It’s weird how my mind works sometimes. I’ve been struggling for, well, almost a year now on the problem of how can I improve upon Quake’s texture mapping scheme. Specifically what I wanted to accomplish was to be able to use regular texture mapping (based on the OpenGL style of 0-1 coordinates) and convert that into Quake texture mapping vectors when writing out to the MAP file.

This didn’t seem like a major undertaking when I started but it certainly turned out to be one. I tried a million things and could never get a solid solution working.

I came the closest I’ve ever come today and then it dawned on me; it’s not possible. You can’t do this. 0-1 texture mapping allows for the kinds of distortions that Quake texture mapping can never duplicate.

I realized that Quake texture vectors are always at right angles to each other. In other words, you can scale them along the U and V vectors independently and you can rotate the entire works as a unit but you can never have U and V traveling at anything other than a right angle. This destroys any plans I had for an interactive UV editor and importing models from modeling programs to use as brushes.

God, I feel stupid. If I had realized that earlier all of this heartache could have been avoided.

And with that, I put this particular pet project to bed. I guess if I want advanced texture mapping I’ll have to resort to creating custom models.