Designing maps for Doom vs Quake

[tsunstealer]

Like the title says, but which would you recommend first for a beginner? I only have experience with Wolfenstein 3D level design currently, so I understand some general guidelines with designing maps, but I am aware that the limitations of Wolfenstein 3D are absent in Doom and Quake. I am not asking which game is better, I am only asking which is easier to get started mapping with. 

[ketmar]

with Doom, you are basically drawing a 2d top-down map view, and then assign heights to its parts (it is slightly more complicated, but it doesn't matter here). and with Quake, you have to design in full 3D (like, real 3D objects, side by side in 3D space).

 

so, switching to Doom maping will be the natural move. it is way easier to draw a doom map than a quake map. once you master that, you can move further. or stay with Doom, you can do wonders with Doom engine.

[Jello]

Doombuilder is very intuitive, but I started with Worldcraft making levels for Quake, and it's dealing with 3D shapes. So to me, that makes more sense than drawing lines with Doombuilder, despite Doombuilder being simpler. Your mileage will vary, and I can see advantages to both. Doombuilder is easier and simpler than 3D editing like you would get in Quake. In my case, I started with Quake editing, and therefore it makes more sense. 

 

But yeah, they're completely different. Mapping for Doom is like making a map on graph paper, mapping for quake is like working with Lego. Which is a very simplistic way to put it, not denigrating either community, they're just very different. My personal preference is mapping for Quake/Half-Life with Worldcraft/Hammer Editor. Trenchbroom does a good job as well, but I prefer 3D mapping.

[boris]

While getting started mapping in Doom is easier, it doesn't mean that getting started mapping for Quake is hard. It does seem very daunting at the beginning - just compare creating a square room in Doom vs creating one in Quake, and then actually playing it in-game. But once you get the hang of it, creating stuff because surprisingly easy.

In fact there are things that are much easier in Quake than in Doom. Imagine having a room filled with crates, and support beams for decoration at the ceiling, overlapping with the crates. Now you want to move the crates. It'll be a comple clusterfuck in Doom, while you'll simply move the crates in Quake, completely ignoring the ceiling.

 

If you want to look into Quake mapping I strongly recomment dumptruck_ds's TrenchBroom tutorials. He also runs the Quake Mapping Discord, which has plenty people who don't get tired answering newbie questions.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Disclaimer: Take this with the grain of salt that I've built and released a bunch of Doom-engine maps (with a bunch more unreleased) but as far as Quake-engine stuff goes have only ever built minor rooms/arenas/test maps rather than anything that can be called "finished".

 

Ultimately I'd say mapping for Doom tends to be more quick and simple but mapping for Quake tends to be more intuitive.  It may depend on how your mind works of course.

 

In Quake you can think of all the structure you lay into the map as "chunks of stuff" (the technical term is "brushes" for whatever weird reason), like building with blocks or Legos.  Each wall is a brush, the floor is a brush, that pool of water you can swim in is a brush, the trigger that makes you explode into bits of steak when you fall into that trap is a brush, etc.  That, to me, makes a lot of sense, compared to some of the ways Doom-engine stuff works, but it often means that you have to put in more individual "chunks" to get the same sort of area.  Lights are also something that exists as individual entities which can be both a good and a bad thing, you have a lot more control over lighting and it's more intuitive, but this also forces you to think about how the lighting should work a lot more (though note that if you target certain Doom ports, Quake-style light entities are potentially an option).  One of the big downsides of this system is that you can run into problems with the infamous "map leak" issue, where you have to make really sure that all your walls/floors/ceilings meet up anywhere that they seal off the rest of the "world outside the map".  By nature you don't generally have to worry about Doom maps getting "cracked open" this way unless the editor you use is really old and bad or you did something really weird.

 

In Doom mapping, what you lay into the map are the open spaces, or sectors (be wary of saying "rooms" because that's sort of misleading--a conceptual "room" may be made up of many sectors, rather like a "room" in Wolfenstein 3-D is generally multiple tiles.  "Area" might be better, with the understanding that they can sometimes be very small areas).  Every sector has a floor and ceiling built into it, in terms of both what heights the floor and ceiling are at and what textures they use, as well as the level of light in that area, and some paper-thin lines bounding it that can serve as the walls, steps between different floor/ceiling heights, or just passable connections between sectors.  Triggers happen mostly when you use or cross a line, although there are some sector types that do things to the player as well (like floors that hurt to stand on).  So you can sketch out large and weirdly shaped areas very quickly since every "wall" is just a line you can draw as part of the bigger shape, but places where you want to have a lot of complexity in the floor/ceiling/lighting of a room can be a mess like boris said.  Modern editors have made that a lot more manageable by letting you just draw lines across other lines and the editor figures out where the splits have to be for you, but it still can get kind of ugly on the map in those situations.  (Then again a complex 3D layout of brushes can get hard to interpret too, but I think most Quake editors have an option to hide parts of the map you're not working on for that very reason).

 

Also bear in mind that while nearly anything in Quake can be done in Doom nowadays using the right port extensions, that can result in a whole new level of weirdness.  I'd be hard pressed to think why I'd pick trying to do things like 3D floors/swimmable water in Doom over Quake beyond a desire to make something requiring them for that game specifically.

 

IIRC the technical terms are that Quake mapping is based on "positive space" (what you block in corresponds to the solid/interactive parts of the map) while Doom mapping is based on "negative space" (what you block in defines the open spaces).  If you want to try to compare it to Wolfenstein 3-D concepts (perhaps stretching things a bit), it's like Doom decided "the floor tiles are the most important part of the map, whatever's not a floor must be solid" while Quake decided "the wall tiles are the most important part of the map, whatever's not a wall must be open".

 

TL;DR - For simple, oldschool maps it's probably quicker and maybe easier to knock something together for Doom.  When you get into more complex stuff, it might matter a lot more what system you find more understandable to work with/what oddities you're willing to work around.

[Flesh420]

Quake mapping is fairly easy to understand, but takes a while to get fast with shortcuts.  So at first (and generally) it takes much Much more time to complete a map for Quake than Doom, for obvious reasons.  And say you're about 90% done with your Quake map then decide you don't like an area, it can be a huge pain to change it.

[tsunstealer]

Thanks everyone! Very detailed info and this certainly helped a lot. 
 

I think ultimately I will end up working with making maps for both games, and get a feel for both and see which clicks with me the most. 

 

I have doombuilder 2 downloaded already for Doom mapping. Is there any reason that I shouldn’t use that editor? I know everyone seems to say it’s the best (I have no true experience to prove otherwise), but there are SO many level editors for Doom so I’m curious if it really is the best to use for a beginner or if I should try something else? I’m already fairly familiar with Slade3 for editing everything else in Doom, in fact it even allows me to edit Duke Nukem 3D stuff and even Wolfenstein now thanks to ECWolf. 
 

For Quake I have Trenchboom and Quark downloaded. I know Trenchboom was mentioned earlier so that’s why I chose it. Is there any reason not to use these? 

[Gez]

Doom Builder 2 is a bit old, you're advised to pick up one of its successors instead (either Doom Builder X or GZDoom Builder Bugfix). Another alternative is Eureka. And of course there's nothing wrong with using SLADE's map editor.

[tsunstealer]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

Doom Builder 2 is a bit old, you're advised to pick up one of its successors instead (either Doom Builder X or GZDoom Builder Bugfix). Another alternative is Eureka. And of course there's nothing wrong with using SLADE's map editor.

Would Doombuilder X be sufficient enough if I want to make maps that will work for all ports of Doom? Like if I want it to run via Crispy Doom but also work on GZDoom? Or is it more suited around GZDoom type features? I hope to take things a step further at some point, but I think I want to design maps/wads that are easily compatible with various ports for now anyways. 

[Gez]

All the listed editors are sufficient for that.

 

You can assume that any map that works in Crispy Doom will also work in GZDoom. The reverse is not necessarily true, since GZDoom offers more editing features.

[Jello]

4 hours ago, tsunstealer said:

Thanks everyone! Very detailed info and this certainly helped a lot. 
 

I think ultimately I will end up working with making maps for both games, and get a feel for both and see which clicks with me the most. 

 

I have doombuilder 2 downloaded already for Doom mapping. Is there any reason that I shouldn’t use that editor? I know everyone seems to say it’s the best (I have no true experience to prove otherwise), but there are SO many level editors for Doom so I’m curious if it really is the best to use for a beginner or if I should try something else? I’m already fairly familiar with Slade3 for editing everything else in Doom, in fact it even allows me to edit Duke Nukem 3D stuff and even Wolfenstein now thanks to ECWolf. 
 

For Quake I have Trenchboom and Quark downloaded. I know Trenchboom was mentioned earlier so that’s why I chose it. Is there any reason not to use these? 

I don't have a whole lot of experience with Trenchbroom, but it seems pretty similar to WorldCraft/Hammer Editor. I always used Worldcraft, until Valve bought it and changed it be primarily for Half-Life 1 editing. It still works with Quake 1 and 2, but there's extra steps to get it set up, going online and finding files. I got used to doing that well before Trenchbroom came out, so it wasn't an issue. But if you're just beginning, Trenchbroom is good. It's quite a bit less work to get up and running, and functionally it seems the same. But again, I haven't used it all that much. But if I was you, I'd probably use it.

 

The J.A.C.K. editor wasn't too bad either the last time I used it. Looks like there's still a free download for it out there, although there's a version on Steam for $15, not sure what extra features the paid version offers, and the idea was that it could be used for making maps for any Idtech/Quake based engine, so Quake 1, 2, 3, Hexen 2, Half-Life (although for Half-Life, just use the Hammer editor). But again, Trenchbroom seems like it's fine. 

Edited November 23, 2019 by Jello

[zen4040]

doom(mapping) is way more fun and easier, quake gives you more options in terms of geometry but the textures and props provided aren't that interresting in my opinion. If you're going to map for quake tho, I'm pretty sure J.A.C.K is pretty much the engine everyone uses these days.

[snapshot]

Go with the free JACK editor if you want to get into Quake/hl mapping, not enough extras in the Steam version to make it worth getting and I think last beta was nearly 2 years ago. Small features like target indicators and render style previewing on the fly will make your life a lot easier. I've been stuck with Hammer for like ages and moving to JACK, felt much better. same layout, same controls, more convenient.

Edited December 10, 2019 by sluggard

[Woolie Wool]

On 11/23/2019 at 7:53 AM, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

IIRC the technical terms are that Quake mapping is based on "positive space" (what you block in corresponds to the solid/interactive parts of the map) while Doom mapping is based on "negative space" (what you block in defines the open spaces).  If you want to try to compare it to Wolfenstein 3-D concepts (perhaps stretching things a bit), it's like Doom decided "the floor tiles are the most important part of the map, whatever's not a floor must be solid" while Quake decided "the wall tiles are the most important part of the map, whatever's not a wall must be open".

 

TL;DR - For simple, oldschool maps it's probably quicker and maybe easier to knock something together for Doom.  When you get into more complex stuff, it might matter a lot more what system you find more understandable to work with/what oddities you're willing to work around.

 

How does Quake 1 compare to UE1 mapping? I always thought it was a terrible shame that Epic never opened the source on the original Unreal Engine. From what Unreal mappers have told me, UE1 is a 3D negative-space engine; the map is a solid block and you carve volumes out of it, and they claim it to be quicker, easier, and less likely to frustrate with leaks/performance problems than Quake mapping.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

@Woolie Wool I am not really the person to ask about that since as of right now my experience with Unreal engine editing is "opened the Rune editor once or twice".  Judging by some of these tutorials I looked up, it looks like it allows a degree of "best of both worlds" with how you build things--open spaces are defined by carving but you can also put in solid brushes to define platforms and such.  While Quake editors could do carving as well as solid brushes, at least in the old days my recollection was that it was not recommended since it could result in messy brush geometry and accompanying problems/inefficiency.  I don't know if that's been improved these days.

[Jello]

Carving could cause quite a few problems, especially if you were attempting to carve circles, or multiple carves in the same area. Carving a circle into a flat brush to get a hole in it, especially in a large floor caused a huge mess. Especially if you had a large number of edges, if you had 8 edges on the circle it wasn't bad, if you had 16 the whole floor started looking like a pinwheel; and it created a shitload of new large brushes. Or if you were carving into a brush that was connected to other brushes, if I recall, it seemed like the newly carved brushes would start spreading. It's been a while, but yeah I managed to completely fuck levels up with carving, it can create a leak that you can never track down.

 

The best use I found for it was punching a square hole in something else, as it was quicker than making four individual brushes separately. When making an arch for a door, I would just make the door outside of the level, do my carving there, then move put the door where I want it. Seemed to have fewer problems that way.

 

And I tried UT editing once or twice. Couldn't really get my head around it, and it kept crashing. Don't think my computer at the time was capable of running that resource hog.

[snapshot]

Never carve. Clipping tool is the way to go, if you really need to have a circle in your floor you should first use the clipping tool to cut out a separate brush that's big enough to fit the circle, that way it doesn't mess up the rest of the geometry. More complex terrain creation is done entirely with clipping and vertex manipulation.

[Flesh420]

On 12/12/2019 at 10:30 AM, Woolie Wool said:

 

How does Quake 1 compare to UE1 mapping? I always thought it was a terrible shame that Epic never opened the source on the original Unreal Engine. From what Unreal mappers have told me, UE1 is a 3D negative-space engine; the map is a solid block and you carve volumes out of it, and they claim it to be quicker, easier, and less likely to frustrate with leaks/performance problems than Quake mapping.

 

I had a hard time wrapping my head around UE mapping after learning how to map for Quake.  I wouldn't recommend UE editing if you've not mapped in full 3d.  An easy/best editor to use for Quake is hands down Trenchbroom.  And if you don't want to worry about leaks first get in the habit of using separate brushes for every wall, not using one brush for walls of two different rooms.  That took me a while to get accustomed to, for some reason.

 

This guy will have you tooled up and mapping in no time:

 

 

The Quake mapping scene is awesome.  You should certainly give it a go.  Play many maps, too.

Edited December 15, 2019 by Flesh420