being / Player1 was telling me that some Quake3 maps will work in Nexuiz if they are using custom textures.

First, is that true?

Second, anyone know how to determine if a map is using all custom textures?

Dokujisan wrote:First, is that true?

Yes, darkplaces supports Quake 1, 3 and HalfLife map formats. q3bsp is the "native" format for all maps bundled with Nexuiz.
But darkplaces doesn't support all q3 shaders, so some maps might have problems. Also q3 maps won't show up in the menu, because they don't have mapcfg files. So you either need to add those yourself or load them from the console with "map" or "changelevel".

Second, anyone know how to determine if a map is using all custom textures?

Load them into Nexuiz annd see how they look. You will notice If textures are missing. There will be bright white surfaces in that case.

Example:

For missing textures the quake retexturing project can come to the rescue sometimes (all opensource textures).

It was said already that the quake retexturing project might not be totally legal. Its nice in general But one would have to consult a lawyer first before using textures from them and releasing them together with a map! Most of their textures are BASED upon copyrighted stuff and if they are TOO equal to the original stuff it might indeed be illegal.
The same thing holds true for map remakes. The only chance to be legal is to start TOTALY on your own and NOT with original mapsources and to be different to the original. And EVEN then its a legal gray area!
Just to keep someone from getting trouble..

alright, I tried loading and playing some q3 CTF maps. I got a few of them to run, but the CTF maps didn't display any flags. I created mapcfg files for them, which set the game mode to ctf. No flags in site on any of the maps. Any suggestions?

Maybe if I find some decent ones, I could talk some of these guys into open sourcing their maps.

Yes, the entities might have different names.

But this is no big problem - when the map is loaded, type on the console sv_saveentfile. You then get an .ent file you can edit. And for example change the classname of the red flag entitiy to item_flag_team1 (no idea what it is in Q3A).

ahh, I did that and the file was created under /data/maps/
In that file, I found this

{
"spawnflags" "0"
"origin" "-1216 703 80"
"angle" "360"
"classname" "team_CTF_blueflag"
"gametype" "oneflag , ctf"
}

so I just change that to ...

{
"spawnflags" "0"
"origin" "-1216 703 80"
"angle" "360"
"classname" "item_flag_team2"
"gametype" "oneflag , ctf"
}

and then I change the red one to team1

is that right?

Exactly. However, you'll still have problems with shaders and all the other entities. And if you plan to host these maps on your server, mind, that you cannot host any of the original id maps from quake3's pak0.pk3. Only home cooked levels that does NOT use any baseq3 textures.

Well we could also make Nexuiz compatible with team_CTF_blueflag and team_CTF_redflag, thats just 8 4 lines of code..

there are for sure more entities of that sort... is there any documentation on that?

divVerent wrote:there are for sure more entities of that sort... is there any documentation on that?

I guess the q3 entities.def file should be helpful....
Meanwhile i added team_CTF_redflag & team_CTF_blueflag

Could OA media be used for replacement textures on Q3 maps in Nex? Maybe as a separate download with a link to OA's project page?

Dunno how useful that would be, since OA doesn't have alot of textures. =0

Is a full replacement set in the works, though, for full compatibility with mods and custom maps?

yeah, except i'm not a texture artist, and neither is anyone else on the team.

Chris Holden stopped doing new textures as far back as September 2005 so we have to use what we got :O

mind, that you cannot host any of the original id maps from quake3's pak0.pk3. Only home cooked levels that does NOT use any baseq3 textures.

I understand. I wouldn't want to use the official quake3 maps. However, if there are Q3 based maps that use some of the baseq3 textures, those textures will just show up as white. I checked a few maps and they appeared okay without the base textures.

But as far as shaders are concerned, that will affect things like lava, teleporters, jump-pads and the like? I saw a teleporter-looking part of a map that didn't function, so I assumed that was a shader that didn't carry over.

If I used these maps (after I get the flags to appear), will the missing shaders or textures cause any technical problems, such as client crashing or slow-down?

Jump pads would be an entity problem.

Shaders are just visual things (primarily, at least); texture blending, for example, wouldn't work. I'd imagine that simple water-like effects (such as lava) would work fine.

Dokujisan wrote:[if there are Q3 based maps that use some of the baseq3 textures, those textures will just show up as white. I checked a few maps and they appeared okay without the base textures.

Please understand already, NO MAPS SHOULD BE HOSTED, THAT SHARE ANY MEDIA INCLUDING TEXTURES, MODELS, SOUNDS, OF ANY BASEQ3 ORIGINALS!

Shaders are scripts that tell the engine, how some surfaces should behave during the game, like animation, blending, stepsounds, anything that interfers with the player - lava, slime, water etc.

Basically, shaders that have multy levels doesn'T work in nexuiz. DP only understands the first two levels.

Please understand already, NO MAPS SHOULD BE HOSTED, THAT SHARE ANY MEDIA INCLUDING TEXTURES, MODELS, SOUNDS, OF ANY BASEQ3 ORIGINALS!

Hey, using ALL CAPS is not going to make it more clear.

My point is that the media (be it textures, sound, whatever) is not on the server or on the client, so there is no problem from a legal standpoint. The baseq3 media is not being used at all. Some of the maps reference the baseq3 media, but the media is not there, so the textures appear as white. Copyright applies to the use of the media itself, not pointers to it. Entities that appear are Nexuiz entities. Models are either custom or they are Nexuiz models.

Yeah but its a bad idea to rely on people to use the baseq3 pak files to make the level look nice. People can download the map via mapdownload just fine but it will reflect badly on Nexuiz if the maps are half white because of missing textures..

Sorry, as you can see, it was a bit late, I was a little tired .

I totally agree with esteel: even if you don't share (no download option) the mapmedia, but you make a map that uses baseq3 textures, would make Nexuiz to look like as it can'T stand on it's own, it needs media from other games, and look like not a stand-alone game.
However, if you do so, you still have to think about warning people, to only play your maps, if they have a legall copy of quake3 (and of course the pak0.pk3).
The problem comes from, that if you made a map for quake3 with id textures, you made it for people, who bought the game, so they PROBABLY have a legal copy too of those textures, models, etc. With Nexuiz, you can do the same, but how can you be sure of the fact, that PROBABLY they have a legal copy of quake3?

Set aside al teh practial problems it may not be totaly legal anyway. How to aply GPL to non-code content is a complex question. When a map is compiled some of the resulting data is taken from the textures, models and so on. For example models are broken down and included in the map, the shadows of some transparent textures are a resuly of that textures alphachallel and so on. In short the data in the .bsp file could be argues to use the copyrigted material in quake3 (or whatever game it may be). Im sure some sneeky lawer could crawl upp yer arse and rip your guts out from the inside if the company the materials belong to are willin to spend enougth cash for this service.

So unless you are willing to gamble just dont do this. or host maps that does.

Thank God this is NOT id software

Like Esteel said, perhaps the best way would be to do remakes of the levels, but make them original enough to avoid copyright issues. In the past id has sort of given the blessing on map re-makes, provided there were no "mechanical" conversions(i.e decompiling a bsp into a map and recompiing it). That issue came up in 1998 with the Doom YPOD project conversion for Quake 1. Also, as most of you know, they did release the entire Q1 map sources, so maybe, just maybe they'll eventually do the same for Q2 and Q3. One can only hope anyway, right?

Irritant wrote: Also, as most of you know, they did release the entire Q1 map sources, so maybe, just maybe they'll eventually do the same for Q2 and Q3. One can only hope anyway, right?

Well, releasing the Q1 maps was mostly John Romero's initiative. He left id after Q1 - so I'm not very optimistic to see the Q2 or Q3 map sources.

When a map is compiled some of the resulting data is taken from the textures, models and so on.

I understand your concern. I think a lot of people are generally fearful of litigation from large companies. However, I don't think their copyrights would extend that far. That would be like anything created by photoshop belonging to Adobe just because some of the data inside the .psd comes from Abobe. Any media owned by ID is not included in the .pk3 file, and that is the main concern. I live in the land of lawsuits (U.S.), and I'm not concerned with this from a legal standpoint. I would certainly take that risk.

However, I wouldn't want to upset anyone in the Nexuiz community. I wonder if I could talk some of these map editors into open-sourcing their custom q3 maps. Then someone could remove the q3 elements / references in pk3 file and use them for Nexuiz without issues. That would be a perfect scenario.

Like Esteel said, perhaps the best way would be to do remakes of the levels, but make them original enough to avoid copyright issues.

Maybe someday I'll be capable of doing that.
Right now, I'm not a map editor, and I'm just trying to find some good maps to play with Nexuiz.

Dokujisan wrote:

When a map is compiled some of the resulting data is taken from the textures, models and so on.

I understand your concern. I think a lot of people are generally fearful of litigation from large companies. However, I don't think their copyrights would extend that far. That would be like anything created by photoshop belonging to Adobe just because some of the data inside the .psd comes from Abobe. Any media owned by ID is not included in the .pk3 file, and that is the main concern. I live in the land of lawsuits (U.S.), and I'm not concerned with this from a legal standpoint. I would certainly take that risk.

However, I wouldn't want to upset anyone in the Nexuiz community. I wonder if I could talk some of these map editors into open-sourcing their custom q3 maps. Then someone could remove the q3 elements / references in pk3 file and use them for Nexuiz without issues. That would be a perfect scenario.

Well for map models its obvious that thise would be a copyright violation, however i dont _think_ id or most other companies would risk the "badwill" it would couse to take legal actions against a individual that uses some of their stuff in a non profit work. Im simply saying that its higly likely that sutch a case could be made, if someone wanted to badly enougth.

It would surely be nice to have some clearly defined boders here, but i dont think we will see that in a while. Its trixy to define how licenses and copyright aplies digital artwork used indirectly. If there is someone here that has a clear picture of this, that insight would be more then welcome.