First, as usual let me say that the idea may be stupid. However let's say it anyway, this forum section is here for this...Hi! Yesterday a guy on Discord told me about how to make a Quake Live map load into OA.
In case you are interested, I'll sum it up here:
1) Get a QL map pk3 file (there is at least one website which allows you to download files from Steam Workshop -a place where you can find third party QL maps- without the need to log into Steam. I don't link it here because I'm not sure it's 100% legal.).
2) Open the .bsp file in it with a Hexadecimal editor (such as
HxD hex editor).
3) Locate the "2F" (47) in the top line (probably at offset 4) and change it to "2E" (46), and save the file.
4) As the modify you just made to the .bsp causes the .aas (bot navigation file) to be considered "outdated", if you wish to play with bots you need to update/recreate .aas using BSPC tool (like "bspc -forcesidesvisible -optimize -threads 4 -bsp2aas mapname.bsp"... if you are a mapper, you know). Maybe there is some way to manually tweak the .aas file instead, but I don't know.
5) Update the .pk3 with your custom .bsp and .aas files.
6) Load the map in the game. You should not receive "CM_LOADMAP: MAPS/MAPNAME.BSP HAS WRONG VERSION NUMBER (47 SHOULD BE 46)" anymore.
, but I personally tried it with three maps, and they more or less turned out to work.
- The first map (kidcooler) clearly was using all custom textures, so no texture missing. But bspc took a long time to run, showed a lot of warnings about bevels and mergewindings and at the end failed due to running out of space for reachings. Compiling without "-forcesidesvisible" created the .aas file instead, but then the bots would not move unless they were seeing an enemy.
- The second map (aerospace) easily compiled .aas file and bots seem to navigate quite well. I was surprised to see that it had very little missing textures, it looks like I've been lucky with it.
- The third map (wintersedge) easily compiled .aas file and bots seem to navigate quite well. But it showed a lot of missing textures (opting for a snowy-themed map backfired, it seems. However also with those from q3a, you can find some maps which show many mssing textures. And OA3 will have that "auto missing texture replacement system" which may mitigate the problem.).
Of course, no QL-specific items showed up (e.g. no green armor +25), but the maps seemed actually playable anyway (apart from the problems I mentioned above). Although the process to make them work, while not so hard, still isn't actually comfortable for average users.
To come to the topic title... the "idea" is "
what about doing a test allowing the game to also load version 47 maps, then try more third party QL maps to see if they would work well or not?" In case the results are acceptable, maybe one may consider keeping the feature (although maybe still mentioning it's not an official supported feature and one would use it at his own risk), or remove it otherwise?
I don't know if that would be an engine or gamecode thing, however it should be a very little change.
Note: the fact that so many descriptions of this list of maps (I think various were converted from Q3 to QL[1]) mention "bot working" makes me fear that QL bots files may not be completely compatible with Q3... but I can't tell for sure, I have no idea about how to test at the moment. I don't know about the process/the tools used to create maps for QL, and for my tests above I simply used the BSPC version I use for OA maps.I don't know how the licensing of third party QL maps works... but probably, shouldn't be so different than using the old (pre-gpl) Q3 maps and mods in something different than Q3 (and hey, QL maps probably are even made using GPL tools nowadays, I don't know). Of course, I would point out that users would do that at their own risk.
[1] Of course if a Q3 version of a certain map exists, it should be better to use that one instead. 
