I’m using Blender with the MDL exporter, Gimp to edit textures and I export them to 100% quality, import into TexMex, reverse it for export, export it to TGA, drag it onto the blender model, then export it. I, however, use Pedit to make custom palettes for my maps. I can import the .pal into texmex to convert it. Does the blender MDL exporter also convert textures? 

I think the blender exporter must at least perform some pallete conversion. I've always used Preach's utility to add skins after the fact since the exporter can only handle one. I thought they needed to be .pcx to work right though. 

Is there a way to do Half-Life style level transitions? Presumably with some specific engine or mod required, of course. 

As far as I know, there are no mods for Half Life style transitions. You might be able to use some QuakeC code to make it yourself, but it would be kinda tricky and require mathematical calculations to compare the previous level to the new Level. 

The blender plugin does some least-squares mapping of RGB colours to the quake palette. For a good quality skin you want to do the conversion beforehand, so you can can consider options like dithering, or even manual pixel pushing. But for just testing out a model it should be fine.

I'd recommend grabbing a copy of QME (Quake Model Editor) - that way you can open up the exported .mdl file without needing to boot up the game, and play around with a native editor if you are having problems with an export. Again I'd recommend using it for development, but not the final version, as it doesn't handle models made by the blender plugin well. It's nice to be able to paint the skin in a 3d view. 

To program this yourself you would need the following:

info_landmark entity present in both maps.
trigger_changelevel, probably with a string .landmark with the targetname of your landmark.

Inside the changelevel use function:
Calculate x,y, and z distance of the player from the info_landmark.

Put all 3 distance values into empty parms in your mod such as parm9, parm10, and parm11.

Set a bit inside one of the parms to 1 to indicate level entry point 1 instead of standard start.

In DecodeLevelParms inside client.qc, check if the bit is 1, if so set the player's starting origin to info_landmark's origin plus the offsets from the landmark stored in parm9, parm8, etc.

Downsides:
You only get so many parms for storing values in between levels such as health, ammo, runes, and weapons. This means that corpse remembrance is impossible. You could set a .deadiflandmark value on monsters set to 1 if you want them to be gone when the player returns to that same level again amd check for the same bit you did in DecodeParms and remove (self). So corpses would be gone then

Coop requires you to add some sort of info_playerstart_coop2, 3, 4 for coop players to start near the right landmark depending on how many different entrances and exits you want. You will of course need selarate bits for landmark1,2,3, etc. to check for in DecodeLevelParms instead of just one. 

Sorry that was for Keiya 

It is so weird i have to tell it to someone, and to booth it happened two times. I'm tempted to put it on the drunk thread due to its weirdness.

To summarize, out of nowhere Hammer has deleted all the ''color'' keys from all the lights in a single map, after having put them several days ago, and had worked on the map and compiled it a lot these last days.

It reminds me of the Witchcraft (named by RikyT23 that way if i remember well) that i reported some years ago. http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=12855&end=12866 and http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=14183&end=14186

Now back to put the keys back on around 350 lights ... and hope it doesn't happen again ... 

Hammer can "lose" stuff if you try to open an rmf and save as a vmf and then later open the rmf again by mistake.

JACK can "lose" stuff if you try to open a vmf or rmf and save as a jmf and then later open the vmf by mistake.

You're SOL if you accidentally then saved over your jmf with the old vmf...unless you happen to have your autosave feature turned on in which case check the back ups to see if they still have color. 

As it happens while i am working and not after opening. I know about .vmf files but never cared enough to find what they do throughly, and never used them. Also i have checked, and Hammer doesn't have the option to only save to .vmf (only to only .map and .dxf) and it does it automatically for all the formats at once, or at least with Baker's Qadapter on.

Truth to be told i have a suspect: the only new thing i have done between the two keys' deletes is test the Ignore Groups option, which in Hammer and in Jack probably too gives lots of problems. For example:
- If i select any or all brushes of a brush entity with IG on and edit them in any way, the entire entity can go back to the original world brushes, which can happen too if i try to clone parts or the whole of it.
- Same happens when editing with IG on a group with any world entities in.

Apart from that, my suspicions come from:
- Why it affected only the color keys i suspect is because it is the only key i manually inputed and is not on the .fgd on this map
- Most of the lights where grouped each with a box made out of world and entity brushes.
- After all this weird behavior when editing entities with IG on i stopped completely using it for entities or groups with entities till i edited the alignment of the textures of all the brushes of a entity brush thinking that it wouldn't trigger the bug and a few minutes after that i noticed that the color keys dissapeared.
- What i don't get is why it affected all the lights, grouped or not. My supposition is that it messed with all the entities at the same time and it has to do with the .fgd reason. 

how do i put down blood decals, i think i saw one in map jam 9 there was a death knight body with a blood decal i was wondering how i do it myself 

It might be a {fence texture on a func_illusionary that's one unit tall and textured with skip on the sides.

It might just be a texture that has blood splats on it.

It might be a func_illusionary with a self.model of "progs/s_blood.spr", but I doubt it since it would have to be precached. Not sure, but .angles would also need to be something like '0 0 90'. 

if I were to import my own blood decal, would it get stored in the map file when it compiles, i would really prefer to keep my map releases as a single file. 

If you use colored lights you will have a .lit file next to your map in the maps folder. FYI. If your stain map is a "fence" texture then yes you "bake" it into the bsp file. 

Hi! New guy here, eager to start mapping. I just downloaded TrenchBroom and set it up as the manual says from the download. I also downloaded the 0.92.1 version of Quakespasm from the site and am using it as the engine for the application. I'm new to mapping for Quake 1 so I decided to compile a small square room map with some random stuff on it to see if I set the tool up right and it compiled with no error message. As soon as I try to run the map via console command on Quakespasm, I get the error message "Mod_LoadBrushModel: maps/test2.bsp has wrong version number (1193291567 should be 29)".

I don't exactly know what I did wrong, I only made a few brushes and entities. The directories with the game path is set at the Quake 1 folder same thing with the engine with the Quakespasm executable. I'm using Tyrann's Quake 1 Tools (v0.15.11, not exactly sure if that's the newest or the most recommended.)

Here's what the compile window looks like.
https://imgur.com/a/8wE4S

I don't exactly know what I did wrong, would like some feedback. 

1193291567 == 0x47202F2F == "// g"

Looks like somehow you just renamed the .map to .bsp instead of actually compiling the thing. 

Yeah, about that. I'm guessing I need to play around with it a bit. I'm not that big into coding so I don't know what else to do to fix this. There was a screenshot of the compilation window inside the Trenchbroom manual, tried the parameters exactly as it was in it and I ended up just renaming it like what you said. 

Whoops, nevermind, got it working now, thanks for the response anyways. 

I am talking about arches like this:

http://www.celebrationspartyrentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Wrought-Iron-Parisian-Arch.jpg

I can create corners just fine but not something as complex as a proper arch. I just can't figure this out. Anyone have a tutorial? 

https://imgur.com/a/tmtmz 

See response above but also start playing with the vertex tool. There was a stream last week from Josh Skelly that really went into detail on his method. Go to the end of this video about 5:55:55 or so.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/178387750