OpenRadiant - Thames Software

Use the Quake III level editor for all your projects!

Introducing OpenRadiant

Do you enjoy making maps for games based on Quake III technology from id Software? We certainly do and extensively use it internally as a way to quickly test out new ideas. We are very excited to present to you our heavily cleaned up version of the classic GtkRadiant level editor. Not only have many issues been fixed but the program has been improved in a number of ways including:

Extended support for exporting to the Wavefront .obj format
Supports lightmap baking with the .obj format
Resources such as textures are handled like a conventional 3D modelling tool
Completely standalone; does not need Quake or any other game installed
Maps can be previewed quickly and easily from the click of a button
Single executable making it portable and easy to update
Supports workflows for almost any 3D engine

Most importantly however is that the interface and usability has remained fast, flexible and fun!

Integrated Lightmap Baking

One great benefit of OpenRadiant is that once your level is ready, you can export it to .obj which is a standard model format. This can then be loaded into a wide range of other modelling tools as part of your creative workflow. Not only that but OpenRadiant also supports baking lightmaps within the .obj format.

Download

If you like the tool, please consider making a donation. I have a number of interesting ideas to add to OpenRadiant and any additional funding really does help fuel the work!

Future Work

My main priority is to keep maintaining this tool so that it is always functional and available as people need it. However some additional areas that I plan to explore are:

Export to a single file .html / webgl page so you can simply copy to your portfolio site and let others explore your world
wxWidgets GUI library. Gtk+ 2.x is nice as an API but does tend to limit portability slightly (i.e to macOS, Wayland, etc). It is also heavy in terms of dependencies. After stripping out a lot of unneeded things, this task is looking very feasible. I have already made some good progress on this one ;)
Lightmap baking is primitive. I plan to pull in more of the Raptor Bakery middleware. And open-source the remaining code. OpenRadiant is GPL but some of the lighting / export components are currently "open-core" as plugins.
FBX support. The .obj format is very portable but it does not support a great number of features. Adding the lightmap stuff was a little hacky and non-standard admittedly. I need to document these extensions.
I mainly work with OpenBSD and Windows. Even though the 3D modelling market of OpenBSD is probably pretty small I thought I would support it for fun and to ensure OpenRadiant remains portable to UNIX. I also want to get Linux and macOS cleaned up and supported too at some point. It would be great to get it added to common package repos.