How to fix Alice's lack of illumination in custom maps tutorial

Introduction

American McGee's Alice was developed by Rogue Entertainment using a fork of Ritual Entertainment's Heavy Metal FAKK 2 engine. Which was already forked from Quake 3 Arena. This is notable since custom maps for Alice are based on Quake 3's q2map3 compiler. However, Heavy Metal FAKK 2 featured a lot of enhancements which Alice took advantage of. Such as models that are illuminated by level lighting.

American McGee's Alice notably never had a proper official SDK created for it. And it's unlikely to ever get one now because both Rogue and Ritual no longer exist. Fans have picked up the slack though. The first attempt at making Alice maps was via QuARK. Then later via Netradiant. However both have one limitation. Alice is completely fullbright when you create a custom map.

It has been impossible to fix for over 2 decades until today. SomaZ has written a special tool that works with Heavy Metal FAKK 2's compiler. It successfully converts a FAKK 2 formatted map to an Alice map while also retaining self illumination. I'll go over how to use it and install it. This tutorial assumes you have already installed Netradiant and can make maps with it.

What you will need

Netradiant for Alice - You can also substitute this for another editor in the future I assume but you'll need to redo the build sequence.

Alice illumination toolpack - This is where the magic happens.

Installing the toolpack

Once you have the toolpack. Copy all of the files into \NetRadiant\alice.game\. Make sure you overwrite the default_build_menu.xml.

Creating a level

Next let's create a level. I've created a simple box with some lights in it.

Next go up to build and pick "SlowestBuild". It should run through the build process. Notably it will include some extra stuff at the end.

That's the tool working it's magic. The map has been outputted as *MAPNAME*_alice.bsp. Load up the game and start it. It should now load.

There it is. Alice is now lit by the level lights. She isn't fully bright.

Troubleshooting

Because this is a somewhat hacky method there are some bugs I've run into while trying to use this fix. Notably the fix doesn't work if Build Process Monitoring is turned on. I recommend turning it off.

Another thing I noticed is at times Alice will appear fully black. This only seems to occur if I use lights with a really big radius. The map will also crash on startup if lights are outside of the map or stuck within brushes. So you may want to pay attention to how lights are placed before running the map.

Conclusion

SomaZ has released his source code to the Alice Illumination Toolkit here. So hopefully this fix can be improved in the future to more seamlessly blend with q3map2. But in the meantime this is the first time in the history of this game that you can make maps properly the way Rogue made them.