[Tutorial] Porting TFC maps to FF

[squeek.]

Requested by aleXtric, figured I'd make it publicly available. EDIT: Tested and updated accordingly.

• Decompile the TFC .bsp into a .map file using BSP2Map or WinBSPC.
• Open the .map file in Hammer 3.4
• Create a game configuration for Hammer 3.4 (can be called anything, don't have to set any options), and add any .wad file to the Textures tab. You can get a usable .wad file here if you don't have TFC installed, otherwise the TFC .wads are in your tfc folder [steamapps/common/half-life/tfc]. Here are some example configuration settings
• Save as a .rmf file.
• Open the .rmf in current version of Hammer (Source SDK).
• Save it as a .vmf file.

For BSP2Map: Unfortunately, all of the decompiled brushes will be unusable. You get the "shell" of each brush; for example, a cube turns into 6 one-unit thick 'walls' of the original cube.

For WinBSPC: This actually seems to create solid brushes, but I'd still suggest recreating the geometry so that you can be sure it works and can optimize it in terms of number of brushes/visibility/func_detailing/etc.

Another note about BSP2Map vs WinBSPC: sometimes entities/brushes will not show up in a decompiled map. It might be wise to decompile using both BSP2Map and WinBSPC and compare the results.

Once in the Source SDK version of Hammer, what I do is select all immediately and put everything in a visgroup. That way I can turn it off/on at will (and it's always there for comparison). So then, you need to recreate all the brushes and entities and everything. Basically, you get a reference for making the map. The actual making of it doesn't become too much easier.

You can download the .vmf of ff_2mesa3_classic and ff_siege_classic to see some examples of ported maps.

For converting TFC textures to the Source engine, see Xwad (I've never used it)