Difference between revisions of "Getting Started Mapping"

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Basics of Quake Level Creation

This article is meant as a basic introduction to how a Quake level is constructed. This tutorial will use the modern Quake editing software Trenchbroom (PUT LINK HERE) in it's examples, but everything covered will apply to all editors for Quake. The goal is to teach a new level designer what goes into making a map, the terms used, what compiling is, and how to compile and play a created map. If you have ever created levels for the other Quake games, or for the Half-life/Source engine games, all of this will be familar.

What's a map!?

A Quake level is created in level editing software specifically designed for the task. There are several editors availible, and all of them create .map files. These .map files are used by Quake compilers to generate the final .bsp file levels that can be loaded by the Quake engine. Think of the .map file as a blueprint, and it contains instructions of how to make all the solid geometry of a level, and where all the lights and monsters and pickups should go. There are 2 major objects used to make these instructions: Brushes and Entities.

Brush: Your basic building block!

Our basic building block for constructing a level is the brush. All of our level's solid geometry will be constructed from brushes. But what do we mean by 'brushes'? The semi-technical definition in Quake level creation is that they are convex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex) polyhedra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyhedron). The less technical definition is that they are 3D objects made of faces which cannout 'see' each other. Most commonly, you will use cubes or cuboids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuboid), but know that any convex polyhedra is allowed.

It's ok if your head is spinning from reading all that, even if you don't fully understand that definition, using brushes in Quake editing software is easy, and the hard work of mathmatically defining them is done for you, hidden away in the background. All you need to do is plop them down, and arrage them to make the walls and floors of your level!

Entities: The life of the party.

So we have brushes to define our world's geometry... but it wouldn't be a Quake level without guns and monsters! And entities are just that, they are any of the functional objects defined in the game code for you to place into your level.

There are 2 types of entities: Brush entities and Point entities. Brush entities are things like doors, platforms, and trigger volumes; they are any functional object which need brush geometry tied to them to do their job. Point entities are things like weapons, monsters, and lights; they are all objects which are just simply dropped into place (at a point) in the world.

Entities of both types have various properties that can be edited by the designer to modify specified effects on the entity. Each property is a combination of a 'Key', which is the name of the properties, and it's 'value'.

For indepth information on entities, see http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Entity_guide

Putting it together.

Now that we have definitions out of the way, let's actually build a simple level.