Level Editors

This is an article for level editing tools and tutorials. If you are looking for well known Level Editing People see Map Makers

Map Editing Programs

Qoole v2.3 and 2.5

Qoole stands for Quake Object Oriented Level Editor. The main feature of Qoole is an object oriented approach to level editing. The editor is made to resemble a high level OOP language like Visual Basic. This was not much of a change because Quake 2 was already a very object oriented approach to video games even though the original C source was not object oriented. It uses structures in a very clever way to simulate it.

Qoole uses a native type of .qle. It can also export to and load .map files. It comes with the standard qbsp3.exe, qvis3.exe, and qrad3.exe compiling tools. The interface uses an uncommon windows classes which makes the GUI resemble Windows 3.1 and some DOS menus.

The most noticeable aspects of the 2.x versions of Qoole were the existing prefabs that came packaged, the ease to manipulate the camera on all views, the ease and sensitivity of changes along the grid, and finally the ability to use an advanced face move tool. Qoole 2.5 has been described as the easiest map maker to use and the most common map maker to be compared to building with Legos.

There are also several glitches with the 2.x versions of Qoole. The most important is a glitch that makes points drift when using the "export map" tool. This causes corners and detailed portions of a map to unexpectedly shrink or grow by about 2 quake units. This also causes incorrectly rendered brushes to jut out form high angles. When a map is exported to a playable .bsp it must first export to a .map so this glitch is unavoidable.

Another common glitch is what seems to be a memory bug involved with saving and running CSG subtract operations known as "Signal CGSI." If a map is saved while this error exists then the error will persist every time a map loads for editing. This can also cause brushes with high polygon counts to be deleted automatically on the next load. Qoole will save a copy of your map before the change that caused the error have been made as #backup#.qle. It is important to save and back up often when using Qoole 2.x.

Qoole 2.3 and 2.5 can be used for Quake, Quake2, and Hexen out of the box. There are also additional entity files for such mods as CTF, Action, and Rocket Arena 2. The entity file is an extension of the Qoole configure files that expands or reduces the scope of the entities that can be applied to a brush or entities that can be placed into the map. The entity files have the extension .ent. Custom entity files are simple and easy to create when needed.

Qoole 2.x is unique because instead of using markers to represent entities it actually loads the respective model and displays a wire mesh. If a model associated with an entity is placed in a map but the map file does not exist in the designated quake 2 directory qoole will close and save a #backup#.qle file before the change took place. The most common causes for this error are placing full version monsters if the quake 2 demo is the only version installed, creating a custom entity file without placing the new models in the baseq2 directory, and referencing models that have verticies that are not completely closed in with faces.

Qoole 2.x also has a console for scripting that was not finished. There was little to no support for the console. The 2.x console was not used in any newer versions of qoole after 2.5 and was therefore never completed.

Support for 2.5 no longer exists. The original website at the time, www.qoole.com, is no longer in service. Support and downloads can be found at Qoole Source Repository and a few other fan updated websites.