VortexMaps

Map sources for Vortex Arena, and the pipeline that turns them into the map archives the game fetches.

Nothing here is needed to play the game, or to build it. The game repository fetches compiled map archives from this repository's releases; it never reads this tree. Clone this only to author or rebuild a map.

sources/          Radiant/editor inputs — never shipped to players
  maps/           .map geometry, .map.options compile flags, .mapinfo, .waypoints, .rtlights
  textures/       source textures (PNG)  — 17 map_<name>/ sets + 36 shared sets
  models/         .ase / .md3 / .obj prefabs
  scripts/        .shader material scripts + shaderlist.txt
  env/            skybox sets
  sound/          map-specific audio

build/
  q3map2.toolchain   what each stock map was actually compiled with (see "Reproducibility")

builds/           generated, gitignored — published as release assets, never committed

sources/ is type-rooted, mirroring the shape Xonotic content is authored in and the shape q3map2 expects. It deliberately is not split per map. Measuring the tree is what settled that: of 4,193 content files only 589 (14%) are attributable to a single map, 86% is shared, only 17 of the 31 maps have any dedicated texture directory, and no map references zero shared sets — each pulls 10–16 of the 36 shared sets. Maps are views over a shared library, not modular units. A per-map split would have filed 86% of the tree into one bucket and made a build-time overlay mandatory, because q3map2 resolves textures/foo/bar relative to a single game directory. Type-rooted sources/ is a valid q3map2 game directory, so no overlay is needed.

A consequence worth knowing: third-party Xonotic maps drop straight in, because this is the shape they already ship in.

The whole tree was re-encoded from TGA to PNG: 2,940 MiB down to 1,204 MiB, with every file verified by comparing decoded pixels rather than trusting the encoder's exit code.

This is transparent to q3map2. Its image loader (tools/quake3/q3map2/image.c) probes .tga → .png → .jpg → .dds, so a shader naming textures/map_stormkeep/brickfloor finds the PNG with no edit to any .map, .shader or compile flag. libpng is a hard dependency of the q3map2 build (find_package(PNG REQUIRED)), not an option. The game's own VFS probes in the same order, for the same reason.

One file needed an independent decoder: textures/phillipk1x/trim/pk01_trims01b_glow.tga is a valid 256×512 24-bit TGA that ffmpeg misreports as 300×216 paletted. It was converted with PIL and verified against the raw header. The converter now cross-checks ffmpeg against the TGA header and refuses rather than writing a wrong PNG.

build/q3map2.toolchain records the compiler version and flags for each stock map, taken from its .map.options. It is not a single pin, because the history does not support one: the 31 stock maps were compiled with 29 distinct q3map2 versions between them, and with widely varying flags — -samplesize, -bouncescale, -exposure, -areascale, -scale, -dirty.

So the shipped BSPs are historical artifacts rather than reproducible build output. A rebuild produces a correct, playable map with different lightmaps. That is fine for the escape-hatch case (rebuilding when a release asset is unavailable) and it is worth knowing before treating any rebuild as a byte-for-byte baseline.

The content is Xonotic's, under GPL version 3 or any later version — see VortexArena/data/licenses/ for the grant and the licence texts.

Some items carry their own notice next to the art, and those notices matter because they cover work Team Xonotic redistributes without owning:

• textures/phillipk1x/_GPL.txt, textures/phillipk2x/_GPL.txt — Philip Klevestav's Quake IV texture sets, relicensed GPL v2 or later, © 2003–2010. 503 files of this art ship in the compiled packs.
• maps/atelier.license.txt — GPL v3 or later, © 2011 Pawel 'ShadoW' Chrapka
• maps/trident.LICENSE, models/xonotic_jumppad01/…_readme.txt, sound/map_xoylent/sources.txt, textures/map_boil/credit.png

The publish step must copy these into the archives carrying the art they cover. They live in a tree players never fetch, while the art does ship — so without that step a release distributes those textures with the copyright notice left behind here.