Quake Map Development Environment

This is a development environment for making Quake maps with Trenchbroom on Arch Linux. This loosly follows the excellent guides from dumptruck_ds and jonathanlinat/quake-leveldesign-starterkit. When I started this project, quake-leveldesign-starterkit was made for MS Windows only, but it has since started supporting Debian Linux, so you may want to check that out first!

Pre-requisites

• Arch Linux
  • If you run MS Windows, use jonathanlinat/quake-leveldesign-starterkit instead.
• A copy of Quake installed (tested with the Steam version). (You only really need the id1 folder which you can copy from any install.)
• Your user account requires sudo privileges to install all the dependencies.
• You must enable the multilib repository.
• You will also need to pre-install GNU make and git:

sudo pacman -S make git

Setup

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/quake-dev ~/git/vendor/enigmacurry/quake-dev
cd ~/git/vendor/enigmacurry/quake-dev

Run the Makefile

At the top of the Makefile there are a number of environment variables that have default values, but one of them may be especially important if you didnt install the steam version:

• QUAKE_ROOT_ID1

This variable must be set to the full path to the id1 folder from your Quake directory. The default value (${HOME}/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Quake/rerelease/id1) is the correct path for the Steam version of the 2021 re-release of Quake. If this is not correct for your system, you will need to modify the variable, which you can do by editing the Makefile, or simply setting the environment variable before you run it.

Install all the dependencies:

make install

The game assets directory id1 has now been copied to ./ironwail/id1, and the original quake directory is no longer necessary.

Trenchbroom tutorial

Setup Trenchbroom

• Open Trenchbroom
• Select New map
• Click Open preferences...
• Find Quake in the preferences.
• Set the Game Path to the full path to the created ironwail directory (eg. /home/ryan/git/vendor/enigmacurry/quake-dev/ironwail)
• Click Configure Engines...
• Click the + icon to add a new Profile.
• Enter the profile name: ironwail
• Enter the Path: /usr/bin/ironwail
• Exit from the preferences menus you're done with setup.

Modify an existing level

Lets start with making a small modification to the original Quake start map. The map source is found in the src directory named start.map.

• Open Trenchbroom
• Click Browse to open an existing .map file.
• Navigate to the games/id1/maps directory and open start.map.
• Choose Quake from the list of games.
• Use the Map Format of Autodetect or Standard
• Click OK.

Modify the level by adding some additional entities to the scene.

• Move your view inside the level to where the character starts.
• Click the Entity tab, and find the monster_dog entity.
• Drag a few dogs into the main starting area.
• Go to File -> Save document as, and save it as start_dogs.map
• You may close trenchbroom if you wish.

Build and run the modified map, run:

make map=start_dogs

The game should now start and you should see the dogs.

You can load any map name this same way, for example if you create a new level with trenchbroom called foo, you can build and run it:

make map=foo

If you want to make it even easier, set the map variable ahead of time:

## For example say you are working on the foo map for awhile now:
export map=foo

## Now you can just run make, and the foo level is loaded by default:
make

## But later on you can run any level just like before:
make map=e1m1

Build from Trenchbroom

As an alternative to running the make command on the command line, you can build and run directly from trenchbroom.

• Launch Trenchbroom
• Click on Run -> Compile Map...
• Create a new profile, or modify the existing Profile, rename it build.
• Set the working directory as the full path to your main quake-dev directory. (eg. /home/ryan/git/vendor/enigmacurry/quake-dev)
• Click the + button under the Details panel, to create a new Task. Select Run Tool.
• Set the Tool Path to /usr/bin/make
• Set the Parameters to build
• You can append whatever other arguments you need as parameters here.

Launch from Trenchbroom

• Click Run -> Launch Engine...
• Click on the ironwail profile you created before.
• Set all the Parameters you need:

-game id1 -basedir /home/ryan/git/vendor/enigmacurry/quake-dev/ironwail +map start_dogs2

At a minimum, your parameters must set the correct full path to your basedir (the parent directory of id1) and the name of the map you want to launch.

Remember to always save your level before trying to launch it!

Source files

All of the map source files are organized in the games directory.

The files in the games/id1 directory are copies of the original quake levels (open sourced by John Romero in 2016!). These files can be very useful to examine for your own design ideas.

You can create your own directories under games for your own games.

When running make, you must specify the game to use, which by default is id1.

# Run the map called 'bar' in the game called 'foo' from the file: games/foo/maps/bar.map
make game=foo map=bar

Quake console

Here are a few useful commands you can use from the quake console. Many of these you must enter each time you load the level, because they are cleared on level exit, and you can't set operators like "god" mode from autoexec.cfg.

• From inside the game, hit the ~ key to open the console
• Type map foo and press Enter to load the foo map.
• Type god to turn on temporary god mode (cleared on level exit!).
• Type notarget to turn of player targeting (unless you try to fight them! again, this is cleared on level exit.)
• Type noclip to be able to fly, this is useful especially because you can fly outside of the level and see everything from an overview. Use the swimming controls E and C key to ascend and descend, but I like to re-map descend to be Q like it is in Godot.
• Type r_lightmap 1 to enable in-game rendering of the light map areas.
• Type r_showtris 2 to show triangle geometries.

Links

• dumptruck_ds trenchbroom series
• func_msgboard
• Quake map archive
• Quake mapping tips video
• Quake command line arguments (these are the same with ironwail)
• Quake console commands
• Map_compiling
• QodotPlugin/Qodot - import your quake maps into the Godot game engine!
• jitspoe/godot_bsp_importer - an alternative to Qodot that claims to have less overdraw by importing directly from bsp (?).
• Godot FPS quickstart
• BloodThief game using Qodot
• Interesting maps and dev-blog
• Lights:
  • Light chart
  • Light test
  • Light model