Hi, I have been searching for some documentation on the half life 1 map format(.bsp). I havent been able to find a single documentation, like the quake3 map format. Ive downloaded the half life sdk, and looked through the source to see if i could figure it out but its to trivial. Does anyone know of any documentation for this format? thank you

Half Life uses the Quake 1 engine, so the Unofficial Quake Specs would seem to be a good starting point. Chances are there are some minor variations (IIRC Half Life had coloured lightmaps, so check out this Quake 2 BSP documentation), but it shouldn't be too tricky to figure out with a good hex editor.

The only differences between Quake 1 and Half-life 1 BSPs are:

• Structure names (the Unofficial Quake Specs were written before the Quake source code was released).
  
• The version number in the file header.
  
• Order of the lump size/offsets in the file header (bspfile.h in the Half-Life SDK has the correct order).
  
• Content of the lightmap lump: Half-Life stores RGB in three bytes instead of monochrome in one byte.
  
• Mipmap offsets in the texture lump may be zero: this indicates the texture should be loaded from an external WAD file.
  
• Each mipmap is followed by a 16-bit integer (always = 256) then 256 RGB values (texture palette).
  

Thanks a bunch!