Dumping maps?

[Onysfx]

Good evening young jedi and sith.

 

I was playing on Alzoc3_enclave, and I later I found out that the author of the map no longer has the .map file, which means no improvement or change could ever be made to this map again. This applies the same with many other JKA maps.

 

But it seems strange. You can load the map ingame, with all switches, textures, models, etc. Is it in any way possible, to dump the map? And somehow...I dunno, reuse the bsp? I've always been curious about this.

 

Because if not, well....

 

THE JEDI ARE TAKING OVAH!!!!!!!

[mrwonko]

There is no 1:1 correspondence between raw and compiled maps. The main problems:

• misc_models get baked into the bsp in a way that can't be reproduced in the .map format
• lighting (light entities, shader lights etc.) gets precomputed and baked into vertex colors and lightmaps, both of which the .map format does not support
• to a lesser degree: surfaces lose their brush associations; brushes are purely for collision, surfaces primarly visual (see also: surfaceflags vs. contentflags). In theory this means there are more possibilities in .bsp than in .map; if you used some other means of creating the .bsp, you might be able to create one that can't be created by compiling a .map. But since every bsp I know of has been compiled with q3map2 this isn't really an issue.
• broken brushes may glitch out in the .bsp - this is usually undesired, but probably still makes for some hard to reverse bsp files.
• visibility information is completely lost

That's not to say a partial reconstruction isn't possible, but without tools that work on the bsp level (which to my knowledge don't exist, outside of misc_bsp) you won't be able to losslessly reuse maps compiled to .bsp.

 

In short: get your backups sorted or release your sources.

[Onysfx]

Ah. I wasn't aiming for lossless re usability, I was just hoping you could still re-use the map with MOST of it intact. I understand there will obviously be a few problems (or many depending on the map), was just hoping that if somehow the map was converted, it wouldn't become a completely useless unrecognizable, terrible lighted piece of wanky junk. .