FreeGameDev

https://matt-lucas.itch.io/level-buddy

Since this kind of work-flow is much more suitable to make game levels than standard Blender3D.

But feature wise the new Trenchbroom 2.0 Quake editor is even cooler, and it allows .obj export for importing map geometry into Blender3D if you really need that.

It was interesting to see that. One of my projects is a Doom level editor called Eureka, homepage is http://eureka-editor.sourceforge.net/

I think this Blender tool will be useful for people who are not super skilled at making stuff in Blender, but for people who already have extremely good skills in Blender this way of making levels will seem quite cumbersome and limiting.

Great logo for the Eureka editor

I think there is a right setup for a task, and standard Blender is more suitable for turn-table 3D modeling and not the more architectural CAD like work flow of level-editing.
For example try working on those Yo! Franky maps and you will see that it really isn't suitable setup.

But for blocking out levels and then working on detail meshes in the level the above plugin could be great.

Edit: Have you thought about integrating the level editor into one of the much advanced DOOM engines? So that you can seamlessly switch in game to the editor? http://dengine.net/ would be a great basis.

The logo is indeed awesome, an artist who appreciated the editor made it for me.

Julius {l Wrote}:Have you thought about integrating the level editor into one of the much advanced DOOM engines? So that you can seamlessly switch in game to the editor?

In the past I have considered the pros and cons of in-game editors.

One big reason this is external is that you need a decent UI toolkit for something like this. FLTK was the toolkit I already knew very well, so it made sense it go with that.

Most Doom-based engines (and Quake-based engines) lack any kind of "normal" UI stuff, and I didn't want to implement something from scratch or spend heaps of time integrating some UI into the engine. Even FLTK would have been a major task to integrate (though has become easier recently with FLTK's better device abstraction stuff).

Plus I am not a fan of any particular Doom engine (even the one I used to work on, but that's another story......)

The only ingame editing that I would find practical is the lighting process, how it reflects against objects etc. and placing decorative props/mapmodels etc. Garry's Mod was once a useful tool for doing that for the HL2 mapping community by exporting entities placed

Julius {l Wrote}:dengine.net/ would be a great basis.

No it would not. That's an engine so stagnant it has not even yet even adopted well-spread Boom standards that every other self-respecting doom sourceport has had since 1998 - and that's just scratching the surface of its longstanding overlooked faults (and probably the most important fault to bring up in regards to map editing - the only thing dengine's successful is at is by marketing its "advanced" self to the unwary, much like how Milkshape 3D is the "ultimate" game modeler, and how Ubuntu invented Linux)

Yes I agree that external editors have many advantages for advanced users, but accessibility for new users is definitely something to keep in mind when talking about open-source games that want to create a healthy community of contributors. In regards to mapping this seems to work with Cube2 based engines which have a build-in editor relatively well, but much less so with engines that do not. And the worst (in that regard) are the ones that rely on Blender3D or some other general purpose scene editor.

The Doomsday Engine (dengine.net) seems to have a nice build in UI kit for their game management and menu, which is why I mentioned it. But I admit I have not looked into the technical details nor am I really following the technical development of Doom source ports in detail.

I tested this thing for a bit, but I was not able to produce much. This thing is suited for a specific style of level, as in quake games, but for other things it is more comfortable for me to build things the regular way. The texturing function is a thing what could be interesting, but I already build myself a workflow for that in blender.

And as a general statement, such things as "levels" do not exist in reality, they were created in times when computer games had very limited resources, so you made a few small interior rooms, cut off from the outside world and make it look like the real thing.
Today you have enough resources to build realistic worlds, so the classical "level design" is not used as much anymore.