Why make a new package?
The Radiant editor -- being a very complicated piece of software -- is not easy
to install and configure properly. I tried a few versions of Radiant and in
most cases I got errors when building the editor. I was unable to correct
these errors even though I am a fairly experienced programmer. The only version
of Radiant that I was able to build w/o problem is the official package of
NetRadiant that you can download from
icculus.org. Even this package has IMHO an unnecessarily complicated build
system, and provides no automatic configuration of game packs. Game pack
configuration must be done manually and involves editing arcane XML files. This
is certainly not for a beginner who just starts mapping and has no experience
with this kind of stuff.
I decided to make a clean package of NetRadiant that would be easy to build
and install even for beginners who have no programming experience. You only
have to modify a couple of lines in a config file (simple text editing), then
use 'make' followed by 'make install' to get a fully functional editor package
(including preselected gamepacks) installed to a preselected location.
I also believe that Radiant should have as much documentation on mapping
(tutorials, technical documents about map formats, etc.) as possible. This
stuff should be installed locally (after all, WEB links can disappear overnight).
I collected online documents and integrated them into the package so
that they are automatically installed and are always available locally.
I renamed the editor to 'LinRadiant' (under Linux) and WinRadiant (under
Windows) to avoid confusion and misunderstandings. I will try to keep the
source synchronized to that of NetRadiant.