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Build custom deathmatch maps in vintage Quake

Quake’s pure brown deathmatch violence is, despite its age, eternal. Even when the FPS genre came of age, and became a hyper-realistic orgy of shiny blood and countless polygons, Quake’s fast, raw blasting (bar a few resolution, networking, and interface upgrades) stayed static. Not so for its map editors. Where once you were forced to wrap your head around constructing maps using 2D views covering three axes, now, with 3D editor TrenchBroom (plus a bunch of handy textures and some modernized compilation tools), you can do it in a manner much closer to playing the game itself. It’s even (whisper it) quite easy. So, let’s make ourselves a kickass deathmatch map, and learn about the muddy world of brushes, spawns, and more. Bear in mind that much of this hasn’t changed in the intervening years: The techniques we learn here can be applied to later Source Engine games, such as Half-Life and Team Fortress 2, although the editor can’t.… 1 FIRST STEPS TrenchBroom is very much a two-handed editor, as you need to make use of keyboard shortcuts (or a properly configured gaming mouse) to get the most out of it. So, we recommend you start by making sure you’re not using a trackpad; while it’s possible, it’s not pleasant. Grab the latest stable TrenchBroom package from http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/ and unzip it directly to c:/trenchbroom—it’s a bit finicky about folder names, so make sure you put it in that specific place. Once it’s installed and running, go to “View/Preferences,” and click “Choose” to set the path to your Quake installation.

The look of the TrenchBroom window on your first run won’t give you many clues as to what to do next. You’ll see a 3D gray rectangle on a foreboding black background [ Image A]. But try a few movement techniques: Hold the right mouse button and drag around to freelook, or use WASD to move around, and you’ll get an early idea of how easy it is to navigate through your creations. 2 BRICKLAYING FOR BEGINNERS Let’s begin by building a wall. Left-click and drag slightly on one of the top corner squares of your existing gray cuboid, and another cube should appear. This is a brush; all of Quake’s level geometry is made up of brushes. Move your mouse cursor over one of its faces, and hold Shift; the lines on the edge of the face should switch from red to white. Click and drag the face, and you move it,

expanding the brush along with it. If you keep Shift held and move to a different face, you can quickly mold a brush the size of a wall.

Watch for the values when you hover your cursor over a selected brush, and use them to stretch out your floor brush to 256x256 wide. Use your scrollwheel to zoom out if you can’t see far enough. Now use your newfound creation skills to build 64-unit-high walls around each edge [ Image B]. Bear in mind that you can’t create a new brush if there’s already one selected, so either left-click the black background, or use Ctrl-Shift-A to deselect everything. Next, select the floor, hold Ctrl and Alt, and drag it upward to create a copy, then use it as a ceiling. Ctrl creates a copy of an object, while Alt locks your mouse movement to the vertical axis. 3 PAINTING THE WALLS (WITH BLOOD) Now let’s add some color to our boring gray boxes. There are various ways to extract Quake’s textures from your id1.pak file, which we’re not going to go into here, mostly because they’re very awkward. Provided you own the full version of Quake, it’s OK to grab the texture wad from a site such as www.bspquakeeditor. com/files/quake_wad.zip, or even use a freeware texture wad.

Each time you create a new map, you need to tell TrenchBroom which texture pack(s) you’re using. Go to “Edit/Map Properties,” click the plus sign below the Texture Wads box, and point it toward your .wad file. Back in the editor, click “Face” near the top-right of the window to bring up the texture browser. Click one of your brushes, then click a cool-looking texture in the browser to paint it up [ Image C]. The offset, scale, and rotation controls at the top of the texture browser can be used to tweak the orientation of textures; hold Shift, and click on a single face to edit the texture of just that surface. 4 CUTTING DEEP Brushes aren’t immutable, and they don’t have to be rectangular, either. TrenchBroom includes three alternate editing tools, which enable you to pull off more complex maneuvers. You’ll find them in “Edit/ Tools,” but they’re more easily accessible using their keyboard shortcuts. Rotate (R) is fairly self-explanatory; it paints a reticule on to the selected brush, which you can drag to rotate it over three axes. The vertex tool (V) allows for complex manipulation of all the points of a brush, rather than just its faces. But let’s look at the clipping tool (C) for now, and use it to cut a door into one of our walls.

Select one of the wall brushes and hit C. It’s highlighted in orange—left-click anywhere, and you’ll see a vertical line appear, with one half of the block highlighted, and the other not. Click another spot on the wall, and the line intersects the two points [ Image D]. Hit Enter, and only the previously highlighted part remains. Try it again: Hit Ctrl-Z to undo the last clip, hit C to re-enter clipping mode, then click two points marking one edge of your door frame. Now press Ctrl-Enter twice to change your clipping mode—the