quake map editor trenchbroom possibly useful.

[ceriux]

hey so i thought id share this here. it was released a while ago. but its an amazing editor. i know that you can use hammer/worldcraft to map for quake not just half-life. so maybe we can use this to map for msc?

its especially useful when making terrain and mountains!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr9FR1W ... r_embedded

http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/

 

[MS:C community]

From 09:12 onward the video shows some amazing stuff. Automatic face-splitting when doing vertex manipulation to maintain convexity of brushes, wow.
And 3D clipping is shown at 11:33... Incredible! I've always wanted to be able to do that.

Even doing something as trivial as this in Hammer...

...always takes more time than it should.

I'm definitely gonna check TrenchBroom out, thanks for the tip!

 

[ceriux]

you probably will have to do all of your texture work in hammer, it does load fgd's but probably isn't set up for all the features that half-life has in it's fgd's , but it export's to .map which can be opened in hammer and compiled in which ever compiler you use. if this ends up being useful. i can try to convert the msc guy over to quake.mdl so that you can see him in trenchbroom (that way you know you have your proportions right.)

the editor is also open source. so if we have any talented coders hanging around, they may even be able to set trenchbroom up to work perfect with msc.

 

[MS:C community]

I gave this a quick try yesterday.

I made a cuboid with dimensions 320 x 192 x 192 units and the idea was to vertex edit a massive cliff wall, using a roster of 16 by 6 of these cuboids. The front faces (192 x 192 units) were the ones I wanted to extrude, so this cliff wall has, as seen from the front, dimensions of 16x192 by 6x192 units.

Sadly, that did not go too well. This program is in dire need of WASD+mouse movement. As the only camera options are looking around *or* moving the camera up/down/left/right (along the plane perp. to view dir.) *or* rotating the camera around whichever point of an object you select with the mouse *or* zooming in/out, navigating is difficult. There's no flying around like you have in Hammer or BSP Viewer.

And in vertex editing mode, the corner/edge/face vertices only render when you're within a certain distance from them. Needless to say, for my massive 3072 x 1152 units cliff wall, I had to be just a tad bit too close to see enough vertices simultaneously to edit.

Awkward (and when crossing large distances also slow) camera movement combined with the render distance limit of the vertices didn't make this really easy. The vertex editing tool is also in dire need of an axis lock for extruding corner vertices. I wanted to move vertices either towards me or away from me, not to the left or right. If you use Alt+drag, you can only move vertices along the z-axis and there should definitely be a key combination to restrict movement around either the x or y-axis, rather than the entire xy-plane.

The idea is good, but without better camera movement, higher render distance for the vertices and a horizontal axis lock for vertex extrusion, terrain creation on a large scale is barely easier than when using Hammer. And I couldn't load Half-Life WAD files (only tried a few, though).

 

[Thothie]

I suspect you won't be able to load any Half-Life wads... I had similar issues with Quark, even in Half-Life mode, the BSP texturing system is quite a bit different... Which is a real shame, as I suspect Quark could be tweaked to decompile maps fairly cleanly. Not that I've ever gotten Quark to put out a MAP format that Hammer or the HLT compilers will take - but I've been told it's possible. ...and Quark can extract textures from Half-Life maps into Half-Life compatible wads, no problem.

I suspect, if you were use to Maya, the camera system, etc, in this would be more intuitive... But yeah, should be making your navigation with FPS players in mind, when making a mapping program for said games.

Still interesting though.

 

[ceriux]

yeah, the editor doesnt load half-life wads. only quake, which is why i said you may need to do all of your texture editing in hammer still.

but if you're having problems with controls the website has good information for all of that.

http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/docs/

if you guys want ill see if i can come up with a good workflow for using this to make terrain and such for half-life.

i can make a dev texture set similar to half-life 2 which should easily translate between the two editors.