Hello,
I had the same idea some weeks ago because I found "The Simpons" map for Q3A and wanted to convert it to UT99. I talked about this work (with partial results) on my clan forum, see the link of the thread:
http://www.teamcon.net/forum/viewthread ... #post_8503
Converting a Q3 .BSP to a UT .T3D is possible, the main problem is the parsing of the exported .T3D and its final internal format and this is, damn, a really big issue. A .T3D file, in order to be imported in UEd 2.0 (UT99 v436), must have a standard format, take a look at these UnrealWiki pages:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:T3D_File
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:T3D_Brush
There are softwares around (yes, they exist!) that can export .T3D files from Q3 format-compliant files (.BSP, .MAP, .OBJ) but in most cases the parsing is different from that exposed on UnrealWiki. For example, AC3D, a well-known 3D modeling software (
http://www.inivis.com/features.html), can import a Q3 BSP and export it directly to UT format but unfortunately this file is not imported into UEd 2.0 as map, nor as single brush, because the internal format is not recognized. There are many ways to convert a 3D format to another one but the main issue remains always the last step, the parsing of the .T3D format.
As you can see from my first link, I found a way to export a Q3 geometry from GTKRadiant to UEd 2.0. A Q3 .BSP map file was first decompiled into a .MAP file, which was then opened in GTKRadiant and exported to a .OBJ file. This .OBJ file was opened in 3D Object Converter (
http://web.axelero.hu/karpo/) and then converted to .T3D format ("UnrealEd 3" format as say the export options). Finally, I was able to import this file in UEd 2.0 only with "Brush > Import" and the entire Q3 geometry was imported as a single brush. A friend of mine tried to build the map but UEd crashed because it had too many nodes.
This was a first crappy result but I have also to add some other infos about this damn work. The only software I've seen till now that parses correctly a .T3D file is Google SketchUp which is able to do this work through a special plugin. I talked about it and its use in UT99 mapping in another post, pay attention to it:
http://www.teamcon.net/forum/viewthread ... #post_8461
SketchUp's .T3D files are standard-compliant and they can be imported without problems into UEd 2.0. So, after the previous method, I've tried this one to see how it goes. A first simple test went fine so I decided to redo the entire conversion starting from the .OBJ file exported by GTKRadiant. I opened the .OBJ file in SketchUp and then exported the map to .T3D format by using the plugin but during conversion SketchUp crashed. Truly, I see 2 reasons for this:
A) my old Toshiba notebook (P4 Mobile 2.8Ghz, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 7000 Mobile 64MB) is not suitable for this kind of operations
B) there are too many nodes in the original map and the software is not able to manage them.
If A, then I simply must use a better pc.
If B, then the "solution" is to apply the conversion Q3/UT99 to smaller parts of the original map (single brushes like buildings, houses, etc...). Maybe this is not compulsory for all maps but surely for the most complex ones. In this case, I think a good knowlegde of GTKRadiant is required to edit the original .MAP.
This is what I found till now. If you find a way to improve this workflow, please, let me know.
Thanks to all.
greetings,
Pietro