Agreed! I used it to build the maps for my 13kb Quake demake[1]. Compared to q3radiant that I used back in the day, Trenchbroom is just so much more pleasant to work with. In hindsight it seems totally obvious that _this_ is the way a map editor should work.
func_godot works better than I expected it to the first time I used it, properly imports and compiles triggers, lights, materials, sounds, etc straight from trenchbroom so you really can do 90% of your work in trenchbroom. It's awesome for prototyping!
> I grew up using Hammer and this simply blows it out of the water.
Strange to read "I grew up using Hammer." when I still see Hammer as a newfangled update to Worldcraft.
No Quake map editor will let you do anything the Quake engine can't, of course.
If you draw your maps on paper first, as id Software did[0], then the editor you use doesn't matter so much.
J.A.C.K.[1] is the current torchbearer for the Hammer lineage.
Also there is a community fork of Trenchbroom[2] that exists because Trenchbroom includes slop. Or "machine generated code" or "wAIfu generated code" or however salves your feelings.
I remember back when I was heavily into making Doom 2 maps, I had a sort of Tetris effect where I started seeing real world building interiors as the sectors and textures that I could use to recreate the building in Doom.
I tried Quake map making, but the 3D tools were too complex for young me to figure out, also my PC was too slow to use them.
I am working on a new project and looked at both TrenchBroom and NetRadiant. Neither of them were very usable for me. I am familiar with old and new UnrealEd so I ended up using that since it is a free download now with the OldUnreal release.
Cool article, never knew the actual history of how Trenchbroom got started! Have been using it very casually over the last decade or so. There are some incredible Quake mappers out there making things that would make your jaw drop if you haven't seen Quake in quite a while.
For example, Arcane Dimensions[0] or the Quake Brutalist Jam[1]
Anyone looking to get into single player Quake should grab an engine like IronWail and just go through all three Brutalist Jams. These are essentially map packs with contributions from various mappers, linked by a museum like base map (as many jams do). Each successive Brutalist Jam pushes the boundaries of what a thirty year old base game can still do.
TrenchBroom is great. I am the maintainer for Neverball (which is incidentally one of the games that does still use the old style texture projection). TrenchBroom was the first Quake editor that already had a functional Neverball gamepack without me having to do a thing.
Trenchbroom is very good, but I still think, it's not the best possible map editor. It uses brush-based approach, which isn't the right way of designing maps for games in closed spaces (like Quake). Creating each room requires creating at least 6 brushes for its walls/floor/ceiling, which is way to much for such stuff. On the other hand Unreal Editor (for first Unreal and Unreal Tournament) supports creating rooms directly (as subtractive brushes), when two room primitive touch each other, they are automatically connected.
I tried both and both are interesting. Conceptually the brush approach seems more intuitive for some types of maps. Like making a few rooms that come out into an open space or some oddly shapped stuff like pyramid rooms, etc. I dunno, both are interesting and once you got used to the approach, the additive system works pretty well.
Back in the day I made a lot of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament maps. The Unreal Editor was a lot buggier than Radiant but the workflow was far superior. You could bang out a floor plan quite fast with the subtractive approach. No caulk textures to deal with either (a special texture that the renderer ignored for the sides of the boxes used to create the walls that the player never sees).
I know nothing about this scene, but interested to know more. I remember hearing that Unreal Tournaments engine used this subtractive model internally so it is not strictly editor ux decision?
I don't know what Unreal Tournament did use internally, it's hard to investigate, since there is no (official) source code release for it. But I do know, that brush-based (additive) approach isn't strictly necessary for creating maps for Quake/Quake II/Quake III, it's technically possible to write a map compiler taking maps in some subtractive format. The reason why it's not done (or at least not common) is because it's not a trivial task and because existing infrastructure adds some friction.
It is neat all of these years later to see Qt pop up now and then, just chugging along with comments from users like the author saying "Yep, that was worth it.". Just doing its thing getting out of the way and letting users build what they want to do.
Trenchbroom is legitimately among the best software I have ever used. I grew up using Hammer and this simply blows it out of the water.
One nice thing is that you can use it as a level editor for your own games in Godot with func_godot
Agreed! I used it to build the maps for my 13kb Quake demake[1]. Compared to q3radiant that I used back in the day, Trenchbroom is just so much more pleasant to work with. In hindsight it seems totally obvious that _this_ is the way a map editor should work.
[1] https://phoboslab.org/log/2021/09/q1k3-making-of
func_godot works better than I expected it to the first time I used it, properly imports and compiles triggers, lights, materials, sounds, etc straight from trenchbroom so you really can do 90% of your work in trenchbroom. It's awesome for prototyping!
> I grew up using Hammer and this simply blows it out of the water.
Strange to read "I grew up using Hammer." when I still see Hammer as a newfangled update to Worldcraft.
No Quake map editor will let you do anything the Quake engine can't, of course.
If you draw your maps on paper first, as id Software did[0], then the editor you use doesn't matter so much.
J.A.C.K.[1] is the current torchbearer for the Hammer lineage.
Also there is a community fork of Trenchbroom[2] that exists because Trenchbroom includes slop. Or "machine generated code" or "wAIfu generated code" or however salves your feelings.
"The map editor everybody uses" is reductionist.
[0] https://xxcancel.com/romero/status/643540836072992768
[1] https://jack.hlfx.ru/en/
[2] https://codeberg.org/NextBroomTeam/NextBroom
I remember back when I was heavily into making Doom 2 maps, I had a sort of Tetris effect where I started seeing real world building interiors as the sectors and textures that I could use to recreate the building in Doom.
I tried Quake map making, but the 3D tools were too complex for young me to figure out, also my PC was too slow to use them.
I am working on a new project and looked at both TrenchBroom and NetRadiant. Neither of them were very usable for me. I am familiar with old and new UnrealEd so I ended up using that since it is a free download now with the OldUnreal release.
Cool article, never knew the actual history of how Trenchbroom got started! Have been using it very casually over the last decade or so. There are some incredible Quake mappers out there making things that would make your jaw drop if you haven't seen Quake in quite a while.
For example, Arcane Dimensions[0] or the Quake Brutalist Jam[1]
[0] https://www.moddb.com/mods/arcane-dimensions
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vquTPCYbOxk
Anyone looking to get into single player Quake should grab an engine like IronWail and just go through all three Brutalist Jams. These are essentially map packs with contributions from various mappers, linked by a museum like base map (as many jams do). Each successive Brutalist Jam pushes the boundaries of what a thirty year old base game can still do.
TrenchBroom is great. I am the maintainer for Neverball (which is incidentally one of the games that does still use the old style texture projection). TrenchBroom was the first Quake editor that already had a functional Neverball gamepack without me having to do a thing.
Trenchbroom is very good, but I still think, it's not the best possible map editor. It uses brush-based approach, which isn't the right way of designing maps for games in closed spaces (like Quake). Creating each room requires creating at least 6 brushes for its walls/floor/ceiling, which is way to much for such stuff. On the other hand Unreal Editor (for first Unreal and Unreal Tournament) supports creating rooms directly (as subtractive brushes), when two room primitive touch each other, they are automatically connected.
I tried both and both are interesting. Conceptually the brush approach seems more intuitive for some types of maps. Like making a few rooms that come out into an open space or some oddly shapped stuff like pyramid rooms, etc. I dunno, both are interesting and once you got used to the approach, the additive system works pretty well.
Back in the day I made a lot of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament maps. The Unreal Editor was a lot buggier than Radiant but the workflow was far superior. You could bang out a floor plan quite fast with the subtractive approach. No caulk textures to deal with either (a special texture that the renderer ignored for the sides of the boxes used to create the walls that the player never sees).
I know nothing about this scene, but interested to know more. I remember hearing that Unreal Tournaments engine used this subtractive model internally so it is not strictly editor ux decision?
I don't know what Unreal Tournament did use internally, it's hard to investigate, since there is no (official) source code release for it. But I do know, that brush-based (additive) approach isn't strictly necessary for creating maps for Quake/Quake II/Quake III, it's technically possible to write a map compiler taking maps in some subtractive format. The reason why it's not done (or at least not common) is because it's not a trivial task and because existing infrastructure adds some friction.
Couldn't this be solved by "map compilation"? IIRC, Hammer etc. did something like that. Occluded faces were removed.
It is neat all of these years later to see Qt pop up now and then, just chugging along with comments from users like the author saying "Yep, that was worth it.". Just doing its thing getting out of the way and letting users build what they want to do.
Trenchbroom is excellent and fun. Many game devs use it to block out levels or make entire games.