Map Making for QuakeWorld TeamFortress

MAKE YOUR OWN MAPS

MAPMAKING SOFTWARE AND UTILITIES

There have been diverging opinions on what the best level editor for Quake actually is. Over the years there have been a few, most notably QuArK, BSP, and the more popular Worldcraft, which was eventually purchased by Valve and made into the Hammer Editor. While it is possible to still use WorldCraft to make Quake 1 maps, functionality for this has been removed from newer versions and the Hammer Editor. See the notes at the bottom of this page for using WorldCraft 3 with Quake if you feel you must. But if you're considering that, it's likely because you don't know J.A.C.K.

JACK is a full featured clone of WorldCraft in terms of layout and function, and adds a bunch of notable improvements to texture and vertex manipulation, carving, and lots of other good stuff. To take full advantage of what you can do with JACK now, you REALLY need to add EricW's TyrUtils to it. These are replacements for BSP.EXE, VIS.EXE and LIGHT.EXE that give you a whole new world of possibility.

Download JACK NOW.

Download EricW's TyrUtils NOW.

There are instructions in the EricW package to install them, it's not hard. This will give you native options inside JACK for all of the new features and functions, too... improvements to sunlight, and lights (and colored lights), and so much more. The other really important thing about the EricW replacement tools is that the new BSP allows you to use multiple WAD files - whereas the one that ships with JACK does not, terribly inconvenient. So, DO this.

If you happen to be one of those poor souls who cannot run JACK (maybe you've got a Mac?) a fantastic alternative is TrenchBroom. It is very different, but is actively being developed and has a really impressive set of tricks up its sleeves. There are also some great tutorial videos being produced to help you get started.

WORLDCRAFT NOTES:

WorldCraft 1.6 was the last version to natively support original Quake maps, however WorldCraft 3 can support them if you install the WC3Adapter which helps to bridge the gaps in the formats (specifically, WorldCraft 3 only supports the WAD2 texture format, but the WC3Adapter fixes that issue).

If you want to stick with WorldCraft, follow the instructions in "WC Installation.txt" to be sure you're set up properly. Remember as this is a later version of WorldCraft (the last one before becoming Hammer) it does not directly support Quake maps, so you will also need the WC3Adapter and a copy of something like TexMex for managing textures. I recommend TexMex anyway, no matter what you use.

MAP MAKING FILES

Map-making sites still online (or online as part of an archive) as of June 2017:

QuakeAddicted - https://www.quaddicted.com/files/ and https://www.quaddicted.com/

  • HUGE ARCHIVE OF QUAKE FILES, MODS, UTILITIES and MORE

Celephais.net: http://celephais.net/

  • Home of FUNC_MSGBOARD - a great forum for mapmakers and developers.

WorldCraft The Forge: https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/worldcraft/index2.shtm

  • The Forge is a page devoted to information about creating levels for Quake with the Worldcraft editor by Ben Morris. We've collected information from all over the net and gathered it here in an easy to understand format. Everything from basic tutorials on making your first room to advanced tips from professional level editors.

The Blueprints Archive : https://web.archive.org/web/20050904174741/http://www.backblast.com:80/blueprints/

  • "The Blueprints Archive" is a site which contains many answers to hundreds of questions I received about level design for Team Fortress and its popular mod, Mega-TF, from the beginning of 1997 to the present. Here you will find year's worth of Q&A format questions, text files, zip files, and last but not least, an archived Real Audio Show in which I covered many different topics. >-DyerMaker->

Philipp Nahratow Creating Models For Quake 1: http://pnahratow.github.io/creating-models-for-quake-1.html

  • This is kind of a tutorial/gathering of infomation about creating a model (specifically enemy model) for quake 1.

Blender Import/Export Script for Quake (idtech2) MDL files: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/Quake_mdl

  • If you're looking for a modern tool to create 3D models for Quake, Blender is free and beyond fully featured. This addon script will allow you to import and export native Quake MDL files.