InsideQC Forums

Hi everyone,

after two years of work, I am releasing the first beta of my Quake editor for Mac OS X, TrenchBroom. It is the result of an experiment where I tried to find out how Quake editing would be like if you could do it directly in the engine - that is, in 3D only. Consequently, TrenchBroom has only one big 3D view and an inspector (which you can hide anytime).

Go to kristianduske.com/trenchbroom for a screenshot and downloads.

Some highlights:
- renders even large maps smoothly
- support brush and alias models in the 3D view
- create new entities by drag and drop
- create, move, rotate, and resize brushes with the mouse
- clip brushes using the smart 3 point clipping tool
- create new vertices by splitting edges and faces or merge two neighboring vertices
- move vertices, edge and faces without creating invalid geometry
- texture lock that also works for rotations
- prefabs
- brush groups
- builtin compilation tools (TxQBSP, MH's light version, Willem's vis version)
- autosave, since this is a beta and all

Thanks to Bengt Jardrup, MH and Willem for their compilers and to Gom Jabbar and Vigil and other #tf guys for feedback.

Okay, that's it for now. I hope there are some people who will find some use for this. I'd certainly appreciate it if you reported any bugs, problems or feedbacks to me either here or via email to kristian.duske@gmail.com.

Can I say you're a master? Can I say it?
Really wonderful project!

Just a suggestion: layers system support would be great

The brush group feature will be extended so that groups can also contain entities (and other groups). What else do layers do?

The version which I had uploaded before didn't render edges at all. Uploaded a fixed version already.

SleepwalkR wrote:The brush group feature will be extended so that groups can also contain entities (and other groups). What else do layers do?

Well, layers give more much controls to scene management. With layers you can hide a part of a level or just freeze it to use as "mask", so you can see that geometry but you can't touch it and use it as a reference.
Another good point of layers is the stack structure they have.
If you have a window with a stack of layers that have a name YOU give them, the development process become more flexible and easy

The groups feature in TrenchBroom does all that with the exception of freezing groups, but that can easily be added. TBs groups can be named and hidden / shown, and they will be hierarchical in a future release. I think apart from the freezing, they're pretty much similar, or am I missing something here?

Looks really cool! Great job. Any chance of a Win32 port ?

Yes, Windows and Linux versions are planned, but it will be quite a while.

SleepwalkR wrote:Yes, Windows and Linux versions are planned, but it will be quite a while.

i may have found an editor for which i might trade out worldcraft for then! looking nice guys! Would also be cool to get with the RemakeQuake (i think it is) guys and see about their upgraded quake map format?

Yeah, support for alternate Quake map formats is also on the to-do list.

Congrats, SleepwalkR.

DarkRadiant has nice layers support, the main thing here is the UI. There is a Layers window similar to Photoshop / Gimp's and menu options for Add to Layer and so on.

BSP2 is purely a new version of the BSP format, the map format remains the same. No changes needed...

Okay, but the point of PS layers is that their order matters. How does the order of layers affect the editor? I don't think "layer" is a good metaphor for what this functionality does because it applies that the layers have some sort of natural order...

yeah, I think gb's point was that DarkRadiant's layers UI is GRAPHICALLY similar to famous 2d graphic softwares ones = it's like a stack of names one above another. Of course top-down order doesn't matter in 3d app, but, if you see Blender (which doesn't have a "standard" layer system), 20% of user complaints are referred to the difficult of using layers! (I love blender but levels system sucks)
This because people use to have their nice layers stack which eye icon, renaming feature, hierarchy nested and so on

Okay, I understand. So the main complaint is the fact that it's named "groups" instead of "layers". I'll consider a name change when I start implementing the missing features for groups then, but again I feel that the term "layers" is a bit misleading here. Thanks for the feedback and explanations!

layers? is groups visgroups? what is the convo about? im honestly a little confused.