[Tutorial] Pakrat

[Grim Tuesday]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nutomic

And heres the easy way of packing stuff:

Download Map Analyst, set your compile options as written in the readme, and worry about custom content no more.

I have never done it another way, and it works perfect.

I tried it with my map, and it only didnt pack one thing: The skin for the picnic table from the swamp pack. Im not sure about particles, though.

[Hawk]

Here's a tip I have for automatically including the model textures:

For each custom model that your map includes, find a secluded area out of the player's view and use the model's texture on a small brush. When Pakrat does its scan, it will detect this texture and include it in with the other custom content. No worries!

[Ravidge]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hawk

Here's a tip I have for automatically including the model textures:

For each custom model that your map includes, find a secluded area out of the player's view and use the model's texture on a small brush. When Pakrat does its scan, it will detect this texture and include it in with the other custom content. No worries!

That's pretty clever, never would have thought of that!
Cool tip

[grazr]

I find it's easy enough to just open the bsp and grab the content from the folders in question without bothering to scan. I imagine the scan is only useful if you've used loads of custom content from all sorts of sources.

As for the model-material tip... Hammer doesn't show model textures in the texture browser. So i'm not sure how you figured this one out?

[HeaH]

Great tutorial, thanks! bookmarked

[cbite]

I'm unable to load any maps in pakrat for some reason. I'm able to start pakrat, but as soon as I select a map nothing happens. I get the following message from the console:

Pakrat v0.95 - by Rof (rof@mellish.org.uk)
Reading cp_steel.bsp

It seems like it's trying to read the .bsp file but is unable to open it for some reason.
If I start the program through the pakrat.bat file instead of the pakrat.jar file i get the following message in the command prompt:

C:\Users\xxx\Desktop\pakrat>java -jar pakrat.jar
java.io.EOFException

I'm not sure if the message is relevant or not.
I've tried two different versions of pakrat, and both have the same problem.

Any thoughts on how I could solve this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry for my bad English.

[iller]

Is it normal for everything to get completely screwed up (every model missing or missing every texture) if you re-open a map you already just packed and try to repack different files into it? This is happening to me and It doesn't make sense since nothing is changing the Paths. Is it removing all the models on its own?

[Ravidge]

Quote:

Originally Posted by iller

Is it normal for everything to get completely screwed up (every model missing or missing every texture) if you re-open a map you already just packed and try to repack different files into it? This is happening to me and It doesn't make sense since nothing is changing the Paths. Is it removing all the models on its own?

it is normal yes.
Why is it happening? I don't know, but you can not open a already packed bsp and then add or remove files from it afterwards. Not with pakrat at least.

[DisruptedHunter]

I'm running into a problem using Pakrat, I've followed tutorials but all my custom stuff is appearing purple and black for everyone. For one map it eventually fixed itself but for the other maps I have up on my server they don't work. Any suggestions?

You're not packing correctly. It sounds like you aren't packing the materials, because that's what the purple and black checkerboards represent. If these are models, make sure that in addition to the model file, you pack the texture. If it's just textures, you're doing the whole thing wrong.

You can also try PackBSP, which is essentially the same but I find it a bit easier. Some people have problems packing specific content, though, and maybe 1% of people can't make it start at all.

An easy way to check how other players will see your map is to rename your tf folder to tf_old, then launch TF2 and load your map. TF2 generates the tf/ folder from scratch so anything not in your map will be broken. After you're done just delete the new tf and rename the old one.