Hi
I would like to start work on a little 3D engine. Since a lot of you on these forums probably have made engines yourselves, I would like to ask you what you used to build you scenes with. Did you code your own editors, use 3ds max or some other 3D design program or did you hardcode all the vertices by hand (which would seem like a lot of work 
)? I am looking for an easy way to do small test scenes with only a few connected rooms.
Neither - cheat and load quake maps :]. The .bsp’s are reasonably simple to parse if you just want a bunch of faces. From there you can take advantage of textures, collision, patches, etc. whenever you want to.
Seems like a good idea. One thing though. I would like to do a portal system for culling. The Quake maps are build upon BSP trees and I don’t know how well that would lend itself to portal culling. I could of course just extract the faces and then add the portals manually. I don’t know how difficult that would be however. Does anyone have experience in doing so? Also if someone knows where to find the specs for the Quake 1 BSP format, please post it here. I realise that it’s an old format, but for simplicitys sake I think it would be a good place to start.
Personally currently writing a Quake III BSP engine and later hope to write a Half-life Quake II and Quake BSP engine. Its much easyer to just have your engine use whats already out there. Q3Radiant is a good editor.