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

Quake 2's engine doesn't differ much from Quake 1's, except for its included support of OpenGL. Other than colored lights, there really aren't any new aspects to be considered. Most of the improvements between the games are in the area of entities, where Quake 2 is far more flexible. Most of these newer entities, however, are primarily for use in single player maps. The basic principles of map design, of course, remain the same between the two games. Quake 2 still 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 actually invisible to the player, although some may tell the game to display a model in a certain location (such as an ammo box).

While the editor uses *.map files for development, 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 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 game is given instructions on how bright each pixel of a texture should be depending on where it is, and also the colorization to apply to it.

Getting Started

Once you get the hang of working with maps, and especially if you've done it for earlier games, 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 three major level editors available, Worldcraft, Qoole, and QERadiant, all provide a fairly simple interface and decent help guides. You can find this software on the Quake 2 Downloads page here.

The big question is, which editor should you use? Most people will tell you that QERadiant is the best, and they're basically right. QERadiant includes some of the best features and stability of any editor, and it also seems to be the easiest to use. Worldcraft is more beginner-friendly, but it can be cumbersome - especially if you want to work with more complex maps. Qoole pretty much falls in between the two - it can be slightly troublesome at times, but it allows you to work with fairly complex environments. It's really just something you have to decide for yourself, so I suggest that you download all three and play around with all of them.

Speaking of stability, 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 somewhere else on your hard drive besides your Quake 2 folder.

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