12 March 07 · Turnpike: End Week 1

I've been too busy to update for a little while. Hazard of the job really. I'm either too busy mapping to write, or I'm not mapping and have nothing to write about!

After fixing up the indoors I needed to give QA a version to test with. That entailed finding all resources the map was using and packing it all up into one pk3. Now that may sound like a fairly simple task, and it probably should be, but that's not how it ended up. Not this time at least.

Problems. The first problem I ran into was the texture organisation. I wanted all the textures to come from one directory, ut_turnpike, but the version of the map I had was pulling them from all over the place. Now I could have written a script for all of this, but silly me thought, “How many can there be. I'll just find and replace them all manually.” Not the brightest ideas. It must of taken me the best part of an hour and a half. On the upside though I did manage to remove some textures that weren't really used a great deal.

The other big problem was that some of the id's baseq3 textures were still being used. Apparently they had been replaced somewhere along the line, but for the version I got the replacements were nowhere to be seen. So I went through and replaced them all. Some were fairly easy to replace. On the other hand, the lights and shiny metal surfaces were a real bitch to replace and I spent a good chuck of time photo-shopping.

After that was the fairly simple but tedious task of finding all the model, model texture and sound resources, and packing them all together. Then it was sent off to QA to cast their eyes over.

Overall it took me almost as much time to put the pk3 together as it did to redo the entire indoor area.

Next time: The metro station and garden.