Engines, SDKs and editor thoughts

I started playing with UDK and Unity, just for comparison. My computer is somewhere between low-end and high-end, and UDK smoothly runs all demo maps – some of them pretty CPU intensive.

My QRe engine pipeline is a bit obsolete and deprecated. And old. And tools suck, because I need to use hacks and workarounds to import textures, to add misc_model objects, which are invisible in the editor and so on. I’d love an in-game editor with the same capabilities as QuArK, my editor-of-choice.

I’m using QuArK to map and add textures, Q3Map2 to build maps, and a modified version of Darkplaces, QRe to run the map. I’m using Notepad++ to edit QuakeC and shader scripts and FTEQCC to compile progs.dat. I’m using royalty-free textures from the internet. I’m not using them commercially.

QuArK has an integrated QuakeC editor but it lacks al lot of functionality, so basically I have 2 pipelines:

QuArK – Q3Map2 – QRe

and

Notepad++ (QuakeC, shaders, scripts, effectinfo.txt) – FTEQCC – progs.dat

and

Code::Blocks – QRe source

I tried (several times) to use NetRadiant but I couldn’t get the hang of it. Worldcraft is too restrictive (and not open-source). I’d love to have a combination of BSPQuakeEditor, Tread, QuArK and QOOLE in one full-option editor (which should support Quake1, 2 and 3, not a ton of other games). Unfortunately, Quake development is dead, and the remaining mappers just use the old editors. There are great Quake maps out there, I’m not questioning this, and mappers work with old, obsolete editors, and create art.

However, newly introduced features, such as misc_models, are not properly implemented in these editors. A simple OBJ parser and viewer should do the trick.

That’s all from me now, my CryEngine 3 free SDK has downloaded and I need to try some stuff.

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