First room

Ok then, now that you know the basics of the editor now it is time to step into the fantastic world that we call Quake editing.

First of all you need to start a new level, so select file/new or just hit the new file icon.

This would be a good time to merge your texture WAD if you have not done already. Look at the textures window, select merge, navigate to your WAD and click OK. You will then see the textures to the right of your screen.

OK, now we have a new map area to work with. The first thing we need to do is create the brush that the room will be created from. Click new object, or right click, then select Brushes, then click Cube. You should see the screen to the right.

Currently this would not be large enough to use as a room, it is difficult to describe the amount of space required by the entities, but it comes easily with practise. In order to make the current cube big enough to use as a room switch to scale mode (click the scale mode button) then click on the block we just made to select it. then drag with the left mouse button up and right until the box is lined up with the next larges grid lines. See the image to the left for reference.You also must resize the image in depth (or length depending on which view you previously used) so look at the other view and look to see that the box is not square, use the technique described above to make the box square. It is not imprortant to be precisely on the lines, close to them will do fine

Currently the box is nothing more than a big square, in order to make it into a room we must use one of QOOLE's powerful functions: hollow. select the box then go to options/hollow. Or hit Alt-H. The box will hollow to the current grid size, the image to the right shows the results of hollowing. Right now the box will be textured with water (you should be able to see the water texture in the selected brush window. If the texture on the brush is water, Quake will think that this should be water, this is bad. You must select a simple regular texture, I'll leave the choice up to you, anything you want. I chose a simple dungeon type texture, but the choice is yours.

The final thing to do is include a player start entity. right click (or click new object) go to entity, navigate down to player, then click start. Make sure you are in move mode (click the icon) select the Quake man and manouver him about in the room using all of the views. It doesn't matter where you put the start, the only limitations are: inside the cube, not in a wall, not too high up. The final map may or may not look like this to the left, if it is close enough, fine. I will leave it up to you and your common sense for the positioning of this entity.

Save your level as anything you want to, I saved mine as Test in the qoole directory, to save simply go to file, then save. QOOLE automatically adds its default extension of .qle. The .QLE files created by QOOLE cannot be interpreted by the compilation tools so you also need to export it as a map, this option is just below the save option, again choose a name for this file, if you call this the same as the .QLE file it will be easier to keep up with after a number of files. I exported my .MAP to Test1.MAP. Now QOOLE's job is done, now it is your turn to do some work for a change ;) Exit QOOLE and navigate to the QOOLE directory, I assume that you have installed the compilation utilities (see basics) in your QOOLE directory, if not move them here, it'll be a whole lot easier. Navigate to your QOOLE directory, if you are using WIN 95 use the MS-DOS prompt, in DOS just go to the directory. There are 3 basic steps to compile your level:

It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to explain these utilities, basically LIGHT does the lighting, and VIS makes the level run faster in Quake. Obviously in this first level you will see that the 2^nd and 3^rd steps are almost useless, but it is good practise to get used to using them now. To compile your level using QBSP type:
QBSP Test1
This is because of the name of your .MAP file, if you called yours something different include your file name not Test1, second step, lighting, type:
LIGHT Test1
This will run light on this level, won't take long, there are no lights in it! Finally run VIS
VIS Test1
This will flash through your level and will not take more than a couple of seconds depending on the speed of your computer. DO NOT GET USED TO THIS, when your levels get larger and more complex the VIS time will increas exponentially.

The final step is to copy your completed file (should be named Test1.BSP or whatever) to Quake's id1\maps\ directory. If this directory does not exist, create it. So the final step would be:
copy Test1.bsp c:\quake\id1\maps
alter this if your copy of quake is in a different directory.

Finally run quake and type:
map Test1
at the console. an alternative would be to start Quake with:
quake +map Test1

The very first thing you will think is "Wow, this is bright" Yep, you know why that is, no lights. So guess what the next lesson is ;)

You now have some time to relish in the glow of your fantastic editing skills, and, erm, shoot the walls or something.