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Half Life .Bsp Format

Started by fitfool Oct 3, 2007 at 10:41 PM 2 replies 10.1k views
Original Post
fitfool
fitfool
Hi, I have been searching for some documentation on the half life 1 map format(.bsp). I havent been able to find a single documentation, like the quake3 map format. Ive downloaded the half life sdk, and looked through the source to see if i could figure it out but its to trivial. Does anyone know of any documentation for this format? thank you
benryves
benryves
Half Life uses the Quake 1 engine, so the Unofficial Quake Specs would seem to be a good starting point. Chances are there are some minor variations (IIRC Half Life had coloured lightmaps, so check out this Quake 2 BSP documentation), but it shouldn't be too tricky to figure out with a good hex editor.
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phil_s
phil_s
The only differences between Quake 1 and Half-life 1 BSPs are:

  • Structure names (the Unofficial Quake Specs were written before the Quake source code was released).
  • The version number in the file header.
  • Order of the lump size/offsets in the file header (bspfile.h in the Half-Life SDK has the correct order).
  • Content of the lightmap lump: Half-Life stores RGB in three bytes instead of monochrome in one byte.
  • Mipmap offsets in the texture lump may be zero: this indicates the texture should be loaded from an external WAD file.
  • Each mipmap is followed by a 16-bit integer (always = 256) then 256 RGB values (texture palette).

fitfool
fitfool
Thanks a bunch!

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