Got an entity def file today and wrote a reader for it. Entities are now showing up in the editor with their correct sizes and colors. Brush based entities highlight their edges so you know they’re special in some way. That doesn’t look so great though so I’ll have to come up with something else for that. Here’s a look!
One of the funniest things I’ve experienced with the writing of this level editor so far is the little mistakes I see in the id maps. Nobody is perfect of course and this is all completely understandable - especially since they built these maps while the tech was still being developed (been there, done that, still doing that). It affects me directly though because whenever I load a map into the editor and I see a texturing problem, i assume that my loader code must have done something wrong. I’ve learned to load the game now and check that area out before digging into the code. Here are two that I saw recently:
Again, completely understandable but each one has caused me to have a momentary panic attack.
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!
Do you know how annoying it is to spend several hours wondering why your matrix rotation class isn’t working only to discover that the sin/cos functions are taking radians instead of degrees? I’ll tell you. It’s pretty fucking annoying.