Radiant project files and automation tutorial

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Introduction


Note: This is work in progress and will be updated every now and then.

This tutorial describes means to automate certain tasks in Radiant. In essence, it allows you to extend Radiant menus so that you can execute arbitrary scripts directly from Radiant. That gives you great flexibility and may make your mapping life a little easier. Additionally, it will give you a better understanding of some of Radiant files, when, how and why they are processed and what settings can be configured with them.

The tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of Radiant and the overall SG mapping installation. You should be generally familiar with the file structure and should know your way around in config files with a text editor.

I am using Zero Radiant (aka GtkRadiant 1.6.1) and my SG mapping installation is in C:\Programme\Smokin’ Guns Development. Obviously, you will have to change the paths to fit your installation. I will not point this out at every occasion. It is better to leave these files alone in case you don’t know what you are doing. All the changes should work with older versions of Radiant. However, I haven’t tested it yet. A tutorial for setting up Zero Radiant will added to the level editing section soon.


It goes without saying that you can easily break your installation when fooling around in these config files. I strongly recommend that you backup all files before you edit them. However, I never run into any problem I couldn’t recover from. Additionally, we are going to "abuse" Radiant a little since it was probably never intended to be used in this way. This solution is by no means elegant and there might be better alternatives out there. That being said, it works for me just fine

The tutorial proceeds as follows. Firstly, we’ll give an overview of some key configuration files of Radiant and explain what they do. Secondly, we are going to edit them so that you can compile directly from Radiant. Thirdly, we will run arbitrary DOS-scripts to get even more flexibility.

Table of Contents

• Radiant project files
  
• Compiling directly from Radiant
  
• compiling and testing your map from Radiant
  
• model generation from Radiant
  
• creating a map backup from Radiant
  

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Radiant Project Files


Radiant stores project specific settings in project files which are usually stored under …\smokinguns\scripts. In general, there are two types: a template file (called default_project.proj) and user files (called user#.proj where # is a number). The user project file contains the configuration settings of the current Radiant project. This one is loaded during startup and mainly controls any paths settings Radiant requires to execute other programs.

The default_project.proj file looks like this:

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Compiling directly from Radiant


As you know, we cannot compile directly from Radiant (by using the bsp menu) since we have to use “our” compiler. However, we can simply hack the default_project.proj file in order to point Radiant in the right direction. Here is what you need to do:

1. Locate your default_project.proj file under ..\smokinguns\scripts and open it with a texteditor.
The entries that invoke q3map2 look like this:

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One Click: compiling and testing your map from Radiant


Here is something that is very useful for me: I test my map very often during the first stages of development in order to check for scale and general layout. Here is how you can automate that:

Make the following entry in your default_proj.proj file:

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One Click: model generation from Radiant


Here is another neat thing: creating models with one click.

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One Click: creating a map backup


It is prudent to backup your map. Particularly before you start to do major changes. Rather than copying the map file back and forth, you can do that more easily: