I’ve been using these on my Mac for awhile now and figured that someone else out there might like them too! I found these on deviantArt one day while doing Quake searches. Heavily stylized with some brush outlining stuff. I like ‘em!
DM2 - Claustrophobopolis
DM3 - The Abandoned Base
DM4 - The Bad Place
DM6 - The Dark Zone
Sure, not that exciting in the grand scheme of things but a 2D grid is important. And now it’s working…
I’ve been messing around with selections lately. How they work, what they should look like, etc. Here’s a shot of what I have so far. Can you figure out which entities and brushes are selected?
I figure that should be clear enough. Heh.
Hey, that wasn’t THAT bad. I found the source MAP files that id used to generate the files for the ammo and health boxes in that big source drop that John Romero did awhile back. I imported those into my project, loaded the textures up manually, and used a subset of my MAP loading code to recreate them in the editor. You can now see pretty much everything in your level now. The level itself, monsters, ammo, health, torches. It’s all there!
I even added support for checking an entities spawn flags to determine which model to draw for it (so small vs large ammo, or normal vs rotted vs mega health).
OK, I’m going to have to get back to doing some serious work like undo/redo and selections but this was a fun side journey!
EDIT: That second shot is kind of spooky. If you didn’t know better, you might say that was in the game itself (with lighting turned off, of course). Cool!
No, not that kind.
I’ve been busy parsing the .PAK files that come with Quake and extracting the MDL files that live within. What a BITCH it was getting them parsed out correctly but I finally did it.
Grunt gang bang…
Oh shit…
This looks like a problem…
Grab the armor…
My next eye candy related quest will be to get stuff like ammo and health boxes showing up. Hmm….
Not that much to show today but I fixed a bunch of bugs. I read one time that if you have a bug you should stop all feature production and fix it right away. This gives you the best chance of having a solid application by the time you’re done. Plus, you don’t save all the bugs up for the end when the earlier bugs might now be hidden by other bugs and it gets really messy.
It’s hard not to work on cool stuff and hunt bugs but I’m going to try that on this app and see how it works out.
One visual thing I did today was get entities to use the same drawing routine as the brushes do so they can pick up the shading goodness. Here’s a quick look:
::click for huge version::
I think the shading on the various faces (depending on their normal) really helps with depth perception and gives the level viewport a sense of solidity that you just don’t get from full bright textures.
I know other editors have done this in the past - I’m simply acknowledging that they were right. 
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!
Well, not really, but it’s a reasonable fake in the Quake engine. It’s a pretty simple trick that other editors and exporters have used but I just added it to mine. What I do is have a special tag I place on meshes inside of Cheetah (in this case, just putting a “*” in front of its name). When my exporter sees that it treats every triangle of the mesh in question as a separate Quake brush and it adds polygons behind it to make it a complete shape. This leads to some exciting possibilities. Look at this mesh, for example:
It looks like I’m building a cliff or hill or something but that sky texture on top is out of place. Now suppose I delete the bottom polygons and open this thing up. If we then flip the normals on these polygons and look up from the bottom it looks like a canopy of cliff faces with sky above. Like this:
And here it is inside of Quake with some extra brushes added and proper lighting:
This opens up a lot of cool possibilities and really limits how much brush drudgery I have to deal with inside of Cheetah. I can rely on Cheetah’s strength in modeling shapes and let the exporter turn it into something Quake friendly. Love it!
Here’s another use of this technique, adding some rock details into the ceiling and some dirt piling up on the floor:
I foresee much fun with this!