Quake - Tales of Woe
So I’ve been playing with Quake and trying to figure out something fun to do with it. I spent last weekend buried in it, trying to figure out a way to get geometric shapes exported from Cheetah 3D into Quake. I figured out that the OBJ file format was good for this since it was easy to read and parse (this was after a failed flirtation with the RIB file format which ended up letting me down). I wrote a conversion program that would convert the OBJ files into Quake compatible MAP files and after working out a few glitches, it basically worked.
Then the sadness came.
Duplicate planes! Points off plane! Gah! My guess is that Quake’s compiling tools have a fairly low tolerence for decimal points and weird angles (which is what modeling programs are best at creating). I could get basic blocks brought into Quake but that didn’t satisfy my creative needs - I need more.
I downloaded the compiler tool source code and converted it to run on the Mac myself (qbsp, vis and light). My hope is that now that they are being produced on my machine, I will be able to massage the source where it needs it to accept the more complicated shapes I want to throw at the tools.
We shall see!
So far, it’s been frustrating at the the same time so very awesome. Quake is a fun place to play.