House Cleaning!

Thanks to the popularity of Urban Terror, the time I have to work on The 6th Floor falls into the “weekly” category. Not to fret, I come bearing gifts this week. To start off the week, check out the newest 6th Floor Poll which begs the question, “Strafe Jumping or Sprinting?” You make the call, then make the vote!

Also I got around to finishing a new Oswald Rant. This time we get to “think different.” No, not as in queer, but as in Macintosh and the valuable support they lend the mod community. That is when a development team decides to create their mod so it is able to run on a Mac. So check out, Think Different: Urban Terror.

As I mentioned last week, unless you were under a rock, Silicon Ice released their Beta 2.3 version of Urban Terror. This was mainly a map pack, but did include a few changes. The community seems to enjoy the new levels. They also continue to find more errors and inconsistencies in some of the levels. One of the most notable would be ut_rommel by Bar-B-Q. Interesting that Rommel has probably been the most discussed level in the Urban Terror Forums. There are some performance issues that have arisen since its release. Bar-B-Q is quite aware of that, along with the numerous errors. He is currently working on a revision for an update. Many seem to enjoy Rommel.

I was able to test the latest build of Rommel last like at the Netzwerk Terror LAN, here in SoCal. With teams at 8 v 8, the map was terribly crowded. We were set up to play CTF, which was probably a mistake with 16 gamers, due to the narrowness of some of the areas. In order to break up the this corner, there was a new opening added this area. There are a few routes to take to get to this area, which is somewhat of an intermediate area. A considerable amount of killing and carnage takes place in here.

If your team is successful in getting to this point, you proceed to the ladders and the death defying sprint across this tightrope which leads to the other side of the river.

In nearly 2 hours of game play the blue flag, at the base of the bombed out church was grabbed once, while the blue team made it across the bridge once. No caps! It became TDM with set spawn points. This is not the final version, as Bar-B-Q is looking to work on the layout to provide the community a more solid Rommel.

For those who want more information on creating and naming your own textures, check out this bit of information from some guy I know.

– Q3A doesn’t accept all JPEGs and TARGAs, only a subset.
– Textures can be any size, but will appear blurry unless their dimensiona are a power of 2.
– You do not have to write a shader for your textures unless you are making use of special effects.

I wrote something about this in this forum some time ago, but I’m too lazy to look for it, so I’ll just repeat it:

Here are some general guidelines for making/using your own textures with Q3A (or Q3A:TA, etc.):

 

• Always make your texture dimensions a power of 2.
  If you don’t, the Q3A engine scales them to a power of 2 when it loads them, and that can blur detailed textures.

 

• Always save the “master” copy of your texture in a “lossless” format.
  Each image manipulation program usually has its own proprietary format that preserves layers, etc., and that’s usually the best to use.
  In particular, do not save your master texture as a JPEG (.jpg), or each time you load and save it, you will lose more and more detail.
  (This is because JPEGs are a “lousy” format.)
• If you don’t need to use alpha channels (texture transparency), save the game texture (not your master texture!) as a JPEG.
  Use the highest compression you can that will allow the texture to still look good.
  Don’t sacrifice quality for the sake of compression, but compress it as much as you can while maintaining the quality you want.
  Remember that JPEGs are expanded when they are read in, so compressing a JPEG does not save any texture memory; it only makes your texture file (and the .pk3 file) smaller.
  Do not use “progressive encoding” when saving as a JPEG, or some versions of the editor will crash when trying to load them.
• If you need to use texture transparency, save the game texture (not your master texture!) in a TARGA (.tga) file with alpha channels.
  Note that if you want to make the entire texture have the same transparency, you should save as a JPEG and use a shader to implement transparency.
  Save as a TARGA only if you need parts of the texture to be more transparent than others (e.g., a grate, chain-link fence, etc.).
• IMPORTANT! Never never never place textures in the “standard” texture directories.
  The best place to put them is in a directory that has the same name as your map.
  For example, if your map is named “bloodbath.bsp“, place the textures in a directory named “textures/blood_bath“.
  So, if your texture is named “wall3.jpg“, place it in “textures/blood_bath/wall3.jpg“.
  (Note: Do not use spaces in your texture or directory names.
  In fact, to be on the safe side, use only lower-case unaccented letters (a-z), digits (0-9), and the underscore (_) in your names.
  Also, do not use directory names over 8 characters long unless the parts are separated by an underscore (e.g., use “textures/blood_bath/wall3.jpg” instead of “textures/bloodbath/wall3.jpg“).
  (It seems to be OK for the texture names themselves to be over 8 characters long without underscores (e.g., “textures/blood_bath/myverylongnamedbloodywalltexturenumber3.jpg“).
  Also, note that the 8-character-long problem doesn’t happen to everybody.)Make sure you preserve the directory structure when making your .pk3 file (i.e., if you list the contents of your .pk3 file, the texture should show up as “textures/blood_bath/wall3.jpg“).

Quote of the day comes from SwedeXX on the Urban Terror Forums: “I may be ‘dead as fried chicken, baby’ tonight, but you’re ugly. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up in perfect health, but you’ll still be ugly.” Enough said. Thanks Swede!!!