Q2DM2 Tokay's Towers Style Map?

[bengreenwood]

Hey,

Does anyone remember Tokay's Towers from Quake 2? I used to love that map. Has anybody converted it over to Nexuiz yet? If not, anyone know of anything similar? Or where I might be able to get the map file for the original so that I could port it myself?

Cheers.

[ai]

You would only be able to do that if that map is under the GPL license. At least not distribute it if it wasn't. But sorry on the matter, I do now know this map nor of a converter I bet someone here does.

[Strahlemann]

Tokay's Towers is a really great map!
I loved it

There have been made 2 conversions for quake3 (http://lvlworld.com/search.php?q=Tokay).
The first one (the tourney version) plays quite well, and there's only one missing texture, but the layout is different to the original one (smaller).
The second version uses a lot of original q3 texture that don't show up in Nexuiz
So if you want to play Tokay's Towers in Nexuiz you'd need to completely rebuild it on your own. Or try to contact the q3 mappers and ask for the source files.

[bengreenwood]

Thanks for the advice. If I remade it for Nexuiz, could I make it public or would it not be GPL or something?

Also any similar maps to Tokay's Towers out there?

[Strahlemann]

If you remake it and release it under the GPL that would be the best. But that involves using textures which are GPL'd (like all Nexuiz-textures). Or you make your own.

Of course you can use other textures as well and release the map to the public, it just won't be included in an official nexuiz-release. No one forces you to make GPL'd maps

I don't know of a similar map to Tokay's Towers in Nexuiz/Quake 3. There are some multi-atrium maps out there (search lvlworld.com) but those are very rare.

[bengreenwood]

Does that 35 map pack include unofficial maps?

Alternately maybe you could have some links to non-official maps on the Nexuiz site?

Or even have some kind of level converter built into Nexuiz so that you could play Quake or Quake 2 maps? Maybe you would have to change the settings for textures/ weapons etc. for each map but it could work, right?

[Strahlemann]

The maps in the mappack are all unofficial. They are not licensed under the GPL, so they can't be part of the standard Nexuiz-releases.

The maps in the mappack were chosen because most of them don't use standard-quake3 textures, thus provide their own textures within the pk3 => they nearly worked flawlessly with Nexuiz from the beginning. Additionally the mappack provides the mapcfg-files, a campaign, and proper waypoints for Nexuiz' bots, which were all made especially for the maps from the mappack. Quake 3 maps don't play very well with bots in Nexuiz without the waypoints.

I believe there's no link to e.g. lvlworld.com (where most of the quake3 maps that have ever been made are hosted) because of this fact. There should be a link to http://hagger.rbi.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~polzer/nexuiz/maps/ though imho.

About the level-converter: If i'm not totally wrong, Nexuiz already supports quake 1 maps (remember: Darkplaces (Nexuiz' engine) is built off the q1 engine ). But i never tried that before.
And i have no idea about the quake2 maps. Could be that they don't work with Nexuiz. A converter would then be very nice.

[divVerent]

Q1 maps don't work completely, as the Nexuiz player and the Quake player have different sizes. So there will be some odd misdisplays when you do that.

Q2 maps are not supported by the engine at all.

[Rad Ished]

hmm i got this q2 map pack and they seem to work in nexuiz, apart from the ladders that is. It's got match1, strike and DMs 1 to 8. I only looked around tokays tower so far but it works fine, seems a bit small tho. Got it from file front.
http://files.filefront.com/CHs+Q2+Class ... einfo.html

[divVerent]

You can still do something about the problems with "closed source" maps like this.

I'll describe how I ported q2dm1 to Nexuiz. I started with a Q3 conversion of the map.

1. Scaling. Quake 2 maps seem to work best with a scale of 1.5, 1.75 or even 2 in Nexuiz. To scale the map, use:

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q3map2 -scale 1.5 q2dm1.bsp

You'll then get a scaled version called q2dm1_s.bsp. Do not delete or overwrite the original yet. Repeat this with different scaling factors and try playing until you like it. You may want to use "sv_cheats 1" and "impulse 99" when testing it to get the right weapons for a jump.

2. Lighting. Quake 2 maps tend to be very orange, and this is annoying. Note that they looked almost grey in software rendering, as the software renderer did not support colored lights at all. It probably is a good idea to make lighting somewhere in between. One of many ways to adjust lighting is this:

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cp q2dm1_s.bsp q2dm1_s_l.bsp
q3map2 -export q2dm1_s_l.bsp
mogrify -modulate 100,70 q2dm1_s_l/*.tga
q3map2 -import q2dm1_s_l.bsp

This mogrify format changes the saturation to 70% in all lightmaps. That still looks orange-y, but not as much as before - it still looks true to Quake 2 then, but isn't as intense any more. You may also want to use other editing operations to make it brighter or darker, or use another batch image manipulation tool than mogrify.

Sometimes, you may also want to apply a batch image operation to the textures - I used Gamma on all textures of q2dm1.

3. Entities, variant 1. Nexuiz entities have different names than Quake ones. One way to re-entity a map is GtkRadiant. Decompile the map using

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q3map2 -convert -format map q2dm1_s_l.bsp

You'll get a file q2dm1_s_l_c.map. Edit that in GtkRadiant, and just ignore the broken texturing - it's fine, you won't compile the decompiled map, but rather use the original BSP in the end. Change the entities in GtkRadiant then... when done, you apply the changes to the map like this:

Code: Select all

cp q2dm1_s_l.bsp q2dm1_s_l_c.bsp
q3map2 -onlyents q2dm1_s_l_c.map

This only updates the entities, so the broken texture alignment in the decompiled map won't be a problem.

3. Entities, variant 2. Load the map into DarkPlaces, and use "sv_saveentfile". Edit the q2dm1_s_l.ent in a text editor and change entities, until you like it.

In both variants, watch out for ammo_ entities - in Nexuiz, they don't work. You need to replace them by one of item_cells, item_shells, item_bullets or item_rockets.

Have fun!