UT99 to Nexuiz map converters?

[MirceaKitsune]

I've been wanting for a while to bring UT Goty maps to Nexuiz and play them there. I seen the Unreal 1 engine uses a pretty similar architecture as the Quake 1 engine in maps, with of course slight differences regarding brushes and other things. I was wondering if anyone has ever made a converter (or knows another way to convert) a Unreal Tournament classic map to a Nexuiz map. In other words, a converter which can take any Unreal 1 engine map (UT99, DeusEx, etc.) and convert it to a .map file in a format which gtkRadiant can read. What I'm basically looking for it to do is to copy the brush arrangement from a .unr map and put it in a .map file in a way Radiant can read.

I have mapped a bit for UT and as far as my understanding goes this should be possible. The main differences between UT and Quake are that first off, UT uses subtracted brushes for the area where the players reside, which in quake need to be represented with normal brushes closing off the space. Substracted brushes could just be ignored and remade in Radiant manually the right way, or if the converter would be smart enough, represent it automatically through many surrounding brushes. The second difference is that in the Unreal engine, one can create hollows and inner angles in the same brush while in Radiant a brush cannot have an inner angle. This would be easily fixed if the converter would know how to split a brush in multiple brushes at this point, and preferably use caulk on the sides which get separated.

It would be preferred if it could also take all the textures which the map uses from its .utx packages and make them .png or .jpg files in a subfolder under Textures, also remembering what texture was set on each face that way. If that isn't possible everything can be manually retextured with similar stuff I guess... as I said I'm mainly looking for something which copies the brush arrangements. I wouldn't hope there could be a way to copy the lights, player starts and other things as well, but if there is any tool which can do such a brush porting that would be awesome.

[speaker]

Hi,

Automatic conversion of UT maps to Nexuiz (or Quake) format is not a trivial task. AFAIK there is no utility to do such a conversion. I don't say it is impossible though. UnrealEd can export map geometry to T3D format. This is an ASCII text format (vaguely similar to the Quake MAP format) in which the coordinates and positions of all brushes are specified, as well as texture info (I think, but it was a long time ago that I worked with T3D files). So it should be possible to write a translator between T3D and MAP. The job is complicated by the fact that the T3D files also contain substractive brushes, and I can't imagine how these could be handled by a simple translator. You would have to do a lot of analysis to properly reconstruct the additive brushes that are acceptable in Quake MAP files.

IMO remaking UT maps in Radiant is a much simpler solution. Not to mention that in this way you avoid a lot of nasty license issues.

[shameless plug]
Remaking is the way I usually take. Check out for example my UT conversions 'q3_curse2' and 'q3_bloodflowers' available at LvL.
[/shameless plug]

Hope this helps.

[MirceaKitsune]

Well as I said, substractive brushes could be either ignored and redone manually in Radiant by the user or the converter could recreate it from several brushes which would close off around its edge. Manually remaking the maps... can be done of course but with hundreds of times the effort then being able to port. I mainly intended to convert maps for personal use so license issues wouldn't be a problem. Even if I'd share a ported map UT Goty is 12 years old now so no one would mind much I think

[TVR]

... Manually remaking the maps... can be done of course but with hundreds of times the effort then being able to port. ...

As UnrealEd relies entirely on subtraction process, certain show stoppers exist to prevent conversion.

FIrst, obtaining text source of the maps.

Next is the probability of parsing bounding boxes coordinates to enclosing convex sets.

Following, texture map translation to opposite faces.

And most importantly, Unreal script to entities and shaders.

... Even if I'd share a ported map UT Goty is 12 years old now so no one would mind much I think ...

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