   what is a .bsp file?
  often i see downloads of particular .bsp files before allowing me to participate in online gaming... Is this a special file type created by the game publisher or generic?  What does it control in the game?  Thanks for any input,Eli, newbie to the max 
  According tohttp://www.ecs.umass.edu/ecs/formats.html#Bit''s a Quake map.  BSP stands for Binary Space Partition.  Generally, a .bsp file will hold all the level geometery, object and entity locations needed to describe the level.  The name "Binary Space Partition" comes from the algorithm used to store/sort the geometry.  I think various Quake-based games (Half-Life?) also use .bsp for the maps. ;  Theres an article over on Flipcode that takes you through the Quake 2 BSP file format which should give you some insight into the format and how it works ;  Albiet, several different games use bsp, and might not follow the same structure...   I don''t have a signature, sorry. ;  Technically speaking, BSP is a method of organising data in files. There are lots of games which use this method (Doom was the first. BSP wasn''t originally intended for games; Carmack read about it and though "sounds like a good idea"). They''re almost always used to store level data.Note that while a lot of games use BSPs, not all of them call them .bsp files (Doom uses .wads, after all, which have more than just level geometry in them). Note also that .bsp files from different games are not necessarily compatible, even though they use the same underlying data structure. ;  Thanks for your responses everyone.  I suspected it had a significant role in the gameplay since it is usually the largest file that i download before playing new levels.  Anyone know of a really intuitive and/or powerful editor for creating these files (.bsp or .wads)? Eli Colner ;quote:Original post by Stupid_Scholar  Anyone know of a really intuitive and/or powerful editor for creating these files (.bsp or .wads)? GTKRadiant, a very powerful level editor for Quake 3. Go to www.planetquake.com for more editing tools.