Page Text: Titanfall 2
TrenchBroom
This is a guest article about the editor TrenchBroom, written entirely by David Spell, AKA Dumptruck_ds inside the Quake community. David is a major contributing force to the Quake community with his impressive tutorials on Quake mapping and TrenchBroom. David is also moderator for the Quake Mapping Discord channel. Link
David: Back in 2015, I came across a short video showing off the features of a level editor for the first person shooter classic Quake. The editor was TrenchBroom and version 2.0 was in beta. So I sat down, double-clicked on the little brown box icon and in a few short minutes my entire life was changed.
TrenchBroom is a popular cross platform level editor for Quake engine (idtech) games. Currently, Quake, Quake 2, Hexen 2 and Daikatana are supported. Additionally, Quake 3 is partially supported as of the writing of this article. You can also add other games yourself by creating a custom game config. This has allowed people to extend TrenchBroom to partially support Half-Life, Soldier of Fortune, Kingpin, DUSK, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin and other custom mapping projects.
There are a number of reasons TrenchBroom is so popular. It’s professionally designed, easy to learn, has great documentation and is continually updated with new features and performance improvements. In addition, there are online communities in many pockets of the net where TrenchBroom tips and tricks are shared. One such community is the Quake Mapping Discord that I founded in July of 2018. Since that time, the Quake Mapping Discord has welcomed new and experienced users of TrenchBroom and has seen explosive growth.
One of the things that impressed me the most about TrenchBroom was the embrace of editing completely in 3D. Older level editors use the traditional paradigm of one 3D viewport with three orthographic views. In those applications, creating shapes in a level editor took place in orthographic views and the 3D viewport was used for observing the results. While most popular level editors have added in the ability to edit in 3D, TrenchBroom was designed from the ground up to allow users to edit quickly in 3D with a set of simple, intuitive controls. Orthographic views were added later in development for people who prefer to work “the old way.”
Because of this strict design approach, editing in TrenchBroom is actually quite fun as you use first person controls to fly around your map similar to how you play games like Quake. The user interface has very little clutter and most everything you need to create a map is accessible in a bare minimum of clicks or key presses. Keyboard shortcuts are customizable and you can tweak your game configuration file to add even more customization. All in all, TrenchBroom is powerful and accessible.
The program just feels right the minute you get the hang of it. Creating brushes is fast and smooth. The Complex Brush tool allows you to click out the points of a polygon and extrude it into 3D. The clipping and vertex tools are fast and intuitive as are the face, edge and scaling tools. All the tools have a unified feel and there are “hidden” features that will put other editors to shame. One example is CSG face merging, where two selected faces of different brushes can be combined into new shapes based on the negative space between them. The first time I saw this in action, my jaw hit my desk.
The program really is a delight to use.
No surprise that at least two development studios have adopted forks of TrenchBroom as part of their own fan facing SDK releases. Newblood Interactive (DUSK) will support TrenchBroom as will Killpixel Games (Wrath:Aeon of Ruin).
There are a few drawbacks to using TrenchBroom that are related to the “strictness” of design I mentioned above. For example, in other popular mapping tools for Quake, users have the option of creating simple primitive shapes like a pyramid or a sphere. This is a feature of many off the shelf 3d programs. But the designers of TrenchBroom want to keep the interface as clean as possible. Adding a menu of primitives works against this avoidance of “feature creep” prevalent in the design ethos of TrenchBroom. The workaround is to make a set of your own shapes (which is actually very easy, except maybe a sphere) and then save those to a map file. Since the editor can open in multiple instances you can copy and paste your primitives by hand.
Another “double-edged sword” aspect of TrenchBroom is that it’s really intended as a general purpose 3D tool, albeit for idtech games. Features that will only work in one game are avoided in the service of keeping the application up-to-date and bug free. For example, displaying animated textures for one game may require different code than another game the editor supports. So all textures are displayed as static. Since there are only two main developers on the project and this is coded in their spare time, the priorities have to be about stability and solving complex issues common to modern editors.
To me, these are all small trade offs though. TrenchBroom is powerful and fun. So fun in fact, that a few years ago I was inspired to create a tutorial series for TrenchBroom aimed at newcomers to Quake mapping or for mappers who have come back to the game after a long absence. The response to these tutorials has been more positive than I could ever have imagined. If you want to be a professional level designer, I highly recommend playing with TrenchBroom. You just may get hooked like I did back in 2015.
Designer’s rating