===== Quake Map Compilers =====

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Todo: 

VIS: water vis (doesn't hmap allow to leave lava and slime opaque?), re-vising an existing bsp file

light: coloured, sky, sun, radiosity
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To compile a .map file into a .bsp you need to go through 3 steps: QBSP, LIGHT and VIS.

  * QBSP will make a .bsp file. You could load that in the engine already but it would be lit full bright and might run slowly.
  * LIGHT will add the lighting information to the .bsp.
  * VIS will do magic and add information about what parts of the map are visible at a given position.

For more in-depth information see http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/Qbsp/ and http://www.visi.com/~jlowell/tqu/utils.html

Be aware that some tools might work a little different.

Since the tools were open-sourced and all the implementation details were open and public there are many different tools available. Following is an overview of up-to-date Quake map compilers and their pros and cons.

==== QBSP ====
[[/files/tools/txqbspbjp.zip|TxQBSP]]

==== LIGHT ====
[[http://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/BengtLightColouredR2.zip|Bengt Light Coloured (Release 2)]]

This version was modified by MH and added coloured lighting and multi-threading to Aguirre's version.

==== VIS ====
For VIS there are no differences in the output of different compilers, so speed is all one should be interested in. In 2009 Willem [[http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60365|released]] the MacOS and Windows versions of a multi-threaded port of Bengt Jardrup's VIS tool. This means on multi-processor/multi-core systems the VISing time is cut to a fraction. Some bug-fixing later [[/files/tools/wvis_20100119.7z]] is the latest version for Windows, the source is included. The MacOS binary is included in Willem's [[http://www.wantonhubris.com/toetag/|ToeTag editor]] ([[/files/tools/ToeTag_230.zip]], [[/files/tools/ToeTag_230_src.zip]].

Alternatives: