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 3's advanced 3D engine is far different from the engines of Quake 1 and Quake 2, the basic principles of map design haven't changed. But, thanks to some new features, you now have plenty of toys to play around with. You can now work with shaders, fog, jump pads, mirrors, colored lighting, curved surfaces, and much, much more - things that were either not possible before, or usually frowned upon. Quake 3 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.

While the editor uses text-based *.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. The process is actually quite complex and takes a lot of effort to master, because even though the compiler creates the VIS data automatically, the mapper must control it in order to make it truely effective. 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, for example, 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 two major level editors available, Q3Radiant and GTKRadiant, both provide a fairly simple interface and decent help guides. You can find this software on the Quake 3 Downloads page here.

The big question is, which editor should you use? Most people will tell you GTKRadiant, because it's the newest available. The Q3Radiant project was cancelled long ago, and 202 - the newest version available - is far from bug-free. The two are very similar, and both of them take advantage of the entire Quake 3 engine, so it's really just something you have to decide for yourself. GTKRadiant is probably the best to choose because it has more functionality, better plugins, and is much more stable.

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 3 folder.

page 1 of 6
next page: entities