Three days straight troubleshooting a Quake texture glitch just to find out it was a single wrong pixel in the alpha channel

I swear I nearly threw my monitor out the window when I zoomed in on that stray transparent dot after recompiling the WAD file 12 times, has anyone else spent a whole weekend hunting down something that stupid?

2 comments

2 Comments

finley9395d agoMost Upvoted

Heard some old school mapper talk about this on a forum a while back... said one time they spent two days chasing a weird shadow bug in a custom map and it turned out to be a single black pixel in the lightmap that got saved wrong. That whole alpha channel thing is brutal though, especially with Quake's tools being so picky about what they accept. Makes you wonder how much stuff got scrapped back in the 90s just because of tiny errors like that...

the_anthony4d ago

@finley939 nailed it with that lightmap story. Same energy as alpha channel nonsense, just different decade. Quake tools are straight up brutal about that stuff, one wrong byte and the whole WAD throws a fit. I've definitely been there with a misbehaving texture, though mine was usually some dumb ass alignment issue I could've fixed in five minutes if I'd just calmed down first. We all chase ghosts in this hobby, it's practically a rite of passage at this point.