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Latest stable version:
 Quest v2.4

Alexander Malmberg <alexander@malmberg.org>

1. Basic editing concepts

Welcome to the Quest Map Editing Tutorial series. This is the first part of it, and more are to follow. In this tutorial I am going to explain some basic words you will often see when making a map. So here we start.

Brush

A brush is usually a solid convex object in a map. Nearly everything in a Quake map is formed by brushes: walls, water and doors for example. Brushes can have any shape as long as you keep them convex.

Faces

Faces are what form the brush (the sides); they can have a texture which can be scaled, moved or rotated.

Vertices

Vertices are what form a face ;), they are the corners of the Face, and so, the corners of the Brush.

Entities

Everything in a Quake map is an entity, all normal brushes that don't have a special function (like a normal wall) contain to the "worldspawn" entity. But when people talk about entities they usually mean weapons, health boxes, lights and doors or platforms. Entities can have key-value pairs, which you can set their preferences with. For example the intensity of a light, the sound of a door and so on. The possible key-value pairs are described in the entity window.

Models

A model is an entity that is formed by brushes. A door, or a trigger are models, because you form them by normal brushes, and assign them to an entity. A model can consist of one or more brushes. If more than one brush is used, they work as one.

There is a special feature for doors. If you got two different doors (moving in different directions) and two of their faces touch each other they perform in a team. So when door1 opens, door2 opens too.

Focal Point

This is actually a quest-specific thing, which is not saved in maps. Everything in quest has one focal point, which is in the center of itself. You can select brushes/entities/whatever by CTRL-clicking on its focal point. This is a good way of selecting things, because brushes are seldom in your way, at least not as much as in other map editors, where you can select a brush by just clicking anywhere in it. Of course it can happen, that focal points overlap each other, in this case you will get a menu that shows you a list of brushes or faces and their texture name, or a list of entities and their classname. If your view is from the top of the map, the menu will show the focal point that is highest first.

So now you know the basic things about map editing and you can head on to the next tutorial.