Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-3547390-20170220155554

One day. Which is more important in the grand scheme? Doom II or finding out the name of an obscure level in WAST? Priorities are important, so thus it is necessary to focus on the latter because I am absolutely insane.

I have tried with Quake, but all the editors feel frustrating. THRED is unstable at best. QuArK has funky movement controls that don't work half of the time. Can't really complain too much about the others, but I get triggered when I cannot see the entities in the editor. Unreal has a really powerful editor, the only real gripe I have with it is how pathfinding is done. Thief has DromED, which is absolutely amazing aside from the fact that it is totally unstable to the point that you will rarely get anything done and requires a lot of random knowledge about certain obscure filenames. GTKRadiant is absolutely amazing, I just had the bad experience of doing it on a 800x600 window that made everything a lot more complicated then it needed to be, and it doesn't really have good support for Quake 1. Unity is pretty good except for the fact that it is designed like Blender, which means intuitive for everyone else that isn't me. I prefer the not intuitive but professional atmosphere of Unreal Engine 4, where I have done absolutely nothing because I cannot seem to make it past an Autodesk Maya tutorial without getting stuck at some point. Actually, from all this software, I have learned the internet is a great resource for anything that isn't a tutorial. I learn mostly by doing and by trying to follow instructions, so when I seem to get stuck following instructions because of random reason X that others also had a problem with but nobody knows how to get past, it shows there is a big problem. Is it sad that I just ask for a simple way to learn Autodesk Maya without the textures being warped or the z direction being out of wack? Blender is absolute garbage in functionality from what I see, 3ds Max is good for wireframes but very annoying if you wish to just warp some vertices, Wings 3d is just too basic and doesn't work with anything, and Maya just is lacking someone that can explain how to use it properly.

Quake is just a horrible game to generally edit for. You need to hunt down a lot of software that allows various levels of compiling, such as light levels or a simple BSP. As they were all written for DOS, you have to use the Windows command line and navigate to the software every time you want to use it. Entities are not visible in the editor, entities don't have many properties that can be modified because everything relies on the qc. This even includes textures, which makes it nice if you want basic mechanics but makes it a bit more of a hassle for a more complicated mechanic. Every editor I have used has a hierarchy list, but throws everything in your level in an unorganized mess.

I personally like additive editors, I find subtractive to be a very limiting style as it involves a bunch of tiny boxes all over the place whenever you try to do some detailing. I guess the best editor would take DromED, which I find to have some very powerful properties (Thief was designed with a unique mentality, the coders gave the level designers a totally unseen amount of power, DromED is probably the only editor out there that truly gives you the power to do whatever you want without even needing to learn a single line of code), and add better scaling / a true importer that allows for easy visibility. It would also need to get rid of whatever major glitch affects it that causes everything to turn a dark blue (against a black background) that makes nearly everything impossible to see. Maybe get rid of room brushes and manage them with AI based locales. Thief's editor is not perfect at all, I generally avoid making my own levels with it generally because of the blue room glitch getting on my nerves or because it crashed one too many times. However, you cannot deny the sheer power the editor has, and in a more user-friendly environment with some better stability it would be the best level design software ever designed.

By the way, got about 10 new levels for you to check out :P