The Quake Fan who built the map editor everybody uses

It's great when you have it set up but there's so a fairly gnarly amount of ritual magic needed to set it up. I kinda wish it was first part integration, especially given the extremely lackluster 3D level editing abilities of Godot itself.

Godot feels very much held back by how much stuff you need to do in 3rd party apps with flakey or nonexistent integration. Software developers often get shit for the learning curve of IDEs, but nothing has the "damn girl, you live like this?" energy as open source gamedev tooling. Even something pretty basic like doing texture painting in Blender? Jesus H. Christ. Makes The GIMP seem more polished than anything Apple put out at the peak of its polished days.

Interesting, and cool project by the way!

I don't know what Unreal Tournament did use internally, it's hard to investigate, since there is no (official) source code release for it. But I do know, that brush-based (additive) approach isn't strictly necessary for creating maps for Quake/Quake II/Quake III, it's technically possible to write a map compiler taking maps in some subtractive format. The reason why it's not done (or at least not common) is because it's not a trivial task and because existing infrastructure adds some friction.

The unreal method and the quake one are almost exactly the same technically. The level has to be watertight, no leaks from the inside out, even outside areas are actually inside. I suspect for the previs set calculation to work correctly. The editors were both csg brush based and compiled to similar bsp data structures. But in one of those strokes of brilliance where the problem is inverted, the unreal editor devs said "if we start from a solid world and you subtract the rooms you want then you can never have a leaky level" goofy as hell compared to how you think about building things, but it generally worked.

Note, that I never mapped much, but my standard approach was generally to cut a few large rooms out in the general shape of the map(because despite the clever opening if you got too ambitious too quick unreal absolutely would leak like a sieve) then use a mix of add and subtract brushes to make the fine geometry, which was exactly the same as quake maps, large simple rooms to avoid leaks(this time needing to be assembled) filled with fine geometry via adds/subtracts.

This is sort of the early id, Epic engines in a nutshell, id better technically, Epic better tooling and ergonomics.

And a footnote on brushes, because I did not understand this until long after I stopped mapping, A "brush" is a 3d primitive unique from the point,face one commonly used in 3d modeling software. A brush is defined as the convex shape made from intersecting planes. So where for a point,face model you define where the points are and which points form a face, for a brush you define where the face is(point, normal) and what faces are in the brush, the shape comes out of how they intersect. I assume this was because for large simple geometry that you are going to be doing csg operations on the plane model is more attractive than the point model.