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Show HN: Q3Edit – Edit and play Quake 3 maps in the browser (q3edit.com)

106 points by drdator ↗ HN
I've been building a level editor for Quake 3 that runs entirely in the browser: Radiant-style layout, brush and patch editing, CSG, terrain sculpting, and entity editing. It opens and saves .map file and you can play the maps you build directly in the browser using a webassembly build of ioquake3.

17 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 10.9 ms ] thread
SaltyAstronaut
Very cool! Would love a way to implement and play on the browser as well. Fingers crossed for that one..such a good game and very nostalgic.
oldquakedays
back when I was in high school, my friend and I used Quiver [0] to make quake maps on macos - it was very fun. to think that quake networking worked under those old school modem conditions/latency is kind of wild. id3 truly were miraculous developers.

I remember asking someone who worked at my high school for a map of the school and remember thinking it would be fun to recreate the school... in quake... and probably model my least favorite teacher as a monster I could chase...

it's somewhat scary to think back about this - especially since Columbine happened the same year. there was no risk from me (absolutely no way or interest to access guns - we were teenage dweebs in a country with strict gun laws) but thinking back I'm glad I never finished my maps or shared them.

[0] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6370-quiver-1-2-quake-ed...

drdator
Thanks for the nostalgia trip :) I was a big fan of Quiver back in the day. I even ported q3map to classic Mac OS at one point (I was 14 i think) so I could build maps in Quiver and run them in Q3 without leaving my Mac. Which I guess makes the WASM build in Q3Edit the second time I've ported q3map somewhere it was never meant to run.
phendrenad2
Very cool. Are you compiling the maps with q3map2?
drdator
Thank you! No, it's the original q3map from the GPL source release compiled to WASM, not q3map2. Will at some point look into q3map2.
spikk
This can actually accidentally become the best debugging tool for map files, ngl you should cook
jacobgold
Very cool. It's impossible to explain how cool the GPU rendered preview window looked when we first saw it in the early map editors.
valorzard
When trying to do quick play on Windows 11 Firefox, I got an error saying it couldn't capture my mouse
voidfunc
Oh man this takes me back to map making days with q3radiant and gtkradiant.

I miss the days of shooters with strong community run servers.

vivzkestrel
- can someone with expertise shed some light on how do you go about figuring out how a game like quake 3 works

- now i know someone would say "just read the source code bro" but i am not a 3d game dev

- as a beginner, how do you wrap your head around a codebase as complicated as quake or something?

gregjw
is the community still here for this kind of project? like people actively seeking out more Quake 3?
raymond_goo
Loading q3dm17sample.map seems to work fine.

However trying to Quick Play the map gives me:

=== Stage 1: BSP ===

Q3Map v1.0s (c) 1999 Id Software Inc.

---- q3map ----

verbose = true

qdir: /quake/

gamedir: /quake/baseq3/

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/shaderlist.txt

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/acc.shader

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/ammo.shader

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/beams.shader

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/cf_models.shader

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/clown.shader

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/clown2.shader

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/common.shader

Unknown surfaceparm: "antiportal"

Unknown surfaceparm: "lightgrid"

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/cosmoflash.shader

...

entering /quake/baseq3/scripts/weapon_shotgun.shader

1411 shaderInfo

--- LoadMapFile ---

Loading map file /quake/baseq3/maps/compile.map

entering /quake/baseq3/maps/compile.map

****** ERROR ****** LoadTGA: Only type 2 (RGB), 3 (gray), and 10 (RGB) TGA images supported