There are missing textures, missing shaders, missing EVERYTHING, and most of it is broken even in wolfcam, but it somehow manages to work perfectly in Quake Live. This baffles me. The only explanation I can come up with is that id decided to break all their maps so that they're just barely useable in QL, but won't work at all in any other game (Q3 conversions such as this, for example). It's stupid, and probably untrue, but I honestly have no other idea.

I'm re-repacking all of my QL paks, in hopes that something was missed, but I'm positive that my current resources are all from the latest QL version. This is so stupid, I'm probably going to give up on this map if Muffin doesn't come online in the next couple of hours.

HERE's a list of all the missing textures on reflux, with no fixes. That's almost 200 shaders! And only about 100 of them EXIST in QL! I haven't done the chunky bunch yet: se_industrial, but I expect most of those to not have any shaders either.

Aside from all this stupid shit, something that bugs the hell out of me is the messed-up decals. An example is the weapon marker:

Hektik and shader BS

I finished converting Hektik to Q3, but there was a strange parm in one of the shaders: "novlcollapse" in "textures/sfx/portal_new_nonsolid". It didn't work in Q3, and it looks like the Wolfcam code just brushes it off (doesn't do anything, but was made to not output an error), so I deleted it. This was a relatively smooth conversion, which I'm very happy about, because it means that my technique works perfectly, aside from things like this that can't really be fixed.

This is good, but I want to make sure that the shader parm really is just a compiler setting and doesn't affect the look of the texture, so I might open QL with some HQ config and check it out. Or I could get someone else to do it for me...

Anyway, here's a DL link: hektik.pk3

I wrote a guide for repacking QL maps

I spent the last half-hour writing a short, step-by-step guide on how to convert and repack QL maps so they work in Q3, like I did with Furious Heights, Siberia and Ironworks. It's probably full of flaws and nonsense, so if any of the TWO FUCKING PEOPLE who read this blog care, go check it out and tell me what needs to be added/changed/clarified/etc.

Read it HERE!

Updates on stuff and things

I suppose I should write more stuff here, since that's what blogs are for.

Today (about 10 minutes ago), I talked to Shio, who is a mapping GENIUS, and super über pro defragger, about the problems I'd been having with Quake Live maps. What had happened was, some entities on ironworks and furiousheights were "mis-linked" to their targets, and others were changed. For example, one of the jumppads on ironworks was changed from trigger_push to trigger_teleport, and linked to one of the tele_dest entities. I wasn't sure what the cause of this was, but after talking to Shio for a bit, I had an idea: it was because the entities were linked to other entity numbers (example: entity 45, a trigger_push, was linked to entity 120, a target_location), and I had changed the advertisements from advertisement to func_static, which rearranged the list. This means that entity 45, which was previously linked to entity 120, was now linked to entity 118, which was "pushed up" 2 positions because I had changed 2 advertisements.

This made a whole lot of messes, and the ads didn't even work, which made it almost completely fruitless. But in the end, I was right, and justice prevailed once again.

What this all means is that I now know everything I should need to know to convert maps from QL to Q3, without any flaws (aside from Team Arena maps, which I don't want to keep the entities for because they create errors, and nobody plays TA anyway). Fully-functional advertisements, shaders, entities, and lights. A lot of this is because Shio is such a genius and is awesome. He showed me the -onlyents trigger, and sort-of showed me how to use it (I figured out how to use it literally 10 seconds before he told me how to use it, and we had both come to the same conclusion), and let me brainstorm by spamming him in IRC.

Enough ass-kissing: I'm going to be working on some more maps over the next few days. Toxicity and Reflux will probably be next. I might even make "fps" versions of the ones with intense shaders, like Siberia's snow, that don't have any of those details. The only downside is that they won't work on pure servers, and they might even require different bsps (if I remove the func_static on Sibera, I would have to make a new bsp, but if I only change the shader, it might not work as it should).

Here are some download links, plus some bonus fun stuff:

Furious Heights
Siberia
Ironworks

BONUS:
A broken/buggy version of Furious Heights
A broken/buggy version of Ironworks
Confetti Siberia override shader

Play more promode ;)

Siberia in Quake 3!

I asked the dudes in #tricking.eh what QL map they would like to see in Q3, and we all agreed on Siberia.

It was really easy, seeing as how I'm now an experienced repacker. There were a couple shader complications but it was all done in under half an hour (remember that I do everything by hand, plus every time I get onto a map to test it, I end up running around for quite a while sometimes).

I also decided to take this opportunity to play with a couple shader ideas I had a while ago, and they worked... somewhat. Here's a screenshot:



CONFETTI SIBERIA!

Today is an historic day!

Today is the day that I first converted a demo from defrag to Quake Live properly. No middle-ground demos recorded from wolfcam, no buggy sounds or events that crash the demo, no wolfcam-only playback. This works as a normal Quake Live demo should!

This is also part two of my three-part project, but I'm not going to tell what part three is ;)

If you want to watch the demo, you can download it HERE!

For some reason, the demo doesn't play in QLDT (I have some suspicions as to what could be causing it), but it works fine in QL and wolfcam. There are also a bunch of imperfections, such as the time being wrong, and the configstrings being Q3's and not QL's (that's what might be causing QLDT to not play the demo). I'll play with the configstrings and try to make the demo playable in QLDT, but it's fine as-is, IMO.

nebuLa needs to learn to not add spaces to his filenames, because they really do mess with autocomplete, and all those %20's in the URL are just plain ugly.

Furious Heights in Quake 3!

I decided to play around with some map conversion, because I wanted to do yet another experiment. My pick was Furious Heights.

After an hour or two of on-and-off work, I got it 95% working. All the shaders and textures are there, but the advertisements don't work. This map isn't that big a deal; there's just a big empty frame on the wall. But some maps, like Campgrounds, have the advertisements being part of the actual map structure, so if the ad doesn't show up, there's a big hole in the wall, plus some massive HOM effects.

I tried a few things to get the advertisements working: I tried changing the classname from "advertisement" to "func_static", deleting them altogether, and changing a few other parameters in a few different ways. I couldn't get them working, so I'll have to consult my experts as soon as I can.

They're available for download, but I'm not sure if I should actually publish them (lol nobody reads this fucking blog anyway)...

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In other news, DREAMHACK!!! Along with the duel finals, mccormic's latest movie, "Kleftogiannis", will be shown. He's taking a very unique approach to this, and I love talking about it. He's making a CPMA/OSP/QL movie, which in itself is very weird, but he's also essentially showing a "beta" version at Dreamhack. What I mean by that, is that because he was strapped for time, his vision isn't quite complete. He will be fixing a lot of transitions and minor bugs after the showing at Dreamhack, as well as adding a whole second track (the first track is just brilliant. It's amazing, and I can't stress that enough. It's a DnB remix of some song that I'm not allowed to name).

It's gonna be the tits!

Editing, other things.

I fixed Aerowalk (there were three missing textures, plus a broken shader), and finally captured my video, only to realize that I didn't add enough time to the end of it for proper transitioning, so I had to redo everything. And because I'm stupid, I deleted all the .ct3d files, so I have to restart from scratch. At least I figured out how to do everything (mostly), and won't have as many hindrances along the way.

This is an opportunity to fix everything that was wrong with the first instance, and make it all better in general. I know a few techniques I can use to make the whole process a lot smoother. Remaking the Aerowalk cam is really annoying, though, for many reasons, and so I stopped for today (or yesterday, by real logic), but will hopefully finish this whole thing tomorrow (or today, by real logic).

I'm also in the process of fixing all the texture bugs I can find. There are problems, of course, but I will have a fully-functional map pack soon, with absolutely no texture bugs, and possibly some improvements.

Looking a little bit at the way bsps work, I realized some cool things that are actually good to know: there is always a specific amount of room before/after a shader name when it's called in a bsp, which means that you can safely add/remove characters from the shader inside the hex editor. What it also means is that the character limit for shaders is easy to find. I haven't counted, but it's only about 30 characters or so.

I went through all the maps and fixed one bug in particular on every map that it appeared: telex. Instead of using the shader, which had proper blendfuncs, QL decided to use the raw texture, which looked like crap. So I overwrote the texture name with the shader name, and now it's all good. I had to also fix the shader, though, because it was stupidly done, and didn't work at all.

After I've fixed all the maps, and after Maverick gets off his lazy, vacationing ass and gives me an FTP, I might upload my fix.pk3 for other people to use, because I know I'm not the only one with this problem.

The last thing I'm doing is some more of my stupid demo modding/stitching. I have a basic plan, and nothing more. It will be more of a hobby that I can do whenever. It's stealing all of Mazu's cpm3a jumps from HERE. Basically, I'll be doing all his jumps, and stitching them together into one big demo full of awesome, with some clever chat thrown in wherever it fits. The way I see me doing it is, I land a jump in CPMA (and record a demo obviously), then get the pos from the end of that demo and load it in defrag, then just run to wherever the next trick starts, and transition from there. I'll have to figure some clever way to go from defrag to CPMA, because there is no savepos in CPMA (otherwise I wouldn't need to make "interim" demos in defrag). Someone with real knowledge and skill could finish this in a couple days, but I'll be doing it over the course of X days/weeks/months. I'll figure something out, or this will just be another worthwhile project sent to the scrapyard.

Movies have been slow lately. Not many new releases, and not many old movies to download. I've downloaded pretty much every worthwhile movie that's already out, plus/minus around 5. There is one in particular that I would like to get my hands on, but have no way of downloading: anti-conformist, a staged fragvideo by the same guy who made deception. Wussie has it, but he hasn't uploaded it anywhere, and own-age.com is dead so I can't get it there. It's been bugging me ever since I learnt of its existence.

That's pretty much it, aside from oranje having his own $10 VPS with massive lag spikes but an average ping of about 15ms (for both of us since it's practically right beside us both).