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Latest stable version:
 Quest v2.4

Alexander Malmberg <alexander@malmberg.org>

2. Creating a room

After you learned the basics of map editing, i will now tell you how to create a room. First you should start quest of course, and then you have to select a .wad file that contains the textures you need. If you don't already have such a file, you can create them using the cwad2 tool. This extracts all textures of bsp files in pak files and puts them into a wad file. You can also download different .wad files from the Internet.

After this is done you should set up your viewports so that you can work well. For me i use a big 2d viewport on the right half of my screen, another 2d viewport in the top-left quarter of my screen and a 3d textured view in the lower-left quarter of the screen. The big 2d viewport views the map from the top, the smaller one from its side. But you should find your own preferences for doing well. You can rotate the 2d and 3d view by hitting alt+arrowkeys.

So now let's select a texture for our first brush. Press CTRL+T and pick a texture you like. If you have done, you can click OK.

(Hint: it is always a good idea to remember texture names, so that you don't need to search for them for a long time if you need them again.)

Now get the focus on one of the 2d viewports and press ALT+C to create a cubic brush. A new brush is always created in the center of your selected viewport. Now you see that this brush has a lot of focal points. More than you need, because i won't explain face editing to you in this tutorial. So you can press CTRL+ALT+R to get a menu, which lets you set what you want to see and what not. Toggle "Face focals" off.

After a new brush is created, it is selected automatically. You can deselect brushes by CTRL-clicking somewhere in empty space. You can relesect it by CTRL-clicking on its focal point.

Now were going to make a room using this brush, there are actually two ways. The difficult one and the easy one. I will explain the difficult one first, so that you learn something about vertex editing. The selected brush has dots on his corners, these are vertices, you can select them by holding down shift and dragging a selecting area around the vertices you want. By this way, also the vertices that are "below" the top one are selected. If you would just SHIFT-click on a vertex, only the clicked vertex would be selected, not the ones that are below it. If you ever want to select all vertices of a brush you can just click CTRL+A.

If you don't have a grid in your 2d view yet, press "g" to get one. You can resize the grid by pressing + or -. For this tutorial, use a 8 units grid.

Now, expecting that you are in the top-view, select the two upper vertices by SHIFT-dragging a selecting box over them and drag the vertices higher, so that he brush is about 256 units long. Now deselect them by SHIFT-clicking in empty space, and select the two right vertices (actually you are selecting 4 by doing this, because there are also vertices below those you can see) and resize the brush to a width of 8 units. (1 grid square). Of course we need to adjust the brushes height also. Go to the side-view viewport and select the two upper vertices and drag them to a height of 256 units. This is our first wall :)

Now, for our luck, there is copy and paste. Select the formed brush by CTRL-clicking its focal point. Press CTRL+C (copy) and CTRL+V (paste) to duplicate the brush. Then drag the brush 256 units to the right. Now we got a second wall :)

Now (top view) select the two walls, and duplicate them, so that there are 4 walls now. Press CTRL+R to rotate the two walls, rotate them by 90 degrees. Preventive you should always press CTRL+N after a rotation to snap the rotated brushes to the grid. Now (with the 2 new brushes still selected) move them around so that there are not any holes between the walls, and so that they do not overlap! (just move them one unit down in this case :> )

Now a floor and a roof is still missing. Go to the side-view and select two walls. Duplicate and rotate them as you did it before, so that the brushes close the room at the top and the bottom.

You can give each brush a different texture if you like, by selecting it and pressing CTRL+T to apply a texture to one or more selected brushes.

So now the room is finished :)

The easier way to create a room is to make a big brush of the room-size you want, and press "R" when the brush is selected. Quest then makes a room of that brush automatically.

But there is still light missing. So press ALT+E and select "light". A light entity is created now, but you will probably have to drag it so that it inside the created room. You can press CTRL+E with the light selected to get the entity window. You can set a value for the key "light" to set its intensity. Default is 300, you also can set a number to the "style" key, which makes the light flicker in different styles (0 is default, non-flickering). You have to try around with lights a lot to make them look good.

OK. Now, one thing to play that map is still missing! We don't have a player start point yet. Press ALT+E and select info_player_start. You have to drag it into the room again. You may not place entities in walls, they will not spawn if they are in a wall, it's better to place entities a bit higher, because they are dropped to the floor anyways. info_player_start is a single player start point, if you want deathmatch maps, use info_player_deathmatch instead, but there should always be an info_player_start in your map too, just in a case that mods want to use it, or that somebody wants to check out the map in single player.

Now that the map is finished, save it by pressing CTRL+S. If you didn't give the map a filename before, you get a file selection dialog. Call it rvbtut1.map or something.

Now you have to compile the map. This work is done by map compilers, you need a specially-modified compiler version from Alexander Malmberg to use the special map format, which is used by Quest. You can also switch off the new map format, if you want to use another map compiler that does not compile the new map format, but does things like watervis and colored light for example. To compile the map do:

	qbsp rvbtut1 && light rvbtut1 && vis rvbtut1

You don't have to vis your map every time for testing, because vising takes the longest time of the map compiling process. If you do not vis the map it runs slower in quake, and walls are going to disappear in the default quake software renderer. But it is still enough for testing. If you just want to see if rooms are big enough for example "qbsp mapname" is enough. You will get a fullbright map then, which is very ugly, but enough for testing. If you release a map you should compile a map with:

	qbsp rvbtut1 && light -extra rvbtut1 && vis -level 4 rvbtut1

to get best quality for lighting and vis data.

Now copy the generated rvbtut1.bsp file to your id1/maps/ directory, start up quake and type "map rvbtut1" in the quake console. Now you are in your room :)