battleMETAL - Quake/Darkplaces was a bad idea - Part 1

This was a terrible idea

Late again with the blog post, ach, about 2 weeks out from moving to a new location. This part is a quick overview detailing all the fun to be had pointing out why Quake / Darkplaces was a terrible choice. A feeling that I had upon reaching spring 2018, having been working on battleMETAL since July 2016, was that of exhaustion. Any strengths that the Darkplaces engine might have offered turned out to not really offset the Technical Debt that was incurred by the requirements of the game.

A great example of this situation was level creation. For original Quake, the best way to make levels is to use one of a few tools specifically dedicated to this task. Tools like GTKRadiant, QUARK, or TrenchBroom. These tools facilitate level creation by providing a means for designers to create the terrain for a level, place objects such as lights, monsters, player start point, select textures for the levels, and modify lighting. The level building tool then compiles all this information into a .bsp file that Quake loads when entering a level. Mapping for Quake is a well documented process, the advantage of being a popular and easy-to-mod game from 1996. There was just one big hitch in the process - Quake can’t really do outdoor terrain, cue the record-scratch sound.

See, in 1996 - and even well into the late 90’s and very early 2000’s, outdoor terrain was hard to achieve. Computer power was more limited despite the advances since 1993’s DooM game. Many games achieved a feeling of outdoor space through camera tricks, data storage techniques, or even art / design aesthetics. The method that Quake uses for creating level terrain is called Binary Space Partition or BSP. We’re not going to go deep into that particular set of computer programming, rather here’s the gist: the game (Quake) creates walls, floors, doors, ceilings, ramps, stairs, etc out of chunks of 3d space called brushes. When the map is compiled, the compiler takes the interior space of these brushes and compiles them into one large mesh of vertices. For computers in the 90’s, this was a level format that was easy to render without killing frame rate.

The Quake level design tools allow the user to create, reshape, change size, change textures of all brushes in a map. However, as we’ve seen with these old 90’s games, the brush-based system of level making results in very….chunky world aesthetics. There are ways to generate ‘realistic’ terrain with this brush method, but it results in map files that take several minutes or hours to compile. For battleMETAL a work around was found, by treating the terrain mesh as 3d model like any other 3d model, the game now had a way for realistic terrain. The sacrifice was that this terrain model does not show up in the map editors available, leaving the user to guess where to place other objects on the map. By requiring more accurate terrain models for the game, battleMETAL lost the ability to leverage Quake level makers which is a large trade-off indeed. This next part of the blog series will be just as the subtitle describes; why that (choosing Quake / Darkplaces ) was a bad idea.