Developer Talesquakelevel-designopen-source
Kristian Duske Built TrenchBroom So He Could Make Quake Maps Again. He Never Made Another One.
The Mac user who started the level editor behind Wrath and a generation of Quake maps in 2010 told func_arena he hasn't made a single map with it, and that he's still cleaning up code he over-engineered back then.
“Ironically, I never made a single map again, using TrenchBroom or otherwise,” Duske told func_arena.
The reason he started was a Mac. “I started TrenchBroom in 2010 because I wanted to make maps again, but I was (still am) a Mac user and couldn’t find a level editor that I liked.” There was one option, ToeTag by Warren Marshall, “but I wasn’t super happy with the workflow.” He’d already ported FitzQuake to SDL just so he could play Quake on his Mac.
The first TrenchBroom was “written in Objective C and C only,” released in 2012. The project’s own history begins earlier, with an “Initial import.” commit by Duske on March 15, 2010. Then he threw it out. “I decided I would start over, but this time using C++, which I also wanted to learn, and with portability in mind.” TrenchBroom 2.0 shipped in 2018, and “in 2020 we switched the UI frameworks from wxWidgets to Qt,” a move he credits to co-maintainer Eric Wasylishen.
The repository calls it “a modern cross-platform level editor for Quake-engine based games.” It’s GPL-licensed, sits near 2,900 stars, and the latest release, v2026.2, came out in August. Duske says it’s “used by indie developer teams to make retro shooters such as Wrath.”
Asked what surprised him, he picked two things: “That it’s so successful and that I’m still working on it.” He hadn’t even wanted the 2D views at first.
He’s blunt about the code. “TrenchBroom has a lot of over engineered code that I’m still cleaning up to this day. I wish I had kept things simpler back then and used much less object orientation.” The feature he never cracked was a nicer CSG subtraction, the operation that carves one brush out of another. “The problem is NP complete… I tried this for months with many approaches, but they all failed, so I gave up and did the simple approach that we have now in TB.” The hardest one he did ship was linked groups.
Play the video on YouTubeAI is changing how he works on it. “AI support allows me to take on tasks that I couldn’t take on alone before,” he said, including reorganizing the project into smaller libraries and improving the build system. It hasn’t changed what TrenchBroom is for. “For me, TrenchBroom is still a Quake level editor first and foremost.” If someone wants it bent toward another engine, “TrenchBroom is open source, so people can fork it and with AI tools, they can adapt it to their workflows.”
He has a stock answer for requests he’s heard too often: “I’ll just say ‘I don’t want to discuss this again’… I’m just one guy with a family and full time job.” His day job is programming for a music company. As a teenager he wrote his own sequencer because he’d spent all his money on synth hardware.
Of all the Quake-engine games the editor has to handle, “Daikatana has the most quirks of them all.” Quake 3 support is still unfinished. “I’m working on it,” he said, though he also admitted that playing Control Resonant is “why TrenchBroom progress has taken a bit of a nose dive.”
Nobody has put a date on Quake 3 support, and the man who started the project is in the middle of a game.