Awesome New Quake Editor

After having downloaded the Quake.wad that somebody directed me at (thanks for that by the way) I have started making a map.

I like the simplicity of the editor, but I am not so sure if I like the fact that there are no grid views. Those exist in other editors for a reason. Editing the level in 3D mode only is a chore.

EDIT: Also, I cannot use the arrow keys to move in the camera move like the documentation says.

EDIT: Ok, this "3D mode only" is getting on my nerves a lot. I was under the impression that the fact brushes can only be moved up or down by halding the ALT key was to make sure that brushes would always be drawn at the same default hight to make editing easy.

Nope, it appears that bruses just appear pretty much were you draw them with the mouse, which means I have to constantly re-adjust their hight all the time. Also , it is very hard to be precise when you can't easily tell the differences in height and the like. I am starting to be of the opinion that this editir really needs a non-3D grid view.

EDIT: Yea, editing everything in 3D is really clumsy and crude. If the creator of the editor reads this, then he really should know that this editor needs a none-3D mode.

I think most of it is just having to get used to using 3D mode only, but I too believe a constrained grid view would be useful. It would be useful for viewing map layout at-a-glance: Something as simple as switching the faces to "don't render" and panning out to view the whole map from either the x, y, or z axes.

But honestly, this is the least of my niggles. A novice mapper like myself lives and dies by an editor's documentation -- the excellent ZDoom wiki might very well be the only reason I'm even here on this forum, contributing the various projects -- and Trenchbroom is lacking in this area more than any other right now.

schwerpunk said:

I think most of it is just having to get used to using 3D mode only

No.

Being someone who has made a few maps for Doom 3 working in the 3D mode isn't the problem. The problem is that this editor expects you to ONLY work in the 3D mode, and this makes a number of things extremely hard.

A great example would be judging distances between 1 brush and another. With a 2D grid this is very easy, but in a fully 3D mode not so much. Having to do everything in a 3D mode also means that a lot of things take much longer then they have to.

I think I will personally pass on this unless changes are made so that there is at least some kind of a grid view and that you aren't limited to working only in the 3D view.

I have to side with HG on this one.

It's nice that there's a new Quake editor to get people reinterested in Quake editing, but judging everything by "sight" sounds like a horribly convoluted way to make maps with any kind of brush complexity, unless you're doing a lot of copypasting. I'm sure there's some shortcut which allows to you move brushes around with accuracy, but a grid view is still a better way of doing it imo.

I'll reserve my judgment until I can get into this a bit more. I also dislike having to "eyeball" things, but I'm not sure it matters so much in a game like Quake. It's kind of an abstract environment so you're not expected to have uniform scale and so on. As long as the editor manages leaks accordingly, I wouldn't have a huge problem.

Tried it. The work-flow in 3d only view is too clunky for brush-heavy detailed mapping. I feel this is more of a way to simplify 3d editing and use the Quake engine for a tinker-toy map building experience, somewhat akin to Minecraft. It's a shame. The tools that are included in it would be so much more useful if it had the additional 2d views.

I could see it being useful as a prefab editor for terrain meshes or something similar.

Oblige 4.28 comes with a tool called "qsavetex" which extracts the Quake textures -- place qsavetex.exe into the ID1 folder in Quake, run it, and move/rename the output file to where the editor needs it.

I think nowadays a Quake editor should simply read the textures directly out of the PAK files -- but perhaps that is a planned feature.

So it sounds like it's as annoying to work with as I expected. Gonna stick with Radiant. (Kind of) up for a Doomworld Quake mapping project, though.

Can anyone who has used Google Sketchup compare it the functionality of this editor? I guess I could check it out myself, but you know, effort. (I'll probably check it out anyway, btw :P )

I see a lot of people are complaining about it being difficult to judge distances, but can you not manually input dimensions when editing brushes like in Sketchup? Like, click on the object to adjust it and then manually type in "1.5" to make it automatically snap to 1.5 units?

I'm going to go ahead and retract my previous verdict. I've been messing around with it this weekend and had more than a few 'ah-ha!' moments. It's a matter of getting used to the keyboard shortcuts (Radiant users should be used to that already) and getting really locked into only having that 3d mode to work with.

I really love the brush manipulation mode, especially with multiple brush selections and the way it intelligently highlights vertecies occupying common coordinates. When you have your bearing, even by just laying down a floor or wall or what-have-you, it's not hard to find where you're brushes are at and where they are going. I've been getting by mostly by using ctrl-D to do duplicates and adjust the brush properties afterwards. It always pastes on the same position on the Z plane and can be positioned rather easily using just the arrow keys.

Just about all of my previous gripes really aren't valid once I really got a handle on the editor. I have some fairly complex designs laid out in even less time than using Radiant. The only real gripe I have now is, why the lack of a built in front end for the compile tools?

The author says he plans on adding Quake 3 support in the future. Hopefully not too long down the road.

I forgot to mention that there are also other problems like the documentation doing nothing to show you how to make things such as doors, exit switches, switches, and moving platforms.

The documentation only shows you how to edit brushes more or less.

The documentation needs way more stuff.

- custom QuakeLive maps my friends, can never be wrong

why the lack of a built in front end for the compile tools?

THAT.

With vis, txqbsp and light, I had to set up a "command prompt session" for these tools after I saved, also a seperate one for getting ezquake to load the map I was working on.

This happened to be my first quake map and was just a test to see if I could actually make one, which is just a box :P

hardcore_gamer said:

I forgot to mention that there are also other problems like the documentation doing nothing to show you how to make things such as doors, exit switches, switches, and moving platforms.

The documentation only shows you how to edit brushes more or less.

The documentation needs way more stuff.

Speaking of doors, I still haven't figured that one out. Anyone care to elucidate this for the rest of us lost souls?

schwerpunk said:

Speaking of doors, I still haven't figured that one out. Anyone care to elucidate this for the rest of us lost souls?

This guy has a lot of useful video turorials for Quake editing, and its how I have so far been able to more or less learn how to use this editor at last: http://www.youtube.com/user/UZI9MMAUTO/videos?view=0

His tutorials are technically for another editor, but 90% of the stuff he shows you can be applied to this editor as well for the most part with there only being a few minor diffrences to how things are done since he is using another editor. Just keep it in mind that a few things such as CSG Subtraction aren't in Trenchbroom. Like I said, these tutorials aren't for TrenchBroom, but they are still very helpful just the same.

Here is the one where he talks about doors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZRXZIReZjY&list=PLFibQH3rmT5h6KvZPF-P5O1xNUj_nP0SX&index=12

For those who are interested, I created a playlist containing all of this guy's tutorials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtSd76TQnB4&list=PLFibQH3rmT5h6KvZPF-P5O1xNUj_nP0SX&feature=mh_lolz

About 40min worth of work. I'm getting pretty quick with it.

Looks very cool Ed.

Since I am still learning how to get use to this whole 3D editing thingy (90% of my maps have been for Doom/Doom 2) my own work so far isn't as impressive looking, but I think it isn't so bad.







I am aiming for this to be my first finished Quake map and it won't be very long. Basically a short map that contains at least 1 on each element of Quake mapping (1 elevator, 1 button at least, at least 1 trigger etc).

Once it is finished I will post it here so that others can comment on it :)

This thing does get kind of frustrating when trying to judge the distance between things. Other than that, it seems easy enough to learn as long as you're willing to look up the ancient quake map specs from '96.

Also, Quake techbases are boring and have fewer texture choices than Wolfenstein.

EDIT: Also, "grid size 1" and "don't snap to grid" should be the same thing. If it's not done with the grid, it ends up being between grid units, as in between the smallest unit possible and Trenchbroom crashes when I try to fix it by dragging the vertex with the mouse without a grid.

Fiend said:

Also, Quake techbases are boring and have fewer texture choices than Wolfenstein.

Which is why most Quake maps aren't tech bases.

Quake isn't like Doom where a full third of the game takes place in a pure tech-base world. Quake was more about exploring wierd alien worlds.

I do agree that the tech-base maps in Quake kind of suck, though. They just look and feel extremely bland.

Keep in mind TrenchBroom is a work in progress and many features are underdeveloped or still on the todo list.

I think a distance checker is planned. Until then, perhaps increasing the grid size to 64 or 128 may help. Btw, don't use grid 1 for basic editing - it makes things unnessarily complicated.
As for a compiler front end, there's a simple GUI by necros (Windows only). Personally, I prefer the command prompt over front ends and in-built scripts, but I'm used to compiling that way ever since I started mapping.

The documentation will be updated as well, though I don't think there's going to be game-specific information as this isn't in the scope of the edtior. I recommend loading some existing .map (e.g. the GPL id sources) to get an idea how the entities are used. In the case of a door, for example, you simply select a brush, then right click and "create brush entity -> func_door". The angle key determines the movement direction. Each entity has several additional options available that unfortunately are currently not displayed in the entity tab, however (open the quake.fgd in a text editor to see).

neg!ke said:

Keep in mind TrenchBroom is a work in progress and many features are underdeveloped or still on the todo list.

I think a distance checker is planned. Until then, perhaps increasing the grid size to 64 or 128 may help. Btw, don't use grid 1 for basic editing - it makes things unnessarily complicated.
As for a compiler front end, there's a simple GUI by necros (Windows only). Personally, I prefer the command prompt over front ends and in-built scripts, but I'm used to compiling that way ever since I started mapping.

The documentation will be updated as well, though I don't think there's going to be game-specific information as this isn't in the scope of the edtior. I recommend loading some existing .map (e.g. the GPL id sources) to get an idea how the entities are used. In the case of a door, for example, you simply select a brush, then right click and "create brush entity -> func_door". The angle key determines the movement direction. Each entity has several additional options available that unfortunately are currently not displayed in the entity tab, however (open the quake.fgd in a text editor to see).

Yea I knew its still work in progress just pointing it out.

Also, are there any plans to make the editor work for Quake 2 maps also?

Quake 2 and 3 support are planned. Once that's in, it'll also be possible to map for a wide variety of games if you have the right entity definition files.

I dabbled a bit with it.

Really, really wish I could use WASD to move around instead of being forced to use the arrow keys. Hell, even ESDF would suffice. I'm just too used to how, in Hammer, you can press Z and proceed to fly around Source maps with ease, I guess? Also, texture movement, while typically functional, is occasionally unresponsive, and it seems to favor blocks on the X/Y axes instead of X/Z or Y/Z (Z being up/down in this case, regardless that's actually what Quake considers the Z axis).

Of course, the biggest issue I have is that, as always, I'm faced with a blank slate and take a while to figure out what the hell I'm gonna put in it...

Way better than Hammer.

Progress..

http://i.imgur.com/jSipnaT.png

Ed said:

Progress..

http://i.imgur.com/jSipnaT.png

That looks awesome.

geo said:

That looks awesome.

What he said! Great job so far!

That looks like one awesome Quake editor! I still don't have Quake but when I get it and play the game then I'll get this editor and see if I can get the hang of it.

Ed said:

Progress..

http://i.imgur.com/jSipnaT.png

Really nice brushwork. I'm looking forward to seeing it in a properly rendered state.

While I share lots of people opinions that this editor has some cool new features, I still feel that at least some kind of a 2D grid should be added, even if its entirely optional. I just can't get used to this 3D mode only editing. So many things just feel so clumsy and slow because of it.