Map Mixer for Quake II released!

[NIN-IceFox]

We at NIN have just released a multi-purpose tool beta featuring the ability to re-texture and relight any bsp very quickly (no compiling/de-compiling needed!) as well as overrides being faster than ever before to create and work with in several ways!

http://www.netdoo.com/ninclan/board/YaBB.cgi?num=1310116985 intro
http://www.netdoo.com/ninclan/board/YaBB.cgi?num=1310112731 And a tutorial I've written on how to use the main functions

Hopefully this should be very useful to any mappers and server admins as well as even those who've never dealt with bsp files and overrides before due to the ease of use this tool offers!

Interface Example:


Before and after:

[peewee_RotA]

That's awesome!

Does it edit the .bsp files directly?

[VaeVictis]

ONLY THE WEAK NEED TOOLS TO RETEXTURE A MAP.

fuck yeah

ill go in and edit the hex on those bitches!

[VaeVictis]

mine was cooler, quit being a noob fader... debugger > txt file

[|iR|Focalor]

I need a drink mixer for Quake2. Y'all got one of those in the works?

[NIN-IceFox]

That's awesome!

Does it edit the .bsp files directly?

Yes it does, with only overrides being apart of course. So that is why it will create a copy of the bsp with a new name with your changes to it. Main thing about it is how quickly an overhaul of a map can be done unlike before, what may take hours can now be done in minutes once you get the hang of it. And if a retexture you aim for is not matching the lighting you can do things like nocolor and adjust brightness with arghrad in the easy to use interface to match it. Convenience is what it's all about!




Not the best example of what it can do but it gets it gets the job done very fast. With a little time taken an average quality id map can look totally new.

[The Happy Friar]

I got this hosted on fileplanet for ya:
http://www.fileplanet.com/221022/220000/fileinfo/MapMixer-for-Quake-II

[NIN-IceFox]

I got this hosted on fileplanet for ya:
http://www.fileplanet.com/221022/220000/fileinfo/MapMixer-for-Quake-II

Cool, Thanks for adding and featuring it!

[CodeBlack]

Wow, just wow.
That dm4 looks so freaking fresh, same with the vanilla map, i wish this was done to all maps on ts.

[adz1La]

those dm4 textures are fucking sick!

[Jay Dolan]

Neat idea.  I like the drag-and-drop texture replacement.  What would be really sweet, imo, is support for higher-res textures.  But that gets tricky because you'd have to do a lot of texture coordinate math, and a lighting recompile would be necessary to increase the lightmap resolution to match the larger textures.  But the results would look really hawt, and would allow folks to make high-res re-rubs of older maps.  I dunno, just a thought.  I've done this manually for a few older maps that we've remade for Quake2World, and it's very tedious.  Some automation would be most welcome!

[NIN-IceFox]

Oh it was indeed a most freshed up  feeling, even though that map was pretty hard to do being my very first retexture job and some stock textures were repeated a lot in areas that made it difficult to get a good blend, so it's not perfect. I know some commented in server that they did not realize it right away that they were in a stock map since it looked so different!

Can give those two example maps a go in link below. The mintro overhaul is one I really liked the outcome of!
https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=c2aee3d0fe383da7&resid=C2AEE3D0FE383DA7!120

Neat idea.  I like the drag-and-drop texture replacement.  What would be really sweet, imo, is support for higher-res textures.  But that gets tricky because you'd have to do a lot of texture coordinate math, and a lighting recompile would be necessary to increase the lightmap resolution to match the larger textures.  But the results would look really hawt, and would allow folks to make high-res re-rubs of older maps.  I dunno, just a thought.  I've done this manually for a few older maps that we've remade for Quake2World, and it's very tedious.  Some automation would be most welcome!

I know I'd certainly employ use of a similar feature myself too, there is plenty still on the drawing board that can hopefully be implemented as this is still only a beta and Ruiner welcomes any feedback for improvements and features!

[[BTF] Reflex]

very nice 
If you retexture a map on client side like this, with same name, will it still pass map version check?

(Feel free to remove vae's, fader's, and focalor's "comments" from the thread to freshen it up as well)

[Jay Dolan]

If you retexture a map on client side like this, with same name, will it still pass map version check?

Unfortunately, no.  Quake2 calculates a "hash code" of the .bsp file, which factors in the contents of the entire file to produce a magic number.  Updating the texinfo and lightmap sections in the .bsp file (these are called "lumps" in the code, btw) certainly qualify as modifying the contents, and so the hash code would change as well.  You'd get a "local map differs from server" error when connecting.

It would be possible to put this optional, updated data into a separate file, but then the client would have to know to load textures and lighting from that separate file -- i.e. it would require modification to the client engines to support it, which is probably infeasible given how fragmented the community is on choice of client.  I think baking separate .bsp's is the right way to go.. with HTTP downloading, it's not like it takes forever for folks to load them up.

[EmeraldTiger]

Not sure what`s going on, but I linked to my textures folder in baseq2 (baseq2/textures) and it doesn`t load anything.

Looks like a great program tho. I plan to add some Q2 mapping in the mix to my Q3 mapping and this will be useful for overrides.