Can I compile only texture changes?

(Grand Nagus) #1

Let’s say you have a big map that you’ve done a full compile and all the lighting and entities look good. BUT, while touring your map you discover one misaligned texture!

Is there a switch for q3map2 that would only do a texture compile? I’m tweaking some textures and thought I had them all the way I wanted, but I’m discovering some that are not quite aligned the way I want. I’m not changing any brushes or entities, just the alignment of some textures, and I don’t want to do a full bsp/vis/light compile again.

Does anybody know what that switch is, if it exists?

Thanks in advance for the help!

(onu) #2

Lighting stage is likely the longest part of your compile, and since the light compile would have to create new lightmaps anyways you’re kind of screwed. Just suck it up and do another compile, or make the fixes and find someone you trust to make the compile for you.

(Grand Nagus) #3

Actually, lightmaps are separate textures that are blended into the textures that you see. So if you tweak the texture, you’re not necessarily messing with the lightmap itself. However, if the texture you’re playing around with emits light, then you’d definitely want to do a full compile.

But I’m sure there’s a ‘onlytexture’ compile switch in there somewhere… If there ain’t, then there should!

(ydnar) #4

The way the drawsurfaces are constructed makes it extremely difficult to do an only-textures compile, even if it was just offsetting.

This feature could be added to a BSP editor though…

y

(Grand Nagus) #5

Well, crud. But thanks for the reply, ydnar!

BTW, what’s a BSP editor? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that…

(wudan) #6

Lol, I was just thinking about that!

Essentially, all the textures are listed in the first part of the BSP and then indexed by the surfaces? I’ve looked at the texture part, but not how surfaces reference textures, but it’d make sense if they were indexed.

I wrote a little prog that resides on my hard drive that reads the entities and textures out of a BSP and puts them to text files, just so I could have a peak at the Enemy Territory Entities.

Basically, I could modify it to ‘Frankenstein’ a BSP, but aren’t the triangles and whatnot rebuilt every compile time, and potentially different with each -bsp?

Or maybe he means something higher up … I guess if you wanted to take the time to write a program to re-paint the surfaces and whatnot, you could, but it’d really take longer to make such a program than it would just to re-compile and make the changes.

(ydnar) #7

Shifting texture coordinates on a surface or particular triangles is a trivial task. It could be added to any Q3 BSP viewer in less than an hour.

y

(shadowspawn) #8

…

what about texture remapping.

trivial? damn dude that would’ve saved me a compile or two, but then again there’s always other things that wind up getting corrected after noticing something like that, like stupid aas crap.

i swear, for tc i just waited till ALL the bug reports were in, otherwise i’d be recompiling every damn day.

(Tha_Slughy) #9

which tc map ?

(shadowspawn) #10

i think all of them had shifted textures at one point or another; gtk doesn’t give warnings like it used to for working with brush primitives; and snap to grid when its on will tend to muck around with some ‘fitted’ textures.

doesn’t in spog’s latest branch, that thing is the bee’s knees.