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[illwieckz]

Hi, these days on Smokin' Guns Return discord channel Barto talked about an old Western Quake 3 map that was unfortunately never ported when Smokin' Guns went standalone.


Spoil: How looks br_haunted map in Smokin' Guns.

There was some worries about the map source being lost, and about the issues around map decompilation, such process being far from good to fix maps.

Was I was looking for this map Tequila found an old website (western.bsdmon.com) that had a dead link for this map on it. Unfortunately the link was dead, but fortunately the Web archive had a downloadable copy from year 2007.

So, I put my hand on it to see what could be wrong and what can be done.

It appeared that, unless I miss something, only the texture paths had to be updated to make it looking right in the game.

The texture paths are stored in BSP file, that's why usually people think a decompilation and a recompilation is required to edit such things. But fortunately, not. If the new textures have the same size (and here it is since they were just renamed), it's possible to replace the texture list in the BSP file while keeping the rest unmodified.

In the past I wrote a command line tool named Esquirel to do various maintenance things on BSP like extracting the texture list as a CSV file and re-importing it after modification. So I fixed the paths and rebuilt the PK3.

I also rebuilt the .aas file.

You'll notice an issue with the fog in the tunnel of death. This bug was already there in Western Quake 3 so I guess to fix this it would be required to go through the whole decompilation and recompilation process.

Here is a working link to download the map, playable in Smokin' Guns: br_haunted.pk3.


Here is the map repository: br_haunted_src.pk3dir.
Here is commit fixing the textures in BSP: e455bff (while in intermediate textual representation).

So… let's play!

[Prodigy]

Hello my friend. I'm happy to know that you succeeded in porting this map! Do I have any chance to play it together with my brother KnightV in your server gg.illwieckz.net { le frag courtois }?

[Barto]

Definitely I should have mentioned this map earlier. I was sad it never got ported to SG (even unofficially), but it seemed it was a low hanging fruit for you illwieckz. I'm impressed!

I never knew what the structure of bsp files was, are there any technical documents describing it (at least on the serialization side of things)? I did try to rename manually the texture in the past, but gave up since it wouldn't load. I concluded that the string size was probably hidden somewhere and I gave up at that point even if probably adding a null byte after the string would have worked.

Q3map2 was never too great at decompiling bsp coming from id tech 3 games. That one does not even compile back from my most recent attempt. That's sad that the source map seems to be inaccessible, maybe I should throw a message to the initial authors and see if anything will come out of that discussion.

There are many things that can be done on this map: fixing the lighting resolution is also another thing to add after fixing the death tunnel. This is why having the map source would be way simpler for future evolutions of the game assets.

Thanks for all your work!