lol Spirit.
I am only now learning how intense the "archiver's impulse" really is. It's extremely useful: hell without it, we wouldn't have classic literature. So props.

SleepwalkR: uhh, holy shit man. Awesome. Great idea with no 2d views as well. It should lead to less blockish/halls&rooms Quake maps (damn that first shot of Necros' map is a great example too). 

 

It looks totally amazing. And i'm impressed with your "3D only" design goal. 

for archival purposes / finding old versions. with this naming scheme you can only provide one version and it is going to be multiple versions (yay, confusion). old versions can be useful sometimes. 

Will do that once there's a new version. 

Will probably give it a try on my gfs mac at the weekend. No chance of a windows or linux port? 

An iPad version would be awesome! 

There will be ports to other platforms, but it will take time because I need to port significant parts from Objective-C to plain C. 

For a IPad version, I want to make Quake stuff on planes! :) 

Great work! The camera-only editing approach reminds me of an old level editor for DOS called GEOMETRY by Billy Zelsnack (anyone remember Prax War 2018? ;). I use to live by GEOMETRY for mapping. It took me a long time to switch to a Windows editor because I was so resistant to giving up DOS back in those days.

QUAKE editing/mapping/modding (and more generally id Tech) is a difficult thing to do outside of Windows. I'm an old schooler that has converted to using Mac's.

I've been fascinated with editing on the Mac because QUAKE was originally developed on NeXTSTEP (precursor to Mac OS X).

Oddly enough, I wanted to learn the proper ins and outs of programming and decided to try to get a QUAKE editor ported to Mac OS X -- starting with the original NeXTSTEP QuakeEd sources and eventually mixing various code bases (QE3/QE4/QE5, Radiant, etc). No intention to steal any thunder from SleepwalkR and TrenchBroom, so I'll save my editor banter for another thread at some point.

Some random questions for SleepwalkR:

How are you loading textures? I couldn't get my WADs to load, but that might be because I created them with qlumpy (which I think uses a different miptex format than what typically gets extracted from BSP files).

Did you build TrenchBroom from scratch or use anything as a starting point?

Is the "back end" code (rendering, core editing) Objective-C or C?

Any thoughts about open source?

My years of using QuakeEd/Radiant make me really resistant to different keyboard shortcuts. Thought about allowing people to customize the keyboard shortcuts?

I've tinkered with Willems ToeTag and I'm really happy to see TrenchBroom (and any other QUAKE editing/apps) being developed for Mac OS X! 

How are you loading textures? I load them directly from the wad files. I used these docs as a reference.

Did you build TrenchBroom from scratch or use anything as a starting point? It's from scratch. I purposefully did not use existing code because I wanted to approach problems with original ideas.

Is the "back end" code (rendering, core editing) Objective-C or C? Currently it's a mix of Objective-C and C. Math functions and performance-heavy code is pure C, but the rest is Objective-C. I plan to reduce Objective-C to an absolute minimum because it's slow and not easily portable.

Any thoughts on open source? Yeah, the source will be published under the GPLv3.

Thoughts about allowing people to customize the keyboard shortcuts? I am torn about this. On the one hand, I can totally understand that you would want to customize the shortcuts so that it matches your habits. On the other hand, I have kind of a daddy-knows-best approach. Apple doesn't let you customize keyboard shortcuts either, and for a reason: They have put a lot of thought into how the user interacts with their apps, and the same goes for TrenchBroom. That said, if you have suggestions or find the keyboard layout idiotic, I'm all ears. It's important for me to allow the users to edit maps quickly and efficiently, so if you think that I should approach it differently, then be sure to let me know.

That, and getting keyboard / mouse customization right is difficult. In summary: it may eventually happen, but it's not very high on my list right now. 

I am torn about this. On the one hand, I can totally understand that you would want to customize the shortcuts so that it matches your habits. On the other hand, I have kind of a daddy-knows-best approach. Apple doesn't let you customize keyboard shortcuts either, and for a reason: They have put a lot of thought into how the user interacts with their apps, and the same goes for TrenchBroom.
Has daddy made a lot of maps? Because sometimes programmers THINK they know what's best for users but are often wrong.

I don't actually know your history so I apologize if I'm uninformed. :) 

I used to do a lot of mapping back in the day, and the main reason for writing this editor is to have an editor that works the way I want it to. That, and I used it as an exercise to learn more about Cocoa, C and graphics programming.

But I do agree with the fact that programmers tend to misunderstand the needs of users, which is why I said that I'm very open to suggestions. 

Oh, OK, awesome! Yeah, that's what people really liked when I was actively working on UnrealEd here ... the fact that I was also a level designer meant that I "got it" when users requested features and would implement them the right way.

Microsoft used to call it "eating your own dog food". If you have to eat it, you're going to make sure it tastes good. :) 

Also, for a hobby project, I have found that if you don't have a use for an application yourself, you won't keep the motivation. I have worked on this thing for two years, mostly late in the evening and during my holidays, and I'm sure I wouldn't have come so far if I didn't have the motivation of making a tool for myself to use.

So, I'm really looking forward to getting actual hands-on feedback! Btw, the more I think about it, the more am I inclined to make the ports to other projects the highest item on my to-do list, because the group of Quake mappers who use a Mac is quite small... 

Time to buy a mac?

Or can I emulate this somehow? Wine? 

Congrats on the release :) 

yeah, congrats. :-) Will play with it as soon as I get a minute.

re: porting, I know I failed to deliver on this with Willem's editor, but it could be worth trying gnustep (or there's also cocotron, which i haven't tried) to do a windows/linux port. i'd be happy to look into it if you want.

mindabuse: cool, was this yours? http://code.google.com/p/quakeed-macosx/ (dead link.) 

Thanks! ijed, I don't think you'll be able to use emulation. You'll have to wait for the ports.

ericw, gnustepnis not an option for me. And porting the internals to C or C++ has other benefits apart from better portability: better performance, lower memory footprint and it gives me the. Hance to review and refactor old code.

I will need help with the Windows and Linux GUIs though (the Mac version will keep its Cocoa GUI. If anyone is interested in helping me with that, let me know. 

It may be an option to use Gnustep or Cocoatron, but only after the core has been separated from the GUI and rewritten in C. 

I'm sure I wouldn't have come so far if I didn't have the motivation of making a tool for myself to use.
In other words, you're going to release a map in the near future. Going to nail you down on that statement! 

Define "near future" ;-) 

Yeah, I set up that Google Code site with the hopes of putting my QuakeEd project up there. I ended up nuking that since github has appealed to me much more (social coding aspects, etc).

I don't have much up yet, but my intention is to put QuakeEd on github eventually:

http://github.com/jeremiah-sypult/

Are there many mappers out there that are also Mac users? I know it's not immediately related to TrenchBroom, but I'm curious if there are other forums/sites/places to poke around at since I've been out of touch with the mapping/modding scene for a while and am curious about mapping/modding on the Mac platform.... I found Func_Msgboard while searching for various QuakeEd-related projects (came across sikkpin's QE3 tree/fork, which is what my port is based off of).

GtkRadiant on Mac OS X with X11 was not maintained and was awful to look at (in comparison to a native Mac app, not to mention that I never ran X11 for anything else).

I appreciate that there's people out there that have an interest in QUAKE/id Tech development on Mac OS X. 

btw, how are you loading entity definitions?

please say structured text. ^_^; 

There's not a ton of Mac guys making Quake levels. It's a tiny niche within a small niche. :) But there are some...