So I decided that Cheetah was a lost cause. Not because it’s a bad program but rather that it’s just not suited to editing Quake levels. I got it sort of working with my Javascript skillz but it wasn’t enough to make it something that I would want to make levels in long term.
With the release of Leopard I finally had my hands on XCode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0 so I decided to see if I could make something for myself that would edit Quake levels. Hey look!
A familiar view…
Deathmatch memories…
Single player goodness…
John Romero releasing the source to all the Quake maps created a great pool of test data! Now, it’s not an editor yet but it’s a nice viewer at least! 
You can see the basics of a 3D view, a 2D view and a texture browser here. A good start I’d say!
I couldn’t believe when my “clip polygon against plane” routine started working. I was amazed! I almost gave up. Truth be told it’s 99.9% functional. There are some maps that have a single face that acts badly (stretches off into infinity). I’m sure it’s correctable but I’m not doing it today. Fuck it, I’m getting drunk!
Anyway, THIS is now my pet project. Expect updates…
EDIT: Scratch that math error! I changed a “>” to “>=” in the clipping code and everything works now. Woot woot!
I’m envious!
That looks awesome! In Cocoa, too! Aah! Now I want to make a quake editor too 
(Oh, and that texture browser, is that an NSGridView? 
)
Thanks!
Nope! The texture browser is another NSOpenGLVIew, orthographic projection, and I just draw the texture tiles manually. It scrolls, zooms, filters, etc. Fun to work on!
I can promise you there is a demand for a quake editor on the Mac
Will you have a q3 bsp compiler as well? Will you open source it? Or have you thought about its release at all? 
I’ll release it when it actually does something, sure. Probably with source.
I have working versions of Quake1 BSP/LIGHT/VIS compilers with some additions that I made to them that I will package with the editor. I don’t really know much about Quake3 editing so I don’t think I’ll go there myself. But, with source code, hopefully someone else will.
Dude, that’s sick. I’d kill for a Mac Quake editor that had good tools and a competent UI/design sensibility.
I’d love to make my own assets and tinker with low poly characters and the like. Right up my alley (and totally coincides with a few game ideas I have).