The QuaRk editor for MOH

Post by **Bjarne BZR** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 10:32 am

I'm thinking of converting to QuArK ( Quake Army Knife )... the last version has full MOH:AA support.
I was very impressed when a friend of mine that is an old Quake mapper showed it to me. It has tons of cool tools and addins, and it can be used for LOTS of games.

I'ts going to be hell to learn a new environment, so I ask you guys:

* Is anyone out there using QuArK to map right now ( or used it before )?
* And if so: what do you think about it?
* Is it worth it to swap?

Take a look here if you are wondering what I'm talking about: http://www.planetquake.com/quark/

MadMapper · Post by **MadMapper** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 10:56 am

.MDT was looking at some Quark-using engines...

Post by **Bjarne BZR** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 11:13 am

Yes, it supports the Torque engine that they were thinking about, but I want to know if anyone here has used it for MOH:AA...

Kate · Post by **Kate** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 12:23 pm

I went to the quark website and it does look impressive from the screenshots

Hmm I am starting to wonder if I need to get a life

kate

agentmad007 · Post by **agentmad007** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 12:53 pm

Impressed .....maybe there is too much features , I ll be lost very fast .

But for you exeperienced mapper , you can done such new coolest things maybe .

good luck

tltrude · Post by **tltrude** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 3:39 pm

It is cool, but really hard to configure for Mohaa. I can't seem to get the paths right. My fear is that after it is all set up, it will still be a poor second to MOHRadiant.

Krane · Post by **Krane** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 3:50 pm

1) I'm testing quark.
2) I didn't found anything you cannot do easier in Radiant.
3) No.

I'd like you to ask your friend what did he found in quark that is better than Radiant.

One of the most annoying things is that, aparently, you cannot "explore" the 3d view w/ your right-clicked mouse. Another thing: when you choose "textured" window, all windows goes textured...

Radiant is far easier than quark. imho. I'm still insisting on quark coz of the support for dozens of games, but if you want to map for mohaa, why change?

btw, tltrude, I didn't had any problems configuring quark. Everything is showing up here as it suppose to show.

Post by **Bjarne BZR** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 4:07 pm

No doubt its another workflow Krane, but he showed me a lot of small stuff that made me wanna "Put yo hands in the aia, an wav'em like you just don't caya!"

Like: complex search functions, fantastic texturing modes... but the overall feeling was that of a professional work tool, not so very "home made play thing" as radiant.

And it can keep track of textures an make pk3's and stuff.

It just can do more....

EDIT: Oh, and you can set background images on each view in the editor, something you modelers of real objects out there would like a lot.

panTera · Post by **panTera** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 5:26 pm

Krane wrote:Another thing: when you choose "textured" window, all windows goes textured...

To only texture the 3d view, rightclick IN the 3dview and choose textured.

Well, I have more experience with Quark (4 years) than I have with Mohradiant (~2 years), but I've used Quark only for Q1 and Q2 (played with it for Q3 a little). When I decided to map for MOH, Quark didn't fully support it yet and it had some shortcomings. However it does have some very nice and useful features and is more intuitive to work with.

A few examples.
- First of, you have far less hotkeys and shortcuts to remember. It's usually clicking and dragging. No Shift+this, Shift+that or "enter vertex-mode" keys. You select a brush by clicking it and from there you can do with it what you want. Click on one face to reshape, click a vertex to drag it. To deselect, just click the void.(<-now this can get annoying if there's a lot of brushes in view;)
When you select one face you'll immediately see its (surface/texture)properties in the Explorer window on the left.
- The interface is clear and IMO better and faster to work with than in Mohrad. For instance instead of using ctrl+tab, there's a compass that lets you rotate/zoom the view however you want it.
- It has a great functioning texture-browser that is much faster and less buggy than the one in Mohrad.
- Although Mohrad has an option to see the worldspawn and map info, it is kind of a tucked away. Quark uses an Explorer window to list the complete Worldspawn. With it you have great control of your brushgroups and entities. You don't have to select a brush and press N to get to the worldspawn; it's right there in the Explorer window. Same goes for entities, you can access the properties just by selecting the entity.
- Making and handling groups. You can simply select some brushes and click the New Group button, or -click New Group button and after selecting the brushes (in either a view mode or the Explorer) you can drag them into the Group's folder. Also you can name each group and individually set it to hide. In Mohrad it's all or nothing; once you press shift+h, all hidden brushes will pop up again.
- In Quark you can hold down Ctrl and force a single vertex to grid. In Mohrad you use Ctrl+g and it will force all the brush's vertexes to the grid which can accidentally deform the brush if your grid is on a high setting.
- Using CGS won't crash your editor (but of course you must be careful.)
- Integrated plugins for hunting down microbrushes etc.
- Compiling from within Quark goes well so you don't need a batch-program like mbuilder.

But, despite of nice textureing modes it lacks one of the best features of Mohrad, i.e. the texture-shifting from one face to another. (By selecting a face and (middle)clicking on a texture it will shift its properties to the other face. Brilliant. This is the main reason I learned to use Mohrad.)
When you drag a brush's vertex or edge in Quark the texture won't clamp (i.e. automatically scale to fit the face) and it won't align with the surrounding faces anymore. But, they may have fixed this problem by now.
Also, I find Mohrad's way of clipping brushes a lot more save. You only cut what is selected. With the cutting tool in Quark you can accidentally make a cut (even through the whole map) if you don't have anything specific selected. You click and hold down the mouse and a cutting line will appear in the direction you point the mouse. But that's just one of those things you need to learn to work with.

In conclusion, both editors have their cool features and flaws. I've learned a great deal from working with both programs but at this point Mohrad has grown on me. For MOH mapping I won't switch however if there is going to be a newer game I wanted to go map for and Quark would have full support (plus that texture-shifting feature) then this guy will switch back to 'Quark-mode'. If you've never used Quark before and are used to Mohrad by now I'd say stick to it, unless you like to work in a new surrounding from time to time. But in principle each editor is the same of course.

tltrude · Post by **tltrude** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 5:53 pm

Thanks, panTera, now I can uninstall the dumb thing without a guilty conscience, ha ha!

Btw, Mohpa will use a totally new set of editors. They are "model" based maps and will need a "gmax" like editor as well. The game will still be Q3A based, but the modified engine will be very different from Mohaa's engine, or so they say.

Krane · Post by **Krane** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 6:32 pm

Can you use only 1 window to have 3D while the others remain in wireframe?

Post by **Bjarne BZR** » Sun Jun 20, 2004 7:15 pm

Wow Pantera, that was way more of a feature walkthrough than I expected, thanx.

As for the texture copy function, yes that is great in MOHRad, but the "texture sticky modes" can be used in more or less the same way ( but not as intuitive I guess ). One really cool texture thing I was shown was when you make a corridor that starts to go an agle up or down, you could set a texture mode and just skew ( I think skew is the word... like bending it but with the edges parralell ) the brush and the texture followed the skew. I foud this especially amazing as I had had the exact problem a few weeks earlier with a corridor... I could have made that section bend in five minutes instead of the about 2 hours it took me.

The reason I'm thinking of converting is not only that I find it a good editor, but that we've selected Turque as the game engine at school, and QuArK is the recommeded internal space mapping tool for the Torque engine ( partly because it's licence free, partly because its good and partly because it has built in Torque support ).

And yes Krane, you can.

Balr14 · Post by **Balr14** » Mon Jun 21, 2004 1:59 am

I concur with Pantera. Quark has some nice features. But, I found I didn't use most of them and missed the ones Radiant had. If you never got used to Radiant, it might be worth trying.

Post by **Bjarne BZR** » Mon Jun 21, 2004 12:13 pm

So basically it comes down to a matter of taste and previous experience.
No real need to convert if you are comfortable with one of them.
And as QuArK just recently added full MOH support, I guess most of you people are used to Radiant.

And yes Kate, you need to get a life ( so does the rest of us

).

.Map :: MoHAA Mapping

The QuaRk editor for MOH

The QuaRk editor for MOH

Cool

Mohrad / Quark = 50/50

Thanks