Getting Terrain into Quake 3

[o'dium]

Can somebody lend a hand?

We just added Quake 3 map support to our new engine, and one of the things we want to work with is terrain. All well and good, but i have no idea how Terrain works in Quake 3. I have GTK, and i cant get my head around adding it.

Not i know how the materials work, i know the sahders and textures, what does what and all those tricks. I just dont get building the actual terrain data.

Every time i build terrain from a picture, the whole thing comes out flat as a pancake, and not like how i wanted at all anyways

Does anybody have a good tutorial on making terrain or can give me a quick step by step on how to do it? Maybe even another program that makes it easier to work with terrain?

Thanks in advance.

[StormShadow]

Easygen is great for making terrain for q3 engine games:
http://www.webalice.it/bancala/

Here is a good tutorial for how to use it:
http://www.wolfensteinx.com/surface/tut ... sygen.html

The tut is for wolfenstein, but its pretty much the same process as it is for q3, you just need to change your work folder to q3, etc.

[o'dium]

That looks just like what i'm after, thanks dude.

[obsidian]

Does your engine also support Q3Map2 shader directives? If so, setting up the terrain shaders has been greatly improved. In terms of geometry, you can now build terrain using trisouping rather than the old quad method.

See a modern tutorial here:
http://simland.planetquake.gamespy.com/ ... ain1_1.htm

[o'dium]

Our engines a Per pixel lit Quake 3 based BSP format engine.

[obsidian]

I suppose this is for Quake 2 Evolved? For the terrain stuff mentioned above, it doesn't have to do with altering lightmaps (since you won't be using them), it has to do with vertex alpha blending the terrain textures together. The old metashader alphamap terrain blending method used in Q3TA is pretty much obsolete now, so if your engine supports the q3map_alphaMod directive, terrain/shader editing has been greatly improved both visually and in terms of ease of use.

I strongly suggest you take a flip through Sock's tutorial above.

[o'dium]

Will do. Last time i checked the new blending it used alpha blending and the end result ingame didn't look to good. I'll have a word with berserk later about it.

And no this isn't for Quake 2 Evolved, its for overdose, our first full game thats a shit load (read, exactly) like ET:QW, only done by us lol. Never be as good but it will be a great learning curve, and free, so.

[o'dium]

I wonder if you'd be better off to model your terrain and implement a system similar to d3/q4?

No, collision would be horrible that way.