Quake 1 Modding
Under Linux/Windows and DOS
Hello and welcome to the very first Substack post of The Retro Dev! Wouldn’t you know it? It’s about modding Quake. An extremely impressive and easily one of the most graphically intensive games on DOS. I played it a lot as a kid but oddly I never really modded the game. Link to the tutorial is at the bottom if you want to skip.
Later on as I became an adult I briefly took a stab at modding Quake/Doom etc.. On the Quake side I found it to be very tedious, the tools lackluster. Sorry GTKRadiant but as much as I love you. You drive me absolutely crazy sometimes.
A few days after having played Quake again as I am doing a full series of it on The Retro Dev channel. I decided why don’t I take a stab again at making some Quake maps and see where it goes. Well fast forward a few days and countless sleepless nights.
I managed to not only get a map running with the incredible FTEQW engine but I also managed to get the maps working in DOS as seen above. While I definitely wouldn’t say setting up TrenchBroom + FTEQW was the most difficult thing in the world. For someone new there isn’t very much information out there and you in some ways have to piece meal pull it from several places.
There are some excellent YouTubers(Dumptruck_DS and Quake Builder) out there making some insanely good videos on TrenchBroom and Quake modding in general.
Now when I say new I mean someone who isn’t a programmer and/or someone who hasn’t been modding / developing other games before. For that particular person it’s relatively simple, straight forward with maybe an hour or two of work getting everything right. But for someone completely new? I’d say they might get a bit discouraged.
So what sort of problems did I run into?
Let’s just quickly bullet point down the main set of problems I ran into
What Quake engine to use?
Most tutorials are on Windows.(This part not so bad at first)
Recent documentation on modern QuakeC.
Finding the WAD files.(needed for textures in TrenchBroom)
Packing/Unpacking .Pak/.WAD files.
So only 5 problems not so bad right? Honestly not really but it did take time jumping between several sites and some StartPage searches in order to find what I needed. The main problem is that information exists but is heavily spread out on sites that have been around for 20+ years and don’t seem to coordinate at all with each other.
How did I fix the problems?
After some searching I found that the FTEQW engine to be considered and from the feature list the best at the moment. It supports a wide variety of platforms while offering a huge feature set. So I ended up going with it though if anyone could tell me the difference between this FTEQW and FTEQW site I would appreciate that.
For TrenchBroom itself this part isn’t an issue at all since it works the same on all platforms anyway. However Dumptruck_DS getting started video for newcomers covers using an external program to actually compile the maps into BSP’s. The tool is Windows only and honestly with TrenchBroom 2 really not needed. In the tutorial I made I show exactly how to setup TrenchBroom with the map compiling tools inside of TrenchBroom. This means no external tool is required and it will work anywhere TrenchBroom and the compilers are supported.
Mostly just found a bunch of open code from FOSS games using FTEQW tearing that apart. Honestly there really isn’t that much documentation on this front. It’s largely read source, play around figure it out. I think this is where I will largely focus my resources on.
This one I have to thank Dumptrucks_DS amazing community for actually coming to my rescue and someone uploaded to github the needed wad files. Saved me a ton of time.
This one is probably the hardest to solve. Most of the tools I found are easily 8 to 15 years old or Windows only. Thankfully you can make a game from scratch in FTEQW without actually using a pak file. I plan to solve this one with a python script eventually. Though may make a graphical GUI for easier use. Windows/Linux will be supported.
So in closing and tl;dr. Quake modding is extremely fun and still has an active vibrant community but the documentation/tutorials are literally everywhere. Not saying I can fix any of this. But I do plan to upload QuakeC and more TrenchBroom tutorials for those interested!
Get help on the Forum for this tutorial if you need it.
Links to everything mentioned in the article
FTEQW - Advanced Quake Engine for Windows,Linux,Mac,Android and more
TrenchBroom - Incredible map editor for a wild variety of games/game engines. Can even be used as a generic level editor!
WAD Files - Needed for making maps with TrenchBroom
FTEQCC - Modern QuakeC Compiler
Quake YouTubers who are amazing!
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