Quake3World

After about a year of trying, I finally got NetRadiant to work in Snow Leopard. The process was enormous, as none of the guides I found properly documented when a cold system restart was required, so I tried about a million other ways that were much more complex, including trying to compile from source when some of the libraries aren't working in my OS of choice.

I had NetRadiant working in OS X 10.6.4 for about 4 or 5 days, and it was wonderful. Today Apple released an "update" for 10.6.5

Naturally, it broke a ton of stuff, including XQuartz (I assume) and NetRadiant will no longer start. I'm going to lose my mind.

I'm at the end of my rope with constant inexplicable software-related red tape. I'm done. I'm going to try my best (the best an unemployed person can do while constantly looking for a job) to rewrite into a whole new project that will be 100% java based, or in lieu of that, Cocoa-based because I'm tired of X11 always breaking/getting broken.

I already have some of the GUI stuff in place for new things I wanna try...and I was just wondering if anyone else out there is having to deal with everything being broken by major system updates...then you must know where I'm coming from, and I'd make this project totally open to the community, and to start with I'd just like to run some ideas past people to see what should be changed about the editor since it's going to be a fairly major re-write anyway.

So far I was thinking of:
*Simple ways to group entities/brushes similar to layers in photoshop.
*The ability to edit either the whole group of entities, or specific ones within a group without taking them out of the group.
*A Script editor similar to Q3ASE built right into the editor in a window that could be sharing space with the texture selection area.
*The optional ability to show lightmaps from within the editor.
*Specialization directly for Quake 3 to start. The project would be open source so people could modify the code for their own games.
*Re-gearing the interface around how quake 3 levels "play" so the potential addition of tools that'd be catered to Quake 3's needs or the removal of extra options that aren't needed by Quake 3.
*The addition of BSPC to the "build menu" complete with switches.
*Re-vamped Build menu.
*100% removal of any dependency on X11, GTK, GTK+, or GTK2 - the windowing will be supported entirely by Java or Cocoa.


and probably other stuff as time goes on and needs change....I've been wanting to do this for a while, but haven't had the insane rage potent enough to drive me to attempt something this ambitious until now. If anyone wants to lend a hand, I could be talked into setting up a special sit for the code to be displayed on. In the mean time, Goal #1 will be getting a 2D brush manipulation interface working in java.

Ambitious undertaking. I don't want to discourage you but do you realize how many man-months of work something like that takes? It's also very second system syndrome.

But put it on GitHub and I'll follow it, maybe even contribute a patch or two.

Second system syndrome?

and yeah I know it's nuts but....it's been a long time coming

I just hope I can fix this

I thought things "just work" on Macs?

Sorry, not very useful, I know, but I couldn't help myself...

Now knowing what second system syndrome is, it's funny you mention that because I see it the other way. My current system is anything but elegant, I mean, on macs we have to juggle versions of X11/XQuartz...we have to be extremely cautious about system updates, because they virtually always break something...and while it's not a mac-induced issue, a lot of the programs put on macs are only test to the point their most fundamental functions are known to be working, and it's left at that. Even in leopard NetRadiant never, ever, accepted the preferences to change your map save directory to whatever you set it to. It always invents a folder, and tries to save there. (something like /.q3a/baseq3/maps/)

As far as quake 3 mapping goes, Windows users have always had the upper-hand, you open NetRadiant in windows....now there's something that "just works"...it's tighter, it's more responsive, and it's just a faster working program in windows. (at this point you might be wondering why I don't just use windows) I do use the Windows version a lot, it's great. But I do love my macs, for the most part I'm just happier interfacing with them than I am with Windows, not to mention my windows machines bluescreen fairly consistently...but someday I'm going to end up using linux machines, and I'll want some good quake 3 mapping tools there.

So this project is one big answer to a lot of little nagging questions. It would solve the X11/GTK dependency that's plagued Radiant on the mac, it would add in a few features that really should have been built into radiant in the first place, and it'll remove a few that aren't really needed for quake 3 mapping. And it'll be java, so I could be running Windows, Mac, linux, or solaris and just decide to work on a quake map and have some nice features that were refined and tested. Plus it'll be open source with a guide I'm sure I'll write, about what needs to be changed to get it to work with games I don't play (virtually everything that isn't quake 3 which also uses the quake 3 engine)

and yeah, even as an avid mac user, I'd have said the same thing Eraser, but that's what I'm working towards hopefully.

I want to make a Radiant that JUST WORKS, and I want it to work for everybody, not just mac users. That's why I want this to be java-centric.

As for the project itself...I did find these little gems that might provide a type of springboard for progress..

http://www.aegidian.org/gqt/jqt/features.html

I don't want to base the source code on that(obviously because it's for quake 1 and it may actually be older than time itself), but I was just going to read through the code to get an idea of what to do.

I'll see what I can do about setting up a git-site later today maybe...

This is still as fresh as it gets, I'm still drawing dialogue windows on cocktail napkins to get a feel for a UI I'd want to work with.

*edit - I fixed this stupid thing, but I'm not going to wait until it breaks again (possibly in a way I won't be able to fix) to get back into this project, things move forward as planned.

However, I got NetRadiant working in 10.6.5

http://sirventolin.webs.com/netradiant.htm

**re edit

I've been looking into Git, I think it'd be easier to just email a tarball back and forth but what do I know, Git it is. However, the GitHub site seems to be down, so I'm waiting for that to get fixed while I'm tinkering with NetBeans and casually leafing through java code.

I am working on getting NetRadiant to compile native on OSX, it is very difficult as I lack alot of knowledge... but its interesting and so I continue.
So far I struggle with qgl.cpp, and will struggle a while longer probably - until I learnt more..

There are few ways to get also older Radiant versions to work on 10.6, yes Apple seems to break stuff now with each update.
I have noted my stuff here, http://code.google.com/p/osxnetradiant/
In the meantime that is outdated, have not mapped since longer.

Posting this, cause I would like to travel along with you the road of using NetRadiant on OSX. Bundle the efforts...

Maybe you guys could contact the people developing Net/GTKRadiant and give them some much needed help and testing support.