I'm no mapping master myself, so if any UK mappers fancy coming down to do some projects here, I'd be excited to hear from them. You can find my contacts on the site. 

Willem:
Thanks, the ToeTag editing suite project looks great - really ambitious. I think I'll keep working with the 2.30 code for now, since I have it all set up to compile on Windows, and the stuff I'm fixing in GNUstep will apply to the ToeTag suite as well.

Here's an update on Windows ToeTag:

Recently fixed/implemented:
- the texture searching box updates as you type
- mouse event handling, so now the camera/editing controls work and you can actually do some mapping!
- The circular slider control for rotating textures

Still need to do before a beta release:
- Fix saving
- Add release/retain calls (could be the reason saving doesn't work)
- The toolbar doesn't work
- Fix a bug with the preferences window (text field doesn't get the quake directory you select)
- Package this into an installer
- Testing/polishing 

I really feel for you having to do this via retain/release as none of the code was written with that in mind. I hope it isn't too painful. I just can't work without garbage collection these days. :) 

Our 2 days of mapping workshops for 12-16yr olds finished on Friday - I don't think I can answer any more questions for the next week !

Our PPC Macs were probably a bit under-powered to run ToeTag smoothly, but the enthusiasm of the 14 kids on the project was great to see. We had a range of approaches from the "build a cube map and fill it full of monsters", to some pretty nice teleporting and triggered traps.

One thing that is pretty clear after it, is that these poor children need you to release LevelEd, Willem! 

Haha, so cool. :) 

A workshop for learning how to make maps? Why doesn't the US education system offer classes like these? That is too coooooool. 

 

It's not formal education as such, I work for an independent arts charity. Learning in a very broad sense. In my department we do a whole range of creative technology stuff, from software training to weekends on circuit-bending or techniques for making sensor driven installations using the Arduino. Anything I can think of and find experts to tutor, really.

These mapping workshops were the quickest selling days for young people that we've done, so I think it's easily something to be developed further. The group were super-keen, some already mapping for HL2 and RPG's.

Good way to spend a couple of days though. 

Sounds awesome! 

ToeTag is, by far, the most organized and clean level editor that the Quake community has ever seen. A Windows version is a MUST. 

I would like an alternative to Radiant. Hammer doesn't count. Please answer my lonely cries. 

There was a port under way ... is that still going? 

Glad to hear you guys are keen on it :-)

I've been a bit busy lately, but the last major thing left to do is the memory management. Right now, you can map for about 30 seconds, and then it runs out of memory. The toolbar is also broken, but I made some progress getting it working.

Once the memory management is done, it should work well enough to do an alpha release. I'll keep you posted! 

Right now, you can map for about 30 seconds

Sounds like a good speedmap theme... 

the hour not for sleeping

and my interest in seeing how this is going spiked

heh. 

Yeah, while I wait for the Starcraft 2 Beta Battle.net to GET THE FUCK UP AFTER SHUTTING DOWN 3 MINUTES AFTER FINALLY INSTALLING THE GAME AFTER WAITING ALL DAY FOR MY BETA CODE it would be good to hear some positive news on this project :D 

It's going pretty well! I fixed up the memory management stuff last week, which was probably the most tedious part of this.

There are still a lot of bugs to fix - it's not really usable yet. If you want to check out the current state of the port, grab the following installers:

http://ftpmain.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/binaries/windows/gnustep-system-0.24.2-setup.exe
http://ftpmain.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/binaries/windows/gnustep-core-0.24.3-setup.exe
http://www.ualberta.ca/~ericw/ToeTag-0-setup.exe

I don't know if this will work, but it would be cool to hear if you can start it up! 

Is there a way to run that exe on Linux (like some Mono applications)? 

but the only reason you can't compile it natively on Linux is there are a few bugs in GNUstep with having multiple OpenGL views in X11. Once those are fixed, it will run on Linux :-) 

nothing happened. i see the process in the task manager, but nothing pops up.

w7 x64 

Same for me on WinXP (in VirtualBox). I also tried going back to the GNUStep theme (as the installation suggested a possibly-bad Windows theme which I let it set) with no effect. Started ToeTag.exe from the (nice!) shell. 

i tried with the shell program. it just gave me a command prompt (what's nice about that?) and i took a stab in the dark and just typed 'toetag'.

but same result, i see it in task manager, but nothing pops up. 

I probably did something silly. I need to set up a fresh Windows VM for testing. 

There were some problems with the Preferences window. Try opening the GNUstep terminal and typing:

defaults write ToeTag quakeDirectory "c:\your quake dir" 

didn't seem to do anything, same thing happens as before.