If you have already made maps with other editors for games like Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Quake 3 or Doom 3, you possibly wish to use them with CaWE and Ca3DE as well. For this purpose, several importers are provided that can load such maps directly into CaWE.

In order to import a foreign map, just activate the File → Open… menu item or press CTRL+O in order to open the file open dialog.

The drop-down box near the bottom presents a list of all file types that CaWE can directly load or import. Just choose the desired file type and proceed to open a map file of that type as usual.

After the import, there are normally two additional problems that you may encounter: material and entity mismatches.

The following list summarizes what you have to know and consider about porting:

• Because the existing entities in your world were defined and made for another game, they will mismatch with the Ca3DE MOD entity definitions! Note that there are two kinds of mismatch:
  1. Some entities exist both in the other game as well as Ca3DE (for example translucent brushes, ladders, …), but their names and/or their properties differ.
  2. Other entities only exist in the other game and Ca3DE has no equivalent entity at all, or vice versa! For example, Ca3DE DeathMatch has different weapons, but unfortunately lacks of many of the advanced entities of other games. I am very sorry, but at present you have to find some kind of work-around in such cases. However, I am doing my best to improve the situation in the future.
• Here are some suggestions to fix the entity mismatchings:
  1. It's probably the safest (easiest, but most expensive) to simply delete all existing entities from your world, and only keep the geometry. Then, recreate them from the Ca3DE (DeathMatch) entities.
  2. In many cases it might be preferable to simply open the Properties dialog for each entity, and to reset their properties there. Just make sure that you actually check out each individual property tag.
  3. If you are very experienced, you might solve many mismatchings directly by loading the map file into a text editor.
• Although Ca3DE ignores unknown entities (e.g. entities left from other games), and fills-in default values for unknown properties, it is still best to do the conversion carefully in order to avoid unexpected results. For example, be specially careful with func_wall entities: you'll have to reset their rendermode properties (translucent, blue becomes invisible, …) explicitly!
• The worlds have to be re-textured. Re-texturing can either be done with the “Replace” tool of CaWE, or (if you are very experienced) directly within the cmap file with a text editor, or even with a Perl script. In most cases, you'll have to work with the “Edit Face Properties” function though, replacing textures by hand.