if anyone is still interested, my solution to my problem above with long vis times was simply to remove all the terrain into a seperate map. that map will only get a quick vis, leaving the left-overs of the original to get a full vis (which only took 20 hours vs 700-1200~, lol). 

What does that mean? Can you have separate maps like that for release, or is this just a way to let you iterate without killing yourself? 

I am confused about what you said.. Is it really possible to fastvis only one part of a map, and then fullvis the rest of the same map ? How do you do that ? 

Having a .bsp placed in the map as a model? 

sorry for the confusion, i just meant that i split the map up. the first portion has enough terrain to connect the interior areas, but i reworked gameplay such that the majority of the terrain could be removed and placed in a seperate map to be played linearily after the first.

terrain seems to be a serious vis killer. all those odd angles and varied planes really fucks the BSP process up resulting in thousands of extra portals or whatever. since the terrain section is mostly wide open anyway, and vising would have limited to no effect, that map will just be fast-vised. 

i would be incredibly bad-ass if you could, for example, modify qbsp so that if you cover an area with a 'fastvis' textured brush, any portals (or whatever they are) that are touching that brush are ignored in the full-vis process. :P 

Maybe placing bsp's as entities could work. How it'd not get screwed by vis (flickering entities) would probably depend on dividing it up into chunks with some trial and error though. 

lighting something like that would be a nightmare though. :S 

depends on the engine i guess. with a shiny swiss army tool like darkplaces it should work fine. for some fun copy some map to progs/player.mdl and do chase_active 1 plus chase_back 3000 (or something like that). a piece of cake for dp.

proper lighting (for the "external" objects "in" the terrain map) would hard though,yeah 

Where can I find a suitable add new weapon qc?
I searched at Inside3D but all there is are modified already ingame weapons. 

It's just a matter of finding the right tutorial:

http://www.inside3d.com/showtutorial.php?id=60

This one is about adding new weapons. You do have to pay attention to some of the slight cheats they have to use. One is that rather than setting up a new key to press for the weapon, they make it so that pressing 2 twice brings it up. They also don't make a new entity in the map for it, which is something I expect you'd do if you're making a custom map. 

Building http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/bsp_pak_tools/qeu03.zip on modern Linux is easy, just remove the lines containing the del and coff2exe references.

And now I'll continue the search for a commandline mip2saneimageformat tool. Could not get MIP2BMP.EXE from http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/bsp_pak_tools/qmaphack11.zip to work with Dosbox. 

Niels Froehling's QuakeTools-library would be an epiphany but compiling is just not possible without a tremendous amount of work I guess. http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/bsp_pak_tools/qtools0.3-src.zip 

the right tutorial indeed, but after covering all errors I just keep
drawing 2 untill I too error.
Seems as if replacing v_shot.mdl is an easier way for testing.

Strange to conclude these tuts are so wicked in error messages.
Although they added my EathQuake. 

i've been trying something new. essentially, working only from the top view, i'll drag out brushes 32 units high of varying width and length creating floors. i create a significant portion of the map at a time in this manner and i specifically try *not* to pay much attention to the size of those floors, other than keeping them on a 32x32 grid for texture alignment purposes.
i'll make the decision that, say, a generic hallway is 192 units wide, but everything else goes. a room can be any dimension (and any combination of brushes to create the final shape).
after doing this, in a side view, i'll semi-randomly move connected sections of floor up or down up to 256 units (in either direction).

this can lead to some pretty weird and convoluted shapes with that sort of 'tumor growth' mapping look. 

pics to demonstrate, please? 

I just installed GTKRadiant to try some Quake editing, and I set up the paths all right, but it won't load any textures other than the SHADER NOT FOUND one. When I look in the console it says:
Texture load failed: "textures/"
Any hints on what could be going wrong? 

In the latest version of GTKR 1.5, I just put the .WAD files in C:\Games\Quake\id1 and point the editor to C:\Games\Quake for the game engine path. 

How do I extract the WADS from the PAKS? I've tried several programs but I can't see any .wad files anywhere... 

the wads aren't in the pak files at all, but you can get the textures from the individual BSP files.

But you can also get the wads here: http://www.quaddicted.com/wads/ (look for "quakewad" i think") 

Downloaded the quakewad file and put it in id1... Now works perfectly! Thanks! Although you need to rename the quake101.wad to quake1.wad. 

What light program and command line options? How many light entities? (relative to the number of brushes maybe, just to give perspective). Do you use minlight or skylight or both? How long does it take to run the light part of compiling the level.

I'm real curious about this cause I read a post where Than said the Plumbers Carry Shotguns level took about 25 seconds to light, and my current map is taking almost 10 mins for a high quality pass. There were 2758 brushes and 16621 faces at the time of this run:

----- Light 1.43 ---- Modified by Bengt Jardrup

Extra 4x4 sampling enabled
Soft light 3 enabled
Soft distance 16 set
File: c:\quake\id1\maps\wish16.bsp
Using minlight value 15 from worldspawn
1079 entities read, 625 are lights, 13879 faces, 3.9G casts
4 switchable light styles

lightdatasize: 467 kb

Elapsed time : 9:58 

Many of my maps have taken double that (like 20 mins) in the past.

Plumbers Dont Wear Ties is a detailed map, but not too detailed, but also its not really that big. Its a realistic scale, and its condensed, but its not very big compared to say the Warp maps or Marcher Fortress. Load Bengts engine and load the Plumbers map and type into the console "lightmaps" and try it with your own map too. Lightmaps are if you like "X amount of texture worth of light info", so the bigger the map (so long as the texture scale is 1:1) the more lightmaps.
Also if you have plenty detail in your map that wont help the speed (but it will make the map look sexier :).

I wouldnt worry about it too much! 

I probably should have mentioned I used a Core2Duo e6850 (2x 3.0 GHz) with 2 GB RAM.

I wasn't worried really, it just seemed like 25 secs was way low for a map like that. I ran id's e3m1 this morning with the same settings as I used for my map and it took 2 mins 14 secs.

Anyway, I'm still curious how other people light their maps.