introduction | entities | environment | gameplay | performance | publishing

This guide should be helpful to both beginners and advanced mappers alike. It contains information on aspects like environmental design, gameplay considerations, performance techniques, and more.

The Engine

While Quake 1's 3D engine is far different from the newer engines of games like Quake 3, the basic principles of map design aren't really any different. The simplicity of the engine makes Quake 1 an excellent game to start with, because it is much easier to build maps for. There is no colored lighting, there aren't very many textures, and a builder doesn't have to worry about things like curves and caulk. Quake 1 uses the standard brush and entity system, using LIGHT and VIS stages in compiling the BSP.

Huh? Well, if you're new to mapping, that last sentence probably didn't make a whole lot of sense to you. There are two parts to a map, and two parts to the map's compiling process. The parts of the map include brushes, the static physical parts that the players move around on; and entities, the active parts that tell the game what to do, such as light entities, ammo entities, or sound entities. All entities are invisible to the player, although some may tell the game to display a model in a certain location.

Every map must be compiled into what is called a BSP, which contains all of the data on brushes, entities, VIS and LIGHT. Data for VIS and LIGHT is created during the compiling process. The VIS stage helps the game to determine which parts of the map need to be rendered depending on where the player is standing - this increases performance, because instead of rendering the entire map at one time, the game ignores the parts of the map that are invisible. In Quake 1, VIS is fairly simple to control... somewhat because the game has good performance to begin with, and also because there is not as much flexibility so users don't have to do as much to control it. In the LIGHT stage, the light entities are rendered onto the textures of the map. Instead of having to calculate how much light to display on a wall in real time, the engine is given instructions on how bright each pixel of a texture should be depending on where it is.

Getting Started

Once you get the hang of working with maps, and especially if you've done it for other games using the Quake series engines, you'll find that it's really a fairly simple process. Creating a map that's playable and beautiful takes quite a bit of effort and practice, but there's nothing too complex about creating brushes and entities. The two major level editors available, Worldcraft and Qoole, both provide a fairly simple interface and decent help guides. Both of these programs were discontinued years ago, however, so they may be difficult to find. They are both available on the Quake 1 Downloads page here.

The big question is, which editor should you use? There are significant differences between the two. I personally prefer Worldcraft, because it is simpler and it seems to have less problems. I think Worldcraft is a good editor for a beginner to start with. Eventually, a really advanced mapper should probably move to Qoole, since it has more flexibility when it comes to curves and other more complex parts. It is more difficult to use, however.

While mapping, always remember to be prepared for problems... you will, after all, have problems. The most important thing you can do is save your map in stages. In other words, save a new copy of the map every time you make a major change - such as adding a room or changing some lighting around. This not only makes it easy to undo the change, it also gives you plenty of versions of your map to go back to in case something goes deathly wrong. On top of saving in stages, frequently back up your map files in a second place on your hard drive.

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