I first learned about Qoole on Blue's News when he announced that GLQoole was released. Seeing as I am a 3dfx junkie I thought I better take a look at it. I had been thinking about making maps for sometime, I purchased a well known map editor that was supposed to be great for making maps, but was too slow to make anything worthwhile.

From the moment I first ran GLQoole I was in heaven. You can render a map in and walk through it just like all the other great editors, with the only difference being that GLQoole is fast. I can get to where I want to go now. No more waiting to get there. I found with this one feature alone I was 200% more productive as I could look and see what it would look like in quake. With my $60 editor it was quicker to compile the map and then run it in quake.

Another nice feature is Help Mode in which, when turned on, displays a Help dialog box every time you click a toolbar button to tell you just exactly what that button does. I left help on and after about 15 minutes I was familiar enough to turn it off and go to town like the big boys.

After I had played with it a little bit, it dawned on me that I should make a map to go with my review, so I set out on my quest. I decided on a Rocket Arena level as that would be small and compact and, well I am addicted to RAQuake :). After about an hour I had successfully created my first map that I was (surprise) quite happy with. Along the way I did run into a few snags but help was just a few clicks away. Every time I ran into trouble I just joined #Qoole on EFFNet and was able to find help in no time at all. Here are some screen shots of my progress:

This is a shot of me editing my Arena in Top view.

This is a Shot of the Qoole Editor in default view.

Here is a gorgeous example of 3D view.

Now I am no map creating expert by any means but using Qoole I could easily get the results I wanted. Among some of the other great features I found were the Tutorials and classes on the Qoole web site and irc channel. The Qoole classes are held via irc on effnet in #qoole101, taught by some veteran users of Qoole such as Ms.Barrows. I attended the Sept 24th class on Grouping and Scoping and learned some powerful pointers in working with Qoole. The nicest feature of the irc classes are that they are online at the Qoole web site as well so you can look at illustrations as well. You can find information on the Qoole classes at the Qoole Academy.

As I worked away on my level I found Qoole to be much easier to use than my old editor. The only real problems I ran into involved not knowing how to add entities that were specific to RA levels and was quickly helped by the fine people on irc. After a couple trips to #Qoole I was finished with my arena map in which you can get here (65k).

In summary I would recommend that if you are interested in making maps for Quake that you should check out this fine utility. And with a price of $24.95 for a reg key or 29.95 for the CD how can you go wrong. Don't have 3dfx yet, no problem, I found WinQoole just as useful as the GLQoole version with the exception of the GL Walk through feature. I would give this product 9 star out of 10 rating only because, well nothing is perfect :)

-d0gmA

The latest version of Qoole is 2.07 and can be downloaded from http://www.qoole.com.