First, and by far the most important, you must have the AQ2 mapper's permission to port the map to RQ3. This may be harder than it sounds because the e-mail address in the map's readme file is probably out of date. You may have to do a little detective work to get in touch with people. The bottom line is, however, that your port will be a waste of time, and most likely illegal, without the original mapper's permission. Some AQ2 maps have already been ported and many more are being worked on. The best way to find out if the map you want to port has already been claimed is to post in the Sets & Props Forum.

Whew, enough of that. On to the "how to".


A combination of using both WinBSP and Q2toQ3A is the most efficient way to convert maps. You can also use BSPC.exe (which comes with Q3Radiant) to convert a .bsp to .map, but the results are not as user friendly as the method described below. Here's what to do:

• Run WinBSP on the .bsp file to create a .map file, editable in Q3 Radiant. WinBSP is nice because it maintains all the texture locations, unlike BSPC. That makes it much easier to edit.
  
  
• Run Q2toQ3A on the same .bsp. This will create a .bsp playable in Q3A. It also does some other VERY helpful things for map editing. It creates a Q2 shader file (you just need to add it to the shaderlist.txt found in /baseq3/scripts). It also converts all .wal textures to .tga's. The only glitch here is that Q2toQ3A will copy the textures into a /baseq3/textures/quake2/[subdir] directory (e.g. /baseq3/textures/quake2/e1u2). That will not work. Copy each subdirectory created in the baseq3/textures/quake2 to the /baseq3/textures directory. Alternatively, you can redirect the texture paths in the .map in the map editor.
  
  
• Load the .map in Q3Radiant. No textures will show up at first. Go to the textures menu, and load up each texture directory Q2toQ3A created (e.g. e1u2). Voila! You now have a fully textured map.
  
  
• Sounds - you will need to change the path of the "noise" in the target_speaker. Add /world to the beginning of the file path so it will look like: /world/[mapname]/[sound].wav.
  
  
• Textures - will default to the size ratio they were in the AQ2 map (usually 1.0) and keep in mind that Q3 Radiant defaults textures to one half their size (presumably to be able to show more detail). But you'll be retexturing the map anyway, right?
  

Some things that may not work:

• Some sounds
  
  
• Some lights
  
  
• Rotating doors
  
  
• Perhaps some leaks after conversion
  
  
• Skies (there are tutorials for converting AQ2 skies, but there are better skies out there now, check out the Mapping Resources & Links page for some sites with skyboxes
  
  
• Clip brushes, and other /common textures