[S. P. Gardebiter]

Hello,
I thought it would be a good idea to have a map converter which is able to convert a Duke Nukem 3D map to a Quake III Arena map. There are a a lot of awesome Duke Nukem 3D maps and they would be suitable as well for any other FPS, it would be a shame if those would be forgotten just because Duke Nukem 3D probably isn't as popular as other first person shooters.
I'm not sure if I posted this into the correct section, if another section is a lot more suitable then please feel free to move the thread.

Anyway, I found such a converter but it's not very good and gives Quake III some trouble. A lot of work would be needed to rebuild those maps for Quake, so much in fact that the converter itself is pretty useless because building it from scratch would be a lot faster.

I can't do this alone, since it's way too much work, so I'm asking for help and hope that there are some skilled coders here who wish to get this done too. I already done something but so far it's only able to load a Duke Nukem 3D map into the memory if you click the "convert" button.

http://tile44.org/files/MAP2MAP.ZIP

Source code is included, language is VB.NET and license is public domain. If there is anyone interested or if there are any questions, then please don't hesitate and post here.

[Tea Monster]

Now if you could get Duke maps over to Doom 3, then y'alls be talkin'!

[S. P. Gardebiter]

The Quake III map format includes all brushes that are used in the maps, as well as the textures. Perhaps there are already converters and if not there could be one written pretty easily. Also the Quake III BSP format is used in multiple games.

[Micky C]

I'm not surprised the conversion doesn't really work. Converting a 2.5D map format to a fully 3D one sounds like a big task.

[S. P. Gardebiter]

Micky C, on 16 June 2012 - 05:49 PM, said:

I'm not surprised the conversion doesn't really work. Converting a 2.5D map format to a fully 3D one sounds like a big task.

It shouldn't be, since a fully 3D map format is compatible with a 2.5D map format.
The only things which are kind of hairy are room over room with the same z position, sectoreffectors, sprites which function like floating platforms and water. All these are possible with the exception of the first one and some effects like quakes though. If you don't convert these it's very easy.
The converter I found already had problems with masked sectors (if I remember right what masked sectors are), which is kind of poor.

[Tea Monster]

I imagine you would only be using it as a start point. All that weird sector-based terrain would need to be "adjusted"

[S. P. Gardebiter]

Well, you would need to calculate all the brush positions and lengths based on the sectors and save them as a Quake III map file. The positions and lengths would need to be scaled as well because of the different game unit sizes. After doing so, you would need to center the map but that shouldn't be hard, you just calculate a global x, y and z offset. Just sum up all the coordinates of all sector corners or epicenters of the sectors and then divide it by the number of things you just summed up, the resulting number would be the offset that needs to be subtracted. I don't know how the scaling should be done though, perhaps there is some helping info in the sourcecode of Duke Nukem 3D.

What gives me trouble at the moment is the weird Quake III map format used by the editor, it's not documented anywhere, so I would be thankful for any information.

[SuperFudd]

If you do make progress at this, please consider Shadow Warrior and perhaps other Build engine games.

[Tea Monster]

Blender can export natively to BSP format (which I thought was quite cool). Can you get your app to kick out an obj or similar format? Then you could load it into either Blender or Radiant