Journals

I've had an itch to get back to mapping and to stick with it recently. I wanted to dissect Half-life maps and see how certain things worked so i could hopefully be a more competent mapper among other things. I decided to use the steam Half-Life SDK with Hammer Editor 3.4 that it comes with for reasons I might get to later in this post. I also went to Botman's site and picked up a couple of tools I found convenient for my purposes.

In the config I set up my directories and build programs directories, wad file paths, and so on. For the build programs I used the valve proprietary compile tools. During the mapping process I used custom 1024x1024 (~1mb) textures made with bsp_slicer.exe to rebuild the basic map geometry (perfect practice for mapping) cause, you know... decompilers don't do a very great job they like to carve the whole map from a single brush block and is a huge mess.

I couldn't use the textures at first cause I could not simply select it from the browser and then press apply in the texture tool. Instead I had to awkwardly replace the gaben trigger texture with the 1024x1024 ones. Then I could use them normally... weird... I also had to have the whole brush selected as well because how the replace feature worked differently when a single face was selected(don't remember the exact details).

So the math is a 1024x1024 texture applied to 6 sides of a brush is 6 megabytes, which is 3 times over the texture memory limit (~2mb). This is the best I can figure as to why I was getting the compile error MAX_MAP_MIPTEX. Looked up this error and it said that I was using to many textures which exceeded the alotted memory limit. Well that didn't make any sense because I had the minimal amout of brushes to create a working map and not that many textures.
That's when I realized, of course, it had to be the massive texture size I was using.

I didn't want to break them down because I thought it would take to much time (later on I found you can do it really
quickly with photoshop cs3). So I had also read you can pass the command option -texdata 4020 to qcsg.exe to increase the memory limit to ~4mb. When I tried to compile again I got a diferrent error which was: Windows gave the error "Access Denied". Orignally I thought windows didn't like me modifying a tool set to read only or didn't have
Administrative rights, or UAC was causing this, or my configuration paths were somehow wrong.

Come to find out when running an elevated console and compiling my .rmf file directly with qcsg.exe plus the command
option -texdata that qcsg.exe doesnt recognize that command and I later find out that command was for Zoner's version of the compile tools. So naturally decided to use Zoner's tools, but to make a already long story short, the tools made bsp files that GoldSrc Steam Half-Life didn't like because it would crash with a fatal read error.

So I've decided to stick with the tools that came with Hammer Editor. I see it as a challenge and dicipline to make
these maps with the quake compile tools(I'm a bit of purist anyway). The whole point of this post really is to talk about the Access Deinied error because there isn't much information on it at all. So I hope that this gives a little
more light on this error.