Half-Life .bsp Support
Right now, several engines have Half-Life .bsp support. DarkPlaces, FTE, ezQuake, FuhQuake, Telejano and soon to be Qrack it appears ...
[img]http:///www.quake-1.com/docs/qrack-hl.jpg[/img]
Adding Half-Life support to an engine probably is a 3 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. It's not hard. You have the a WAD3 format loader and the sacred texture prefixes are different.
Half-Life BSP Advantages Over Q1.bsp
The Half-Life file format is scarcely different from Quake. Quake is bsp version 29; Half-Life is bsp version 30.
1. Each texture gets it's *own* 256 color palette.
2. Textures can be stored externally or internally within the .bsp. The advantage is that Quake has around 500 textures with several duplications being compiled into multiple maps. The total file size of Quake might only be 50% if it had all the textures in textures.wad and had the textures external.
3. Colored lights in the map; no external .lit file messy stuff.
4. Effective higher resolution appearance + faster speed developing textures. Having to palletize every texture to the 256 global Quake palette often adversely affects texture quality because there aren't, say, 50 shades of red in the Quake palette.
5. Alpha texture support. These are prefixed with "!" the way liquid textures in Quake are prefixed with "#". Alpha textures have transparent parts. (DarkPlaces does not seem to support this.)
Additionally, Worldcraft 3.3 uses WAD3 so compiling those maps into bsp version 30 maps is more convenient than messing around with Qconverge (or the QuakeAdapter) to make it use the Quake palette.
One downside is the hull sizes don't completely match Quake, but the compile tools are open source () so that could be adjusted.
According to LordHavoc, Half-Life supports 4 hull sizes including a crouching player hull. I don't know if any engine supports the extra hull or how that works in QuakeC.
Avirox setup an experimental FTEQW server running a mod he made to further support the use of Half-Life maps as an experiment that includes func_ladder, rotating brushes, etc. It's pretty nice.
Here are the videos:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 0825&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 7861&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 8685&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 5607&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 0227&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 1049&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 0027&hl=en
Note that videos were made using ezQuake, which doesn't have alpha entity support (glass). This is different than alpha texture support, which ezQuake does have.
I thought it would be good to bring this up because a lot of projects here that seem to be using q1.bsp might be a better fit in the long run using Half-Life.bsp because you would have more flexibility with the textures and the colors, instead of having to use mostly brown and gray textures.
