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The Unreal Editor was such a breath of fresh air compared to what Carmack at id had cooked up to create Quake maps. I worked in both editors as a young kid and

The Unreal Editor was such a breath of fresh air compared to what Carmack at id had cooked up to create Quake maps. I worked in both editors as a young kid and the design paradigm with Quake, assembling a map in a void, left my maps with a host of problems usually related to planes not lining up correctly or having tiny gaps (leaks) which caused the map to not compile correctly or created an issue when actually playing the map. It drove me crazy. UnrealEd on the other hand inverted that paradigm, instead of building your level a void you carved your map out of a solid mass. The geometry was much easier to work with and led me to really embrace Unreal's engine over Quake. I still loved Quake as the better game but Unreal's technology shined brighter for me as a young map maker.

VikingCoder 9y ago
Huh, funny - when I was starting to design a Quake map, if I remember correctly, I would start by making a giant solid, and then carved out rooms from it. Am I remembering that incorrectly?
- Negative1 9y ago
  Nope, that was possible, but the boolean operations could lead to numerical instability if you didn't align your brushes to the grid at a reasonable granularity, which could still lead to leaks. The flooding code was generally pretty well done but developers had to bandage issues like this in every Quake-engine game. FYI Unreal still had leaks (which lead to major performance issues if uncontrolled, due to the PVS being too inclusive), but it was not as pronounced as the negative space still allowed the map to finish building the BSP (Quake just failed, sometimes without a clue as to why).
brobinson 9y ago
Going from WorldCraft (Half-Life) to DromEd (Thief, Thief 2) was a similar experience for me. No more leaks.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Oh man, Half-Life is a treasure but Hammer was definitely not the most straightforward tool.
- ThemalSpan 9y ago
  I miss DromEd so much... that was the only phase of my life where I was into map editing.
badsectoracula 9y ago
> left my maps with a host of problems usually related to planes not lining up correctly Note that this was most likely an issue with the editors people were creating at the time. AFAIK nobody has managed to build the original QuakeEd's source code and that one didn't had those issues (mainly because it didn't allow much manipulation in the first place - most brushes are axis aligned and neatly arranged on the grid). > UnrealEd on the other hand inverted that paradigm, instead of building your level a void you carved your map out of a solid mass Which is funny because this is also what Doom did: like Unreal, Doom had you carve up negative space in a huge solid world. This approach was also used by other engines at the time, like the Sith Engine by LucasArts which was used in Jedi Knight (in that engine all world geometry is made by sectors creating negative space pretty much the same way like in Doom). Although personally as a programmer i tend to favor positive brushes for their simplicity. I have written a 3D world editor that has both negative and positive brushes and the code to handle the geometry generation for negative brushes is like 10 times more than the positive brushes (i don't use BSP) due to all the edge cases from floating point precision.
- mercer 9y ago
  Jedi Knight was one of my favorite games, but the (community-built?) editor was a nightmare. I did a lot of UT level editing, which was a lot more comfortable. I remember the next version (UT2003?) put more emphasis on imported models to populate a sparse UT-style carved-out map, which I imagine made things a lot easier for most people, but sadly was the end of my level editing days. I never got into 3D Studio Max (or Maya?) enough to be able to create maps as nice as those of others. Still, good times.
  - kodt 9y ago
    I recall there being two competing community built editors. JKEdit and JED. I believe I used JED to make a few not so good maps. Good times indeed.
    - mercer 9y ago
      Indeed. I think it was JED that I worked with! UnrealED was a definite improvement.
sclangdon 9y ago
Minor nitpick, but Carmack didn't create the tools for id's games. Romero made most of the early tools until his depature.
- bluedino 9y ago
  Carmck did do the tools for Quake, though. He wrote QaukeEd on a NeXTstep computer, I don't think id ever released an official Windows tool until QERadiant (which was after Quake III or somewhere around that time, and Robert Duffy ended up being the guy there that did the work on it)
  - badsectoracula 9y ago
    AFAIK DoomEd was made mainly by Romero on NextStep too, but QuakeEd was mainly Carmack - although Romero most likely worked on it too. But that was the GUI, the command line tools that the GUI used were mainly Carmack in both Doom and Quake. BTW Carmack released the source code for QuakeEd back in the mid90s [1], however it was written against the "traditional" NextStep APIs which were incompatible with OpenStep or GNUstep and AFAIK nobody ever ported it to anything nor managed to compile it. EDIT: also id did release an editor before QERadiant - in fact this is how QERadiant came to exist :-P. They released QuakeEd 4 (i don't know what happened to the other 2 :-P) which they used for Quake 2 [2]. They also released the code for that which is what Robert Duffy used to make QuakeED 4 Radiant that actually made id hire him (you can read an interview with him here before he was hired [3]). The original editor was written in C and used straight Win32 API with a bunch of floating windows while Radiant converted it to C++ and MFC. AFAIK even though it was converted to Gtk through GtkRadiant, the MFC branch survived even in Doom 3 (which was embedded in the game and launched through the console). [1] http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html [2] http://www.quake2.com/qworkshop/info/qe4.htm http://www.quake2.com/qworkshop/info/qe4.htm [3] https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/spq2/edit/duffy.htm https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/spq2/edit/duffy.htm
misnome 9y ago
I remember the revelation of realising that unreal used positive “null-space” instead of negative and being blown away... no more damned lighting leaks and placing giant boxes over everywhere I thought might have been the cause. I think most of my love with editing as a kid was for the Build editor and Duke3D - you could make some impressive levels with a mixture of laying out walls/zones in 2D, and adjusting heights and textures in first-person 3D. Opening the existing levels was also possible and a great way to learn how they had been made. I swear I’ll remember parts of the sector ID tag list until the day I die. It’s kind of a pity that with the increased complication of engines and design that this is a much harder process to get started on. Though perhaps I’m underestimating the wonder even now of loading up a box room and the feeling of I made this...
- iforgotpassword 9y ago
  Indeed. Even though the build engine was very limited in comparison to true 3d, it was much more WYSIWYG. The mix of drawing rooms as shapes and then jumping into 3d mode to decorate within the game engine was so fast and seamless. In unrealEd, each playtest loaded the full game which took forever on machines of that day.

VikingCoder 9y ago

Huh, funny - when I was starting to design a Quake map, if I remember correctly, I would start by making a giant solid, and then carved out rooms from it. Am I remembering that incorrectly?

Negative1 9y ago
Nope, that was possible, but the boolean operations could lead to numerical instability if you didn't align your brushes to the grid at a reasonable granularity, which could still lead to leaks. The flooding code was generally pretty well done but developers had to bandage issues like this in every Quake-engine game. FYI Unreal still had leaks (which lead to major performance issues if uncontrolled, due to the PVS being too inclusive), but it was not as pronounced as the negative space still allowed the map to finish building the BSP (Quake just failed, sometimes without a clue as to why).

brobinson 9y ago

Going from WorldCraft (Half-Life) to DromEd (Thief, Thief 2) was a similar experience for me. No more leaks.

vvanders 9y ago
Oh man, Half-Life is a treasure but Hammer was definitely not the most straightforward tool.
ThemalSpan 9y ago
I miss DromEd so much... that was the only phase of my life where I was into map editing.

badsectoracula 9y ago

> left my maps with a host of problems usually related to planes not lining up correctly Note that this was most likely an issue with the editors people were creating at the time. AFAIK nobody has managed to build the original QuakeEd's source code and that one didn't had those issues (mainly because it didn't allow much manipulation in the first place - most brushes are axis aligned and neatly arranged on the grid). > UnrealEd on the other hand inverted that paradigm, instead of building your level a void you carved your map out of a solid mass Which is funny because this is also what Doom did: like Unreal, Doom had you carve up negative space in a huge solid world. This approach was also used by other engines at the time, like the Sith Engine by LucasArts which was used in Jedi Knight (in that engine all world geometry is made by sectors creating negative space pretty much the same way like in Doom). Although personally as a programmer i tend to favor positive brushes for their simplicity. I have written a 3D world editor that has both negative and positive brushes and the code to handle the geometry generation for negative brushes is like 10 times more than the positive brushes (i don't use BSP) due to all the edge cases from floating point precision.

mercer 9y ago
Jedi Knight was one of my favorite games, but the (community-built?) editor was a nightmare. I did a lot of UT level editing, which was a lot more comfortable. I remember the next version (UT2003?) put more emphasis on imported models to populate a sparse UT-style carved-out map, which I imagine made things a lot easier for most people, but sadly was the end of my level editing days. I never got into 3D Studio Max (or Maya?) enough to be able to create maps as nice as those of others. Still, good times.
- kodt 9y ago
  I recall there being two competing community built editors. JKEdit and JED. I believe I used JED to make a few not so good maps. Good times indeed.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Indeed. I think it was JED that I worked with! UnrealED was a definite improvement.

sclangdon 9y ago

Minor nitpick, but Carmack didn't create the tools for id's games. Romero made most of the early tools until his depature.

bluedino 9y ago
Carmck did do the tools for Quake, though. He wrote QaukeEd on a NeXTstep computer, I don't think id ever released an official Windows tool until QERadiant (which was after Quake III or somewhere around that time, and Robert Duffy ended up being the guy there that did the work on it)
- badsectoracula 9y ago
  AFAIK DoomEd was made mainly by Romero on NextStep too, but QuakeEd was mainly Carmack - although Romero most likely worked on it too. But that was the GUI, the command line tools that the GUI used were mainly Carmack in both Doom and Quake. BTW Carmack released the source code for QuakeEd back in the mid90s [1], however it was written against the "traditional" NextStep APIs which were incompatible with OpenStep or GNUstep and AFAIK nobody ever ported it to anything nor managed to compile it. EDIT: also id did release an editor before QERadiant - in fact this is how QERadiant came to exist :-P. They released QuakeEd 4 (i don't know what happened to the other 2 :-P) which they used for Quake 2 [2]. They also released the code for that which is what Robert Duffy used to make QuakeED 4 Radiant that actually made id hire him (you can read an interview with him here before he was hired [3]). The original editor was written in C and used straight Win32 API with a bunch of floating windows while Radiant converted it to C++ and MFC. AFAIK even though it was converted to Gtk through GtkRadiant, the MFC branch survived even in Doom 3 (which was embedded in the game and launched through the console). [1] http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html [2] http://www.quake2.com/qworkshop/info/qe4.htm http://www.quake2.com/qworkshop/info/qe4.htm [3] https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/spq2/edit/duffy.htm https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/spq2/edit/duffy.htm

misnome 9y ago

I remember the revelation of realising that unreal used positive “null-space” instead of negative and being blown away... no more damned lighting leaks and placing giant boxes over everywhere I thought might have been the cause. I think most of my love with editing as a kid was for the Build editor and Duke3D - you could make some impressive levels with a mixture of laying out walls/zones in 2D, and adjusting heights and textures in first-person 3D. Opening the existing levels was also possible and a great way to learn how they had been made. I swear I’ll remember parts of the sector ID tag list until the day I die. It’s kind of a pity that with the increased complication of engines and design that this is a much harder process to get started on. Though perhaps I’m underestimating the wonder even now of loading up a box room and the feeling of I made this...

iforgotpassword 9y ago
Indeed. Even though the build engine was very limited in comparison to true 3d, it was much more WYSIWYG. The mix of drawing rooms as shapes and then jumping into 3d mode to decorate within the game engine was so fast and seamless. In unrealEd, each playtest loaded the full game which took forever on machines of that day.