RTCW textures and messing up radiant for ET

(G0-Gerbil) #1

NEW MAPS ADDED

I R extremely pissed off. :angry:
And the object of my pissed-off-ness?
Amazingly enough, it’s people converting their RTCW maps to ET and being lazy basts in the process.
Amazing, but true.

And the reason?
Because people (who shall remain nameless but I’m going to make it pretty damn obvious who it is) are including RTCW textures / shaders in their ET maps. Too lazy to search and replace textures, they are now causing several issues:

  1. Illegally copying resources (be that on their own head)
  2. By keeping the normal names, their ‘custom’ textures are showing up in radiant as valid files. This means, even with shaderlist.txt checked in radiant, non-official ET textures still show up. Which means, if like me you use them without realising - when it comes to test your map on a clean setup, you are looking at a whole bunch of yellow on black squares.

This has REALLY annoyed me because I’ve been spending hours retexturing an RTCW map, only for it to STILL look like shit once I’d done it.

So far, of the maps I’ve downloaded, here’s a list of the culprits who actually steal RTCW resources and leave them in the same file structure:

  • Trainyard
  • ds_bunkers_b1
  • ds_bunkers_b2 (nearly got rid of 'em all, but not quite)
  • fr11 (Fidel’s footy - and not strictly fair since it’s not a public version ‘yet’)

And here’s maps that use the same file structure but with their own resources (so they still show, but it’s not ‘stealing’ as such)

  • Beach 1.xxxxx (dunno what it was up to :D)
  • Atlantic Wall BETA 2 NEW (which actually uses the lights.pk3 that comes with radiant but isn’t actually part of any game :confused: ).

So mappers, if you want to be sure you don’t use any of these totally incorrect and mostly illegal shaders / textures, you need to delete the following files from your /main

  • trainyard.pk3

  • ds_bunkers_b1.pk3

  • fr11.pk3

  • ds_bunkers_b2

  • beach.pk3

I’ve seperated out the last two because it’s only a single texture in each, so not that likely to be used :confused:

SORT IT FFS people, and stop making mapping for us others any harder than it should be… :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: (Luckily just seeing the head banging anim calms me down cos it’s so cool!)

NEW FEATURE:

List of n00b mappers who are currently known to have fallen foul of this bloody annoying issue:

  • Gerbil
  • Drakir
  • Deathmaster
  • 3 other mappers here from various other threads. Not worth naming, either you get the point or ya don’t.

Expect this list to grow in future, or hopefully not, as people immediately delete the PK3s responsible as listed above.

(G0-Gerbil) #2

Oh, and if like me you have a file called:

  • lights.pk3

you’ll need to get rid of that too. Christ alone knows where that came from :banghead:

(ziege) #3

Thanks for the tips, I’m gonna delete those maps and any others I don’t like and never play.

Another way around it is to have a two installations, keeping one clean for mapping. I’m a tight git when it comes to HDD space though so won’t be doing that.

(G0-Gerbil) #4

I already have 2 installs, one clean for testing (NOT for mapping, for testing individual pk3s), and one for mapping.
I can’t stretch to a third (mapping, playing, testing) :confused:

(Lockeownzj00) #5

This may be true, but still, I THINK footy imported them all…

(G0-Gerbil) #6

That may well be true, but currently it’s not a ‘public’ release - you can only get your hands on it because of Mr ‘oh sorry did I do wrong’ Sin :confused:
In other words, Fidel has a chance to sort it before he might get into ‘proper’ trouble. If only the guy behind that bunkery map was as understanding - he seems to be taking it personally that I pointed out he’s using illegal textures :slight_smile: A bit stupid considering he’s posting on the SD forums of all places!

Bear in mind I don’t really give a rat’s arse about whether they are using illegal textures or not - that doesn’t affect me. What does is when they don’t bother to even go to the simple effort of renaming them so they don’t crop up in the Radiant’s ‘proper’ list - that DOES affect me and really gets on me tits. It means I have to check any PK3 I download now and immediately discard it regardless of how good it is if it contains lazily stolen RTCW textures. So far this hasn’t been a great loss, but it’s still a pain in the arse and simply should not be happening :banghead:

(Ubiquitous) #7

You complain WAY too much. Get a life. You act like your maps are the best thing of all time, but they are deficient in terms of gameplay value. If you are going to bitch, at least make the maps be able to compete on a comparable level.

Allied Soldier: “Whee!! I’m swinging back and forth on a chandelier! Wow, I can play the organ! Hmm, I would rather do these things all day versus playing on a map with poor design.”

(G0-Gerbil) #8

Oh no, gosh, someone who doesn’t have the same point of view as me, I’m gonna cry :slight_smile:

Map opinions are not exactly a good way to attack a thread covering not only a legal point but also one that could well make life difficult for all other mappers including yourself (you do map right?).

Cheers for the constructive input :drink:

(Dawg) #9

Ignore Ubiquitous, he is just trolling to make himself feel better.

You made a valid point. There are legal ramifications that many people choose to ignore. I have a hard time imagining that iD/Activision/SD would ever pursue a legal case against a mapper who used these textures but that is not the point. Those that wish to abide by the rules should not have to jump through the hoops of reviewing a pk3 to see if it contains illegal textures.

Dawg

(system) #10

This may be true, but still, I THINK footy imported them all…

No the creator of the footy map is in our forum and he had a thread concerning his map. he put out the rtcw textures or replaced them.
Other point is that his map is not officaly released so you play it on your own risk. :wink:

concerning the messed up stuff with other maps:
I highly recommend that everyone uses two installations of ET. One for gaming with all the custom maps and other stuff in it and one for editing purposes.
So you can be sure you have a vanilly installation and stay out of troulbe with hundrets of different directorys and shaders. :slight_smile:

([DeaD]-SLOTH-) #11

that was installed by radiant. s - m - r - t

also, the smartest thing said in this thread was by the ubquitious guy

(G0-Gerbil) #12

Still haven’t retextured then, eh? :wink:

Cheers for where the file comes from though - weird that it installs files that will lead to missing textures in-game :???:

(G0-Gerbil) #13

BTW for anyone who thinks I’m being annoyingly pedantic about this (IE those mappers who can’t be arsed to at least change the texture and shader names they are stealing from RTCW) I invite you to peruse this thread:

http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3840

Now if you think Drakir is a mapping n00b who is much n00bier than proper n00bs who won’t get caught out by people doing this, then I suggest you re-evaluate your definition of ‘logic’.

If you want to rip textures, at least have the common decency to dump all the textures into a new folder and create (by copying and pasting mostly, it’s hardly a big effort) a new shader script specifically for your maps :banghead:

(G0-Gerbil) #14

BTW if anyone else finds PK3s that do the unmentionable, list 'em here.

(greekdish) #15

Basically…this sucks. It shouldnt be illegal for any mapper to use textures from the old RTCW. In other words, we cant transfer our maps over to ET. Thats a crock of shyt. I put in about a years worth of effort into my map in my spare time…finally got the ET scripting differences down, and now none of my textures are showing up. Thats BS. This game will die very quickly because of this crap. Im very aggravated over this. Im not going back into my map and retexturing everything. Its all ID games, and no one is making any money off these maps, so why cant we use it?? I really want to know the genius behind this brainstorm. :angry: :angry: :banghead: :banghead:

(ildon) #16

oh no! the copyright troll strikes another thread!

(Ubiquitous) #17

Oh no, the short post brownnoser troll strikes another thread! Please, can we let the term “troll” die, because it is so played out. Find a new Interweb trend to latch onto.

I happen to agree that it is really rather silly to keep the community of mapmakers (which are vital to the long term success of this game) without access to all the quality textures that were available in RTCW. Not every mapper has the time or resources to create, or hunt down textures that are worth a damn. There are far too many stinkers out there in the realm of free textures.

(G0-Gerbil) #18

True, and it isn’t that easy to retexture from RTCW to ET, but it’s not impossble. There’s not a direct replacement for every texture, but then again using the ET textures has given my converted maps a fresh new look, kind of like Carol Smilie and the changing rooms crew paid a visit :slight_smile:

ET textures have various benefits and problems over RTCW, eg:

  • ET has very little in the way of standard military textures, but on the other hand,
  • ET maps don’t tend to be a variation on grey.

Not being able to use RTCW textures is not going to be a killer - plenty of mappers are starting out with just ET, so won’t miss RTCW textures.
For those converting, it just means you have to put in a bit more of an effort, but still not as much as if you’d done one from scratch.
And if you are converting a popular map from RTCW, then people who have played the RTCW version will most likely enjoy the new ET look but tried and tested RTCW layout.

You don’t NEED to use custom textures, and once you become familiar with what textures DO come with ET (simply by going through them enough - this comes with time) you’ll realise there’s pretty much enough stuff in there for most kinds of maps (sadly it’s a bit short of normal town textures, but you can’t have everything). Then searching and replacing takes very little time.

Bar the problems caused by the PK3s in this thread, I retextured a map that’s much more complicated than any of the official ones in a couple of days. It’s really not a big deal, and the map looks better for it I think.

People are making it sound like no-one is planning on doing anything other than converting RTCW maps to ET. I for one hope this isn’t the case :confused:

Also your logic of saying we should be able to use RTCW textures cos it’s an ID game means really we should be able to use Jedi Knight textures etc. cos they all use the Q3 engine. It doesn’t work like that. We are in the position we are in - so let’s just try to make the best of it.

If you feel like you need RTCW textures then that’s ‘fine’, but move them into a folder specifically for your map, and copy and rename the shaders so they don’t clash with anything else or cause other mappers to have problems.

I mean, does anyone really want their maps to have to be deleted for other people to map properly?

(G0-Gerbil) #19

Atlantic Wall Beta 2 uses files from the lights.pk3, and includes the whole texture folder (it seems). If you’ve already deleted that PK3 then this map will once again put things up as ‘valid’ in radiant that shouldn’t be :confused:

(G0-Gerbil) #20

Older releases of THERIVER include a corrupted command map for railgun which will be used instead of the proper one.

Also for some reason it includes tons of the ET models etc copied straight over from the game install.

Shouldn’t cause any problems as such, but why??? :???: