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Q3Edit

Edit and play Quake 3 maps in the browser

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I've been building a level editor for Quake 3 that runs entirely in the browser: Radiant-style layout, brush and patch editing, CSG, terrain sculpting, and entity editing. It opens and saves .map file and you can play the maps you build directly in the browser using a webassembly build of ioquake3.

HN · launched Jul 18, 2026 · 106 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views

Niche: game modding tools · 96 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 96 launches in game modding tools →

Could you build this?

No Building a full browser-based 3D level editor with CSG boolean operations, terrain sculpting, custom .map format parsing/serialization, and compiling legacy C/C++ BSP engines (q3map) and game engines (ioquake3) to WebAssembly requires deep systems, graphics, and compiler expertise.

What it would actually take: Requires WebGL2/WebGPU rendering pipeline, custom 3D brush and constructive solid geometry (CSG) math libraries, and Emscripten pipelines compiling legacy C game engines (ioquake3, q3map) to WASM. The hardest parts are robust 3D polygon clipping/CSG without numerical instability and coordinating virtual filesystem (VFS) memory buffers between the browser editor and WASM compilers.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Quiver (classic Quake 3 map editor), Q3Radiant/GTKRadiant, Cube Engine/Sauerbraten, Stepmania

Concerns raised: Quick Play functionality broken in production, Mouse capture not working on Windows 11 Firefox, TGA image format support issues with shader loading, Unknown surfaceparm errors during map compilation, Uncertainty about active Quake 3 community interest

Feature requests: Support for q3map2 instead of original q3map, Better error messages/debugging for map compilation failures

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 206 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #20 of 207 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 242 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.