introduction | entities | environment | gameplay | performance | publishing

Once you have the layout and the gameplay mastered, you can start to work on the third and final variable: performance. Luckily, in these days of 2 GHz processors and 64 meg video cards, Quake 1 hardly takes a bite out of the hardware it's running on. Not only that, but Quake 1 pretty much lacks any special effects that would bog anything down. Basically the only thing you need to look out for is the number of brushes you allow in any one area. Despite all this, there are a few things you need to look out for:

While you're creating your map, avoid building up brushes... in other words, do not put brushes inside of each other. It makes the map run slower and makes the BSP file larger, which increases your map's download size. More than one brush should never occupy the same space unless absolutely necessary. There are almost always ways to avoid this as long as enough care is given to the construction.

When editing brushes, use computer friendly numbers. Keep your maps snapping to a larger grid (8, 16, 32, etc.) as much as possible, as computers can process these numbers faster. The faster the processing, the smoother the map will run. For example, a brush that is 32 units by 32 units can be processed more easily than a brush that is 31 units by 31 units.

Don't make wide open areas if you can help it. Quake 1's engine doesn't like processing this much data, and can only display a certain number of faces before it will quit altogether. The negative gray area will show up in place of your farthest faces if you put too many brushes together.

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