News | Forum | People | FAQ | Links | Search | Register | Log in
TrenchBroom - A Modern Quake Editor For Mac OS X
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.
First | Previous | Next | Last
W00p! 
 
Yeah 
sounds good 
 
wow, that sounds great! let me know if you need some windows testing. ;) 
I Will 
Once I got something to show. 
Which One? 
"I have decided to do the interface using an OpenGL GUI toolkit so that it is portable."

Which one do you plan on using if you don't mind saying? 
Gwen 
Google for Gwen Gui and you'll find it. It's better than all other toolkits I've looked at, but it's still very cumbersome in comparison with Interface Builder. 
Web Browser Based Version 
I think Warren mentioned sometime ago that he was trying to do a webgl version of toetag but gave up for whatever reason. I think it would be pretty cool if there was an editor that worked in a multi-platform browser such as Chrome. Chrome currently supports all kinds of ways to access files as well as WebGL. For GUI stuff it would be possible to use jQuery.

Would anyone else like to see a web app version of this or any other Quake editor?

For what it's worth, Insomniac, developers of Resistance and Ratchet and Clank started using browser based tools and say their tools are pretty awesome now (not just because they are browser based, however), so it's probably not nearly as shitty as you might think if the tools are made well. 
WebGL 
Keep in mind this is just one opinion, but a few months ago I seriously was playing with WebGL. But it would be a ton of time and effort to maintain a WebGL version since Javascript and C derivative languages share little in common.

And then there are the major security issues of WebGL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL , there are sadly several which the statement "The reports provided example exploits capable of cross-domain image theft, graphics memory theft, and client-side denial of service." touches on), which I think may terminally prevent it from being seriously adopted ... and as a result as far as I know only Chrome and FireFox will support it "out-of-the-box". Safari has it disabled, although it is used for advertising within apps on iPhones and such. Internet Explorer will not support it.

I don't think WebGL can ever take off since it is easily possible to make a harmful web page with it if one choose too.

I like the idea of WebGL, but as security issues are a major concern on the internet, I think WebGL has no future.

/One opinion 
Hmm 
That sucks I guess. But surely those security issues will get patched? What alternative is there for 3d on the web? What about performance? MS probably won't support webGL because it's not webDirectX.

It is entirely possible to make an app that runs in the browser but is loaded from client side files. However, I suppose if it's easy enough to make a portable native app, then you might as well just stick with that, since it will give better performance. 
Java Applets 
Can access OpenGL directly, and are portable. If I were to make a browser-based editor, I'd check out Java applets. But I'm not ;-) 
Looking Forward To The Windows Version 
 
Prefabs And Instancing 
haven't tried it yet (windows lol), but does the prefab stuff work like instancing?

e.g. change the prefab and this ripples through to all your instances of that prefab already in the scene... 
 
!!(!) instancing would be insanely awesome. even more so if it worked for anything.

ie: in 3ds max, when you copy any object, you can make a copy or an instance without having to make something specifically as an instance. 
Yeah 
i'm always doing shit like having a million copypasta'd light fixtures then somewhere down the line i decide that I wanna change the design slightly, and having to track down and change every single one again is just about the worst thing ever. 
 
Proper, Max-style instancing would make this the one and only true editor. Seriously. 
 
Like many awesome features, QuArK has cloning. And since it also has groups (think folders), it is really super duper awesome. 
 
Quark is, unfortunately, an abomination. :) I've tried to use it several times and give up within 5 minutes. The interface is absolutely atrocious. 
Yeah 
Very 90's retro UI, could never get my head around it enough to build anything. 
 
Weird, I would say it is much more standard and intuitive than any of the Radiant editors for example. Or any other Quake editor I ever saw. 
 
If you say so. My brain recoils at the mere sight of the Quark interface. 
 
And mine vomits tarbaby sauce if I see a Radiant. 
 
Yeah, you're different, I get it. Most other people feel the opposite way. Quark is bizarre, at best. 
 
Yeah, it's weird. I would like to see some generic Windows user sat infront of Radiant or QuArK and see which one they are able to use immediately. 
Editor Fails 
Quark is not quite the worst Quake editor ever made - that award has to go to the commercial product "DeathMatch Maker". Features:

1) the grid is decimal. I'm not joking. You simply cannot make geometry to the power-of-2 grid, only units of 10, 20 etc.
2) No graphical texture browser, just a list of texture names. 
 
Interesting side note ... I gave a talk on level design at a local business and afterwards, one of the guys who came up to ask me questions was the writer of DeathMatch Maker. He seemed totally normal too... 
First | Previous | Next | Last
You must be logged in to post in this thread.
Website copyright © 2002-2024 John Fitzgibbons. All posts are copyright their respective authors.