the latest trenchbroom 1.x release can work with { textures, in case you were working around that.

Not sure about where to get a good bat file tutorial, sorry 

so, alpha textures start with "{" ...You're kidding me...how many tools does that break? 

The compiler gui thing doesn't do that, although writing some kind of command line application that regex replaces stuff would be trivial.

I don't do i/o stuff much, but I imagine you could do the replace in between your input and output streams and never even have to load the file into memory, just scan the buffer before you feed it to the output? 

"We mark important threads by prefixing the name with a semicolon and the words 'DROP TABLE'" 

Yeah I was just going to work around the TB problem, but if it's already solved in editor then I'm good. 

Well, older versions of TB for one.

Using the - symbol would have been much better. I wasn't much involved when that particular discussion was going on though. 

it's a terrible idea, but apparently it matches the half life convention, which means someone at Valve also had a terrible idea.

Though personally i have a bigger objection to the fact that it's typographically ugly. 

in other news, in order to prevent people from stealing your textures for other maps, just call it "ground 3" or something.

tbh, my stance is that editors should just be quoting texture names anyway, and that its only okay to drop the quotes if its alpha-numeric-plus-underscore.

my solution to batch files is to install cygwin, then you can use 'sed' or whatever. probably overkill though. 

someone at Valve also had a terrible idea

what NO 

Does anyone know if there are any WAD tools for OS X? Want to extract a WAD from a BSP, maybe make my own WADS, etc. Or am I being ridiculously optimistic and should just fire up a virtual machine? 

will do the trick for extracting a wad from a bsp:
"bsputils --extract-textures e1m1.bsp"
(from http://disenchant.net/utils/ )

for other things, I just use wine for OS X (http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/) 

many thanks ericw, just what I needed 

Anyone know of some particularly useful/interesting/advanced/silly/stupid bsp tuts?

domes, concave semi-cirles, anything not exclusively right angles, rules-of-thumb for unusual multi-faced polygons, etc...

I can already hear the cacophonous chant "just use meshes!"

but yeah, bsp stuff plz :) 

 

...but looking now 

Very valuable resource for beginners; I always refer to it when I map ... err, I mean when I incompetently mess around with TB. (Not sure how useful it would be for you, KillPixel, seeing as the finished parts of kpcn2014 are better than anything I could hope to complete in this lifetime.)

But for other newbies who may stumble across this thread and have trouble finding the guide in question:
http://www.quaketerminus.com/hosted/happymaps/curv_tut.htm 

 

CZG's tut is nice but making those pipes in TB isn't too easy IMO, I end up doing a lot of vertex work instead. 

yeah, the tutorial is based on having a specific skewing mode in WC which surprisingly does not get replicated in a lot of other editors.
specifically, this skewing mode will rescale all brushes in the selection. 

I expect you could get similar results by rotating and clipping maybe. I don't tend to do pipes too often. 

@total_newbie - Thanks for the link, and I have seen that tut before. Also, that's very flattering (really), but I have difficulty believing you couldn't do something just as nifty, or even more so ;)

Anyway, ANY bsp tuts would be nice at this point. I feel like maybe I missed some fundamental technique or understanding that could be making my life a lot easier...

My mind is not very mathematically oriented and texture projection is kind of a headache for me. I'd like some formula to use when figuring texture size for angled surfaces. I think for a 45 degree angle the texture sure be like 33% bigger and fitted so there is no visible 'stretching'.

That ease of vert manipulation in that tut doesn't seem possible in radiant, or is it? 

Just use Jackhammer or something that has automatic texture alignment. 

it's the best editor out there. In terms of alignment I rough out most of my geometry whilst having texture lock OFF. That way your textures are aligned by TB default (and faces will be cut properly). The only time you will be doing a lot of texture aligning is when you add in details, and most of this work can be shortened by building prefabs.
I have prefabs for pretty much all texture themes now, building maps is fairly rudimentary. 

I'm talking about texture 'stretching' on angled surfaces as a result of texture projection. AFAIK this is something an editor can't 'fix'.

I'm pretty sure the only way around it is by making a texture a certain percent longer/wider, that percentage is determined by the angle of the surface. Maybe I'm wrong, was hoping someone knew more about this and could clearify. 

if you don't wanna use jackhammer you can figure out the stretch ratios with some simple trig.