cohost ask: level design tools

@porglezomp asked:

I remember I originally followed you on Twitter for level design tool review stuff. Do you have opinions on level design tools that should exist but don’t? I always want to hear about tools

i have many such opinions but i’ve spent so much time expressing them over the years that i’ve somewhat burned out on it. being extremely correct is not in itself very satisfying

i would say though that there has been progress, of a kind, on this, on the unreal side. at some point they made a tool called CubeGrid which is included in UE5 (and i think late UE4) and it’s an extremely good blocking-out tool. the modeling tools inside ue5 have pretty bad ux, but they’re very powerful and they’re increasingly exposing everything you need to make your own editor tools using that tech, which i think is probably going to be the way of things in the future – it won’t be long now until you can build trenchbroom inside ue5, and have it handle all the mesh admin on its own, and sell that on the marketplace and the whole issue will have been addressed. maybe it will be me who does that. probably it won’t