Configuring J.A.C.K. for Quake III help

[DeeP]

Hello. I'm hoping somebody here is familiar with J.A.C.K., a Half-Life and Quake map editor. I'm having some difficulties configuring it for Quake III mapping. For instance, it asks for a .wad file for textures, but I have not found a .wad file for Quake III in any of it's .pak3 files. If anyone know how to configure J.A.C.K. for Quake III, help would be greatly appreciated.

[obsidian]

Quake and Quake 3 are a few engine generations apart. I doubt your editor supports Quake 3. Try GtkRadiant instead.

[DeeP]

J.A.C.K. supports all three Quake games, including others. It includes FGD files and build programs for them. The only problem is trying to figure out how to configure it for Quake III.
http://jack.hlfx.ru/en/

[obsidian]

From the FAQ it sounds like you need to manually compile your map by invoking Q3Map2, which you'll have to download with GtkRadiant. It also mentions that it can't read .pk3 files and you need to manually extract the contents.

[DeeP]

I have already extracted the .pk3 files. Unless I'm missing something right in front of my face, the FAQ only explains that .pk3 files must be extracted, and not how to load the textures into the editor afterwords, so this is where I'm stuck.

[AndyW]

Okay i did a fast check, and its working without problems.. i think you extracted the files to the wrong folder (like me in first try 5 mins ago)

[spoiler][lvlshot]http://i.imgur.com/4RcqlQr.jpg[/lvlshot][/spoiler]

Make sure the extracted stuff is in the BASEQ3 folder like this...

[lvlshot]http://i.imgur.com/8XUSl6w.jpg[/lvlshot]

I hope that helps to bring you back on the road!

[DeeP]

I hadn't set it up the way yours is, so I've changed that. It didn't make a difference, actually, until I re-installed the editor. Everything seems to be working now! Thank you both for the help, I really appreciate it.
I will also give GtkRadiant a try.

[AndyW]

Everything seems to be working now!

Thats just what i wanted to hear, nice!
Have fun

[Hipshot]

Jack is a great editor, it's WC/Hammer delux! But Radiant really is better for Q3/QL.

[CZghost]

I tried QuArK one day, rendered totally useless without any experiences of GUI and good manual. I was unable to create a single brush in QuArK. J.A.C.K seems to be Russian editor. Russian is good unless you expect to keep the setup simple. Also I couldn't download something from Russian websites (pretty anything that ends to .ru). Once upon a time my Brother downloaded an alternative to ICQ called QIP. It's a Russian chat program that supports ICQ and Skype Chat protocols. But as expected, some trick was there. It was a freeware program, but at cost of adverts displayed in browser, installation of additional toolbars, changing homepage to QIP.ru and even Internet Explorer (or maybe even any browser) window title was slightly changed. It was browser name "provided by QIP.ru" - it was a hijacker. Very tricky to remove back then. No more...

GtkRadiant is really friendly to setup and you do not have to extract pk3 files, it can read them. It does not have to load all textures via configuration file, but if you plan to use custom shaders, add these to shaderlist.txt on new lines. Setup only needs to specify the game working direktory and the engine executable name. That's all to setup. Everything else is automatic and GtkRadiant decides himself. It's pretty bugy in directories with spaces in its names, with national characters in the names, underscore is just fine. Also very long path does not look good and may cause additional bugs. Good advice is to install Q3 into a short-named path outside Program Files folder as it needs to be writeable (it's required especially on 64bit systems where Program Files folders of both 32bit and 64bit parts are write-protected and require Administrator permission (that means you would need to start Radiant with Admin perm each time, which costs time as you always need to click you opened the app...