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Comment by dmschulman | Hacker News Reader

The Unreal Editor was such a breath of fresh air compared to what Carmack at id had cooked up to create Quake maps. I worked in both editors as a young kid and the design paradigm with Quake, assembling a map in a void, left my maps with a host of problems usually related to planes not lining up correctly or having tiny gaps (leaks) which caused the map to not compile correctly or created an issue when actually playing the map. It drove me crazy.

UnrealEd on the other hand inverted that paradigm, instead of building your level a void you carved your map out of a solid mass. The geometry was much easier to work with and led me to really embrace Unreal's engine over Quake. I still loved Quake as the better game but Unreal's technology shined brighter for me as a young map maker.

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> left my maps with a host of problems usually related to planes not lining up correctly

Note that this was most likely an issue with the editors people were creating at the time. AFAIK nobody has managed to build the original QuakeEd's source code and that one didn't had those issues (mainly because it didn't allow much manipulation in the first place - most brushes are axis aligned and neatly arranged on the grid).

> UnrealEd on the other hand inverted that paradigm, instead of building your level a void you carved your map out of a solid mass

Which is funny because this is also what Doom did: like Unreal, Doom had you carve up negative space in a huge solid world. This approach was also used by other engines at the time, like the Sith Engine by LucasArts which was used in Jedi Knight (in that engine all world geometry is made by sectors creating negative space pretty much the same way like in Doom).

Although personally as a programmer i tend to favor positive brushes for their simplicity. I have written a 3D world editor that has both negative and positive brushes and the code to handle the geometry generation for negative brushes is like 10 times more than the positive brushes (i don't use BSP) due to all the edge cases from floating point precision.

Jedi Knight was one of my favorite games, but the (community-built?) editor was a nightmare. I did a lot of UT level editing, which was a lot more comfortable.

I remember the next version (UT2003?) put more emphasis on imported models to populate a sparse UT-style carved-out map, which I imagine made things a lot easier for most people, but sadly was the end of my level editing days. I never got into 3D Studio Max (or Maya?) enough to be able to create maps as nice as those of others.

Still, good times.

> the (community-built?) editor was a nightmare. I did a lot of UT level editing, which was a lot more comfortable.

Yeah, there are two editors, JED and JKEdit. AFAIK the latter was much easier but also it was shareware whereas JED is (or became) open source but harder to use but on the other hand it has more features. Also it is extensible and i think it uses some sort of text-based API to communicate with external programs since i've seen extensions being made in different languages. As the end result the entire community focused on JED (although there are still a few people using JKEdit).

But both editors work with the negative sectors directly while i think LucasArts' editor (Leia) had a more high level interface that was more similar to UnrealEd's subtractive BSP. The engine uses per-vertex lighting and i've seen some "artifacts" in the geometry that give me the impression that the geometry was generated through BSP subtraction instead of the more "hand-made" approach that JED has (i don't know about JKEdit).

(Also FWIW this was a similar case with the original DoomEd for Doom - unlike most editors made at the time and even later, in DoomEd the sectors were implicit and assigned through some sort of "floodfill" algorithm that found the connections between them, but in most Doom editors you had to manually create vertices, linedefs, sectors, etc)

> I remember the next version (UT2003?) put more emphasis on imported models to populate a sparse UT-style carved-out map, which I imagine made things a lot easier for most people, but sadly was the end of my level editing days. I never got into 3D Studio Max (or Maya?) enough to be able to create maps as nice as those of others.

Actually it made things harder for people since it added the requirement to use an external tool to create the assets - this was always (even today) was seen as a major drawback when it comes to modding. It isn't a big problem for big game studios because they have dedicated artists for making environment props and the level designers simply have a ton of premade props at their disposal so they don't need to actually make them themselves, but it is harder for solo and small team modders.

This is probably the reason why you see a lot of maps for games that come with in-editor tools (like Valve's games, despite having a clunky interface in Hammer, the brush tools are top notch and a ton of maps are made with that) or with a ton of premade modular assets (like Bethesda's tools which also encourage people to create reusable assets for others as mods as opposed to special single purpose assets).

Thanks for the long response! Brings back memories. I now know for sure I was using JED precisely because I was a teenager who wouldn't consider paying for JKEdit.

I also remember fiddling with surfaces to get nicer lighting, and being happy that I didn't have to do that for UT editing.

> Actually it made things harder for people since it added the requirement to use an external tool to create the assets - this was always (even today) was seen as a major drawback when it comes to modding.

Yeah, it was exactly why I stopped modding. I was more interested in level design than fiddling in a 'proper' 3D editor and I never got around to understanding 'skins'. Was a bit saddened by that and didn't like the idea of relying on other people to provide models for my levels.

I recall there being two competing community built editors. JKEdit and JED. I believe I used JED to make a few not so good maps. Good times indeed.

Indeed. I think it was JED that I worked with! UnrealED was a definite improvement.

I remember the revelation of realising that unreal used positive “null-space” instead of negative and being blown away... no more damned lighting leaks and placing giant boxes over everywhere I thought might have been the cause.

I think most of my love with editing as a kid was for the Build editor and Duke3D - you could make some impressive levels with a mixture of laying out walls/zones in 2D, and adjusting heights and textures in first-person 3D. Opening the existing levels was also possible and a great way to learn how they had been made. I swear I’ll remember parts of the sector ID tag list until the day I die.

It’s kind of a pity that with the increased complication of engines and design that this is a much harder process to get started on. Though perhaps I’m underestimating the wonder even now of loading up a box room and the feeling of I made this...

Indeed. Even though the build engine was very limited in comparison to true 3d, it was much more WYSIWYG. The mix of drawing rooms as shapes and then jumping into 3d mode to decorate within the game engine was so fast and seamless. In unrealEd, each playtest loaded the full game which took forever on machines of that day.

Minor nitpick, but Carmack didn't create the tools for id's games. Romero made most of the early tools until his depature.

Carmck did do the tools for Quake, though. He wrote QaukeEd on a NeXTstep computer, I don't think id ever released an official Windows tool until QERadiant (which was after Quake III or somewhere around that time, and Robert Duffy ended up being the guy there that did the work on it)

AFAIK DoomEd was made mainly by Romero on NextStep too, but QuakeEd was mainly Carmack - although Romero most likely worked on it too. But that was the GUI, the command line tools that the GUI used were mainly Carmack in both Doom and Quake.

BTW Carmack released the source code for QuakeEd back in the mid90s [1], however it was written against the "traditional" NextStep APIs which were incompatible with OpenStep or GNUstep and AFAIK nobody ever ported it to anything nor managed to compile it.

EDIT: also id did release an editor before QERadiant - in fact this is how QERadiant came to exist :-P. They released QuakeEd 4 (i don't know what happened to the other 2 :-P) which they used for Quake 2 [2]. They also released the code for that which is what Robert Duffy used to make QuakeED 4 Radiant that actually made id hire him (you can read an interview with him here before he was hired [3]). The original editor was written in C and used straight Win32 API with a bunch of floating windows while Radiant converted it to C++ and MFC. AFAIK even though it was converted to Gtk through GtkRadiant, the MFC branch survived even in Doom 3 (which was embedded in the game and launched through the console).

[1] http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html

[2] http://www.quake2.com/qworkshop/info/qe4.htm

[3] https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/spq2/edit/duffy.htm

Huh, funny - when I was starting to design a Quake map, if I remember correctly, I would start by making a giant solid, and then carved out rooms from it. Am I remembering that incorrectly?

Nope, that was possible, but the boolean operations could lead to numerical instability if you didn't align your brushes to the grid at a reasonable granularity, which could still lead to leaks. The flooding code was generally pretty well done but developers had to bandage issues like this in every Quake-engine game.

FYI Unreal still had leaks (which lead to major performance issues if uncontrolled, due to the PVS being too inclusive), but it was not as pronounced as the negative space still allowed the map to finish building the BSP (Quake just failed, sometimes without a clue as to why).

Going from WorldCraft (Half-Life) to DromEd (Thief, Thief 2) was a similar experience for me. No more leaks.

Oh man, Half-Life is a treasure but Hammer was definitely not the most straightforward tool.

I miss DromEd so much... that was the only phase of my life where I was into map editing.

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