Best map-making tool for Torque?

#1 Love CShop, quick and easy and the few issues they do have are being taken care of in version 5.0 the wait is killing me. So you know what I am referring to textures cannot be re-loaded in program if you edit a texture you need to exit and start to see the new texture and the hollow brush doesn't work well on anything other than square brushes however both are said to be addressed.

#2 Personally, I like Quark. It's a bit quirky, but is seems more powerful than Cshop. It has diggers, negative brushes, duplicators, extruding, booleans, plane slicing, vertex, face, and edge manipulation. The texturing options are very good too - you can group faces together and treat them as one, you can align and tile the textures automatically, or adjust them manually, rotate them, etc with the mouse or by typing. It's a little harder to use, but overall, I find it much more robust.

#3 QuArK is much more powerful than Cartshop... alot of extras for automatically building things like arches and stairs... tools for map optimization and leak finding, etc. No one can argue that stuff. Still Cartshop is extremely usable for map creation... especially if you want to start being productive immediately. I'm a programmer and i never liked QuArK... it is beyond backwards... i tried to use it and within 30 minutes i still didn't have it setup or even have more than a box on the screen. With Cartshop within 10 minutes i had it installed and i had already created a building and exported a .map. I then found how easy it is to write tools for it and wrote the Pipeline exporter. I can now whip out maps in minutes... it is super easy.

Cartshop5 which will be out fairly soon will be easier, be as fully featured as QuArK, and be even more expandable.

#4 Cartshop is much easier to dig into and make something than Quark, Quark is great for a free program though if you want a bit more refined interface with a more refined exporting process to Torque then I'd highly recommend Cart shop and Tom's pipeline

#5 Great. Thanks guys. Im about to buy 5 copies of CS for the team. We used to have a guy on the team who knew the developer but we were on the incarnation of the game where we were working with UnrealEd (thank god we progressed past that lol). Once we get going, Im sure we'll get Pipeline too.

As an aside...we've decided to with Torque for our MMO game engine and the responsiveness here is amazing.

Feels like friends we didnt know we had :)

Thanks,

Alfred Norris, VoodooFusion Studios
CONFLICT: Omega

#6 I hate bringing up old threads, but I have a few questions.

1. ) Will CShop work with TSE?
2. ) If I use CShop, will I still be able to use the terrain engine?
3. ) Can't I just use 3ds Max to make the whole map? or whould that be more a pain than productive?

#7 If you want to use Max, look into the Game Level Builder plug-in. You'll have alot of constraints that won't make your Max developers happy, but at least they'll be able to stay in their native program.

#8 Thanks David. I just looked at CShop, I find it quite impressive and am probably going to give it a shot. But will it work with TSE? thats important.

#9 Tom would be a better person to answer that. I believe that the pipeline either works with TSE currently or will work with it in the next iteration of the toolset. I can't remember.

#10 @James - Yes, our exporter for Cartshop works with both TGE and TSE. It's a checkbox on the export dialog which controls if a TGE or a TSE DIF is exported (they are different).

Not sure what your specifically thinking about in #2, but Cartshop in no way keeps you from being able to have terrain in your missions.

#11 I like CShop! It's fun! Anyway, I've been doing a new thing lately where I use Bryce landscapes in low polycounts and then apply prerendered high res textures to them. They look almost the same as the 7k poly ones. The only problem is getting them in .dif format and taking away LOD mesh. Other than that, you've got some crazy landscapes for Torque.

#12 Linux based tools for making DIF files for TGE?

#13 Torque Constructor :)

#14 Or a $5000 license for Radiant.

#15 Thx guys, but I am going to try CShop, I dont have 5k. . .

#16 I tried to buy CShop over the weekend. Well, apparently they don't do business over the weekend (although my card got charged). This morning I finally got an email telling me where to download the full version, but the email is screwed up (every other line is blank) so the actual link to the file I need to download is missing. I have the password, but not the link.

My credit card is charged, but I have no program to download. I've attempted several times to contact their customer support, but the service message queue keeps building and my messages never get answered.

Is this a typical situation for theGameCreators? If so, I'm not impressed. I just want the software I paid for :(

#17 This is very odd. Please contact rich (at) thegamecreators.com.

#18 Thanks, Josh!

#19 Something probably got screwed up with their mail server. E-mailing will sort it out. He's very good to work with.

#20 It was fixed within a couple of hours of the above post. Thanks for the address Josh :)