I’ve been working on my converting of Doom 1 levels to Doom 3, and achieved very little.

QuArK (the link is down, but I have hopes that it will one day rise again) is my editor of choice, but it doesn’t currently support Doom 3.

Doom 3 does come with it’s own editor, based on QEradiant, but a) I don’ t particularly want to learn a whole new editor; b) QEradiant is currenly looking like a pain in the neck to use and c) QuArK has particular features that make this current project easier – specifically, I can add a background image to the editing pane, so I use a map of the level I’m working on to vastly speed up construction.

Firstly, QuArK decided to refuse to load the map I’d worked on yesterday in anything other than Quake 1 format (no use to me), and also wouldn’t copy-and-paste from the Quake 1 version to a Quake 3 map. So I had to start again. Grr. Serves me right for not saving it as a project to begin with.

Well, that was sort of okay, but what I’m trying to do now is get QuArK to deal with textures the way Doom 3 needs. Doom 3 needs the path information, you see: when QuArK says “a_bluetex1e2_03″ D3 needs “textures/base_wall/a_bluetex1e2_03″.

I had enough fun getting QuArK’s supposedly useful “file links” feature to work. The idea is, instead of actually bringing the textures into QuArK itself (taking up memory and disk space), you just link to a list of the files (or even the .zip file it all comes in). Unfortunately, what is not obvious, nor mentioned anywhere in the documentation, is that you can only link to files in the base QuArK directory. It will allow you to link the files, and use them, but when you save & load, the links are lost. Clever.

So the only thing I’ve got left to do is somehow convince QuArK to save the path information in there somewhere. I’m considering renaming all the files from “a_bluetex1e2_03″ to something like “textures#base_wall#a_bluetex1e2_03″, and using the Programmer’s Notepad to do a simple search/replace on the map file (conveniently, text). Assuming I can find a character that’s not used in .map files already…

I’d expect QuArK to be able to cope with Doom 3 fairly soon, but the bloody site’s down, so all I can do is fudge stuff for myself…