Transitioning from Quark to Radiant

[bst]

Hi,

I have been using Quark for quite a few years to mess around making maps, I never actually finished one before and its just a hobby really, and I like how Quark works (the useability) very much. But I want to finish a map for Quake Live and I'm guessing if I stand any chance of it getting in I will need to use Radiant. I want to learn how to use it anyway because Quark does have some issues which have annoyed me for a long time (its slow and can be buggy)

The thing is, I'm having trouble getting to grips with some really basic parts of radiant, such as:

* How to wrap a texture from one face to another

* How to manipulate a curve
In Quark, you click on a curve and you can see the manipulation points, you just click and drag them.. theres more to it but its very simple. In GTKR I make a cylinder and its just lines... no points I can move or anything, and nothing in the manual as far as I can see. Its really stumped me this one

* How to lock all views so they zoom in and out together (not that important but I found it useful:) )

* How to organise entities/brushes/curves etc into groups so they can be moved around/hidden/unable to select/etc. I saw the "region" feature but it doesn't seem to be the same kind of thing.

I can't really trust the manual because it seems to leave so much out, and omg its the most unintuative software ever, so I can't just muddle through like I would normally, lol.

I am using version 1.5 of GTK Radiant, but I read that a lot of people use 1.2 or Q3 Radiant, or QE radiant, or GE radiant, whatever it is, lol. I'm so confused at the moment

What I really need is a Radiant guide for making Quake 3 maps, I have looked over these forums and google, but theres so much stuff I can't get my head around it all (I've been to this page: http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewto ... =4736#4736 but I got confused again xD). So if anyone can point me in the direction of a good guide (one which is like Aeons Q4 mapping FAQ would be perfect) or help me with my problems above it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to any help

[4days]

in a similar situation here, in that i've never made a finished map and tend to map for the sake of it - and that i use quark.

not wanting to evangelise for it, but what's making you move away from quark specifically? radiant's a lot to take on if you're against the clock and already familiar with another app.

[Plan B]

I still use GtkRadiant 1.2.13, so I hope most of what I'm going to say is also applicable to the 1.5 version

How to wrap a texture from one face to another

If I understand correctly, you mean copy one face's texture's properties to an adjacent one.
For that, middle-click on the original face, and ctrl-shift-middle-click on the adjacent one.

How to manipulate a curve

Select your mesh (shift-left-click) and hit V to go into vertex manipulation mode.
Just left-click to select a vert or left-click and draw a box around multiple verts, and then drag with left-button.

How to lock all views so they zoom in and out together

I'm not aware of such a function in GtkRadiant, but I strongly advice you to set up the editor so you just see one of the three editing views at a time, and switch between them with crtl-tab.
I also started mapping with all three views visible at the same time, because I felt that way I had a better three dimensional grasp of what was happening.
But once I adapted to this layout, I really came to appreciate the amount of editing space available.

[lvlshot]http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff294/plan_b2/rad.jpg[/lvlshot]

How to organise entities/brushes/curves etc into groups so they can be moved around/hidden/unable to select/etc.

You can group by selecting the parts you want to group (shift-left-click) and then right-click in editing view and select func => func_group.
To then select the entire group, select one part of the group (shift-left-click) and hit shift-A.


I understand how it all might seem a bit unintuitive when you're coming from quark, but "intuitive" just means "what I'm used to", right?
Plus it pays to learn Radiant's functionality, because idtech4 and (probably also) idtech5 still use editors that expand on it.

[Hipshot]

I've done the transition, Quark Radiant. It's a vise move.
There's a lot of stuff that you will miss though. Like the _how_ you group, what you can group, etc.
My reason for moving, which I did like 7 years ago, was that Quark just couldn't handle Quake3, that was what I thought. And also, Radiant felt a lot faster than Quark.

[bst]

Wow, thanks for the replies, very helpful Thanks for answering all my questions Plan B, I'll give it a try later on

The problems I have with quark are:

You can't open a .map file made in Quark in Radiant (except by converting the BSP into a MAP)
It can be very slow towards the end of making a map (one reason I never finished one)
It doesn't handle deleting faces well (ie making a wedge)
Curve texturing doesn't seem as advanced
Certain models and stuff takes a bit of messing around to get working, have to do a lot of things manually
Its not easy to add custom textures/shaders
There seems to be more guides and help available for Radiant than Quark
I like to make Quake maps and maybe even a Rage map when it comes out, and all the latest id tech will be out on Radiant first, with more support (or so I understand).

xD

I'll be back to report my progress!
Thanks again

[obsidian]

Rage is being developed under a different platform than Radiant, for now dubbed idStudio. It will be a full featured platform for Windows only, with more tools built into the editor, but it will still have the basic level building concepts of Radiant style editors so a transition from one to the next isn't bad.

Between the different editors, QeRadiant is the oldest, designed for Quake and Quake2 and ran on Windows platforms only. This evolved into Q3Radiant which was used by id Software to develop Quake3. That was eventually ported over to GtkRadiant, using the Gtk+ toolkit to support the additional Linux and Mac platforms as well as adding support for other Q3-engine third-party games and mods. GtkRadiant is what most people use these days though there are many different versions and "branches", depending on personal preference, one may choose one over the other. The (arguably) most stable builds are 1.4.0 and 1.5.0. I haven't heard of GeRadiant, a google search pulls up a "GE radiant electric cooktops", but I wouldn't be surprised to see a whole array of editors based off of the Radiant family.

1.4.0 supported a wide range of games using the idTech 3 engine via gamepacks, a collection of developer files needed to create maps for that game. IMO, GtkRadiant 1.4.0 is the most polished version though not the most bleeding-edge. 1.5.0 was more or less rebuilt from the ground up and adds support for idTech 4 engine games like Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey. It introduced lots of new and fancy features but at the same time also lost a few, which is why certain people may gravitate to either 1.5.0 or 1.4.0 or even older versions. In the last year or so, I've more or less made the transition to 1.5.0 and haven't really looked back.

1.6.0 (aka ZeroRadiant) is currently under development and is based off of the 1.4.0 branch and is being developed for use with Quake Live. It's more of a fusion between 1.4.0 and 1.5.0 but since it's in active development, it's quite buggy at the moment.

If you're also interested in mapping for Call of Duty 4 or Half-Life 2, you'll be interested to know that the learning curve isn't very large once you've mastered Radiant, since both CoD and HL have their roots tied to the Radiant family of editors. Their technology is based on the same concepts.

[bst]

Thanks for the info & clarification obsidian.

Hmm GE radiant... lol at the cooktops.. I guess it must have been a typo I read somewhere O_o

I think I'll stick with 1.5.0, I've got the structure of my map down now, I imported it from Quark into Radiant by converting the BSP file, seems to work ok and it compiled, the textures are messed up but it was all one texture anyway, so no problems there, all the entities are working fine too. Just got a few things to add, and I'll post it up as an alpha

Cheers

[jal_]

I've done the transition, Quark Radiant. It's a vise move.
There's a lot of stuff that you will miss though. Like the _how_ you group, what you can group, etc.
My reason for moving, which I did like 7 years ago, was that Quark just couldn't handle Quake3, that was what I thought. And also, Radiant felt a lot faster than Quark.

Me too (well, I still work with Quark for mantaining some maps). I miss many things at gtkradiant. Grouping for a start, but proper texturing tools is the one I miss the most, specially at texturing curves. Quark is just way superior in there. I also miss the way selection clicks work in Quark, but I can live with that fine. The texturing hurts every day

I wouldn't even consider texturing these iron pillars in gtkradiant. I did them in Quark without much effort. For making them in gtkradiant I would go straight into a model export and uvmapping them in a modelling app.


EDIT: I'd work with both if I could, tbh, using Quark for texturing. But gtkradiant has incomplete map file support and there's no way to properly load the map file back.

not wanting to evangelise for it, but what's making you move away from quark specifically? radiant's a lot to take on if you're against the clock and already familiar with another app.

Python is simply too slow. It was ok when making duel maps, but I'm working with big terrain maps and Quark can't move them. Also, I work with models a lot now, and Quark doesn't display them (only does md3 which are pretty much useless).

* How to organise entities/brushes/curves etc into groups so they can be moved around/hidden/unable to select/etc. I saw the "region" feature but it doesn't seem to be the same kind of thing.

As someone who also comes from Quark, I'd tell you to forget about grouping. Func_groups aren't really a good replacement of Quark folders, and can mess up your map if you try to use them in the way you do with Quark ones. I try to rely on the visual filters (which are very nice and Quark doesn't have) for clearing up visibility and if I need to move a room I just go a select it all on the fly. Also, in Quark I worked primarily on the 2d views, at radiant I do 99% of the work on the 3d view.

The problems I have with quark are:
(...)
Curve texturing doesn't seem as advanced
(...)

I'm afraid you'll find curve texturing is much worse at gtkradiant. At Quark you can always relay on the UV-mapping in the texturing window, which, while a bit hard, gives full control. Radiant pretty much gives you a couple of options and you have to live with the results, or spend the whole afternoon moving and scaling the texture to make it fit.

I did the move to gtkr 1.5. I've heard 1.4 is much better in that aspect, but I can't say.

I imported it from Quark into Radiant by converting the BSP file, seems to work ok and it compiled, the textures are messed up but it was all one texture anyway, so no problems there

You can convert via q3radiant. Quark-> Import at Q3radiant ->save ->open at gtkradiant. If you used brush primitives q3radiant will enable them at load and you have to disable them at saving.

The results are just as bad as with decompiling, tho.

[wattro]

i really wish radiant supported something like the outliner in maya... sigh... of course, i'd also want to change the hierarchy based on desired filters and/or properties