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Comment by Jur | Hacker News Reader

I remember working with QuArK to build Half-Life levels which must have been somewhere in `98-`00. I loved building the levels and triggers for opening doors and moving elevators. I remember at the time being impressed with the sculpting from UnrealEd when it was introduced, but I don't recall it being more intuitive. Anyone else who used QuArK who has an opinion?

Seeing the screenshot with the gridview from QuArK brings back nice memories in any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Army_Knife

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This brings back so many sweet memories. I started with QuArK, then I was introduced to UnrealEd. I remember finding UnrealEd to be more clunky than QuArK. It also took some time for me to get used to the 'inverse' editing in UnrealEd (in uED you basically start with a solid block of infinite size, and then cut out the parts you want accessible by the player).

I then went on to make multiplayer maps for half-life (can't remember which editor I used), I still play those maps with friends.

After HL1 I went to college and couldn't afford a PC capable of running the newer games/engines, and that's where my map building hobby stopped, unfortunately. Nowadays the engines and tools are so complex, that it just takes too much time to build maps for a hobby IMO.

>Nowadays the engines and tools are so complex, that it just takes too much time to build maps for a hobby IMO.

What tools? I can't think of a single recent AAA game that actually has an editor besides Unreal and Unity and those are, IMO, just as easy to use now as they were back then. The processes are a little different but the basics are still pretty similar.

I didn't use QuArk, but I did use (and bought a copy of) Qoole[1]. I built several Quake2 levels some of which I released out into the wild:

http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/quake2/

I recently tried to get Qoole back up and running, but it really hasn't aged well. Making levels in it now, seems like way too much hard work.

[1] Qoole Screenshot: http://www.cs-h1.do.am/_ld/2/50880145.jpg

GtkRadiant and Trenchbroom are modern brush editors

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