2. Grab your Worldcraft CD. Yeah, the one that's all
dusty. No, try over in the corner. Yeah, there it is.
Copy the wc.exe from the CD into your empty Worldcraft
directory.

3. Run the patch. You might also try sacrificing a toaster
to the VIS god. Tho this isn't strictly his area of expertise,
it can't hurt anything.

• The first thing I noticed was that all the pictures of Worldcraft had the right-hand dialogs jumbled, seriously cutting down the editing space (see the picture at left). The picture at right is much more representative of what Worldcraft will look like. This is important for people judging the editor for the first time. Something not mentioned in the article is that the windows are both resizable and zoomable, to allow full screen editing in one plane.

• "Worldcraft's fourth design window provides a preview of your map and can be set to show wire frame, flat solid, or fully textured views. You cannot walk through the map in this view, but you can set up a number of camera angles from which to view your work."
  
• Worldcraft does, in fact, allow you to move through the 3D view by using the mouse and/or keyboard
• "The editor [texture browser] allows you to view all of the available textures or just those you've already used (which is helpful for giving your map a consistent look and feel)."
• For the sake of completeness, this section should mention that you can view all textures, all textures used, or all textures within a certain .PAK or .WAL directory. You can also search for textures using a text sub-string.
• "For most items, such as doors and platforms, you can call up either a basic or advanced menu of properties and edit them via simple dialogue boxes. The basic menus are good for novices, while the advanced menus let you more fully manipulate the many variables used by Quake II."
• This section is quite unclear. Worldcraft has only one entity properties dialog, which can be viewed in SmartEdit mode or non-SmartEdit mode.
• "Similarly, when it comes time to compile your level, you can choose a simple, default compile with few options or a more advanced method, which offers several more options, takes quite a bit longer, and results in higher-quality output."
• Again for the sake of completeness, the more advanced method (the Expert Compile mode) allows you to modify the existing compile profiles and easily add new ones.
• "One annoying problem with Worldcraft is that the program seems to ignore the information you give it during installation."

• Let me just quote the readme.txt included with 1.6 (this is what pops up before you can complete the installation ***************************************************************************************                     I M P O R T A N T!  R E A D M E ! *************************************************************************************** Worldcraft Options have been preset to work for Quake and Quake II. However, these presets may not be correct for your computer. After launching Worldcraft from the start->programs menu, open the tools-> options menu and confirm that your Game Configuration paths, Build Programs paths, and Texture paths are set up properly. *************************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************************

• "Documentation is pretty plain, just as it is with Deathmatch Maker 2. The basics are fairly well covered but only in a Windows help file format."
• So it's a bad thing I didn't include those nekkid spice girl pics? :) Ok, joking aside, what exactly is "plain documentation"? I think the Help file with Worldcraft 1.6 is quite complete. The Windows help file format was also an intentional decision. It allows the information, including pictures, to be easily organized and indexed. I think the format is excellent for documentation.
• "Valve Software's Worldcraft 1.6. Though it shipped nearly six months later than its original release date - to the dismay of many loyal Worldcraft users - this editor proved to be well worth the wait."
• Whoa! Hmm, I agree that Worldcraft 1.6 is worth waiting 6 months for (god forbid!), but if memory serves correct, the release date was to be no later than December 31st. As incorrect as that was, the time between December 31st and March 6th comes nowhere close to 6 months (perhaps that was calculated in dog years? hehe) Again, kidding aside, Quake2 was still a twinkle in the consumers eye 6 months ago.

I waited months for 1.6, hearing how people said "How Great it was" and "It's the best level editor", waiting eagerly to test it out and perhaps even buy it.But, now Valve have done it again, by UPGRADE ONLY. Now, I'm not saying it's you're fault, but asking you to put up on your page, a message telling everybody to e-mail valve and sierra complaining about this. They will be losing many users because of this, and it is unfair to registered users who have not tried the program before. Sure, they could download 1.5, but what's the point? None of the Quake II features are included, and another map file format! Please put this on your page.

Glenn Duncan

Questions? Comments?
worldcraft@acdsystems.com

Brian Smedley
Head of Game and Utility Development
ACD Systems Ltd

There are many great new features in Worldcraft 1.6, namely Quake2 support.

• Quake II and Hexen II support
  Game Configurations tab has been added to the Options dialogs which makes adding support for these games very simple. You can control the palette, entities, and textures from here.

• Ease-of-use features
  It is now possible to add both PAK and WAL files in the Texture Options dialog, as Quake II stores its textures in a WAL format within the PAK, as opposed to within the BSP files (as was done with Quake I).

The texture browser has a flag to display all textures, or only the textures currently in use.

The Texture Application tool now lets users edit the Quake II surface attributes. It is now functionally equivalent to QE4, and it addresses some problems found in that editor (being able to modify several solids' surface properties without changing their textures is a nice feature).

One of the noticeable improvements in Quake II is the colored lighting and Worldcraft makes picking colors a snap. Any entity key that takes a RGB number as a value now has a "Pick Color" button associated with it which will bring up Windows' default color choosing dialog. Picking a color is as easy as clicking on the color chart.

Checking for leaks no longer needs to be a time consuming process. Included now is the ability to load a pointfile (leak file) directly into your map, where its course will be plotted in a thick red line. This option is available from the Map menu.

Worldcraft will detect and correct mixed surface content errors in Quake2 maps.

• Expert Compile Support
  To aid in the creation of expert compile profiles, a Build Programs tab has been added to the options dialogs, where you can specify the game executable, bsp, light, and vis programs for use with each game profile. When used in the expert compile dialog, these programs can be referenced by using $game_exe, $bsp_exe, $light_exe, and $vis_exe. The Build Programs settings also determine which programs will be used when compiling using the normal compile setup.

Are you planning on doing any other Worldcraft upgrades between now and 2.0?

We will do critical bug fixes -- if necessary -- on Worldcraft 1.6.

What is in Worldcraft's future?

We are committed to making Worldcraft the best and most popular editor out there. We think the combination of Half-Life and Worldcraft 2.0 (which has lots of new features and takes advantage of Half-Life's engine technology) will be a pretty mind-blowing advance to the existing tool set. You will have so much more control over not just the way things look but also how they act. We like to say that the combination of HL and WC 2.0 will turn "level designers" into "game designers." Of course, Worldcraft will continue to support the other popular games as well.

We'll be making an announcement early next week about other developments regarding Worldcraft.

What are some of the things on your "wish list" for future features?

A lot of the features I'd like to see in Worldcraft are getting address in version 2.0. Better texture application tools (3D view texture manipulation, rotation/skew texture lock), better brush manipulation tools (arrays), and tools that enable Half-Life features (AI, DSP, high color textures!)

Was it an advantage to be using more than Sierra's QA team?

Yes, using knowledgeable Worldcraft veterans from the Quake community helped WC1.6 development tremendously. (big thanks to all my testers, and the hundred monkeys banging on a keyboard somewhere updating the help file.)

So... what happened to Ben?

Ben decided he didn't like living in the States and wanted to return to Victoria, B.C. We tried to do development of WC remotely, but it didn't work out. We just couldn't get information and betas passed back in forth in a timely manner. Eventually, we realized we needed to bring WC development back in-house. Mike Harrington took over and finished the upgrade. We learned that remote development really doesn't work and we won't be doing it again.

Who is working on WC now?

We have a team of people working on Worldcraft, including Valve founder Mike Harrington. We have big plans for Worldcraft and want to make it the ubiquitous tool for level development. We'll have more news about this next week.