ericw-tools

ericw-tools, also colloquially referred to as EricW's tools, is a set of compilers for Quake-style BSP maps. Originally developed for Quake and Hexen II maps, the latest alpha versions also have full Quake II and experimental GoldSrc support.

Important:

• Ericw-tools uses Quake II-style lighting keys and entities, rather than Half-Life-style. All entities with the prefix light will be treated as light sources.
  • Use _sun to make a light a sunlight. To achieve proper outdoor lighting on MDLs, create a dummy light_environment with the _nostaticlight KV.
  • Use mangle to make a light a spotlight. This is Yaw Pitch Roll (Z Y X) instead of Pitch Yaw Roll (Y Z X).
  • Use _surface to make a light a texlight
• By default, ericw-tools does not shade smoothly between any faces. Enable _phong in worldspawn and set _phong_angle to 44 for smoothing that is similar to QRAD/HLRAD.
• Ericw-tools does not calculate bounced lighting by default. Set _bounce to 8 in worldspawn (or use -bounce 8 in LIGHT's parameters) to match QRAD/HLRAD's defaults.
  • Each light bounce is expensive in ericw-tools, unlike QRAD/HLRAD/VRAD where extra bounces are almost free. Set bounce to 1 when doing fast compiles.

See GitHub issue 437 for a list of what is still missing compared to vanilla HL1 compilers.

Trivia

• The maps in the Kex Engine remasters of Quake and Quake II were compiled using ericw-tools, and the finalization of Q2BSP support for ericw-tools was developed in-tandem with the development of the Quake II remaster.

External links

• Official website, downloads, documentation, and source code
  • Documentation for latest dev builds
  • Automated builds of latest development versions