Blender isn't particularly suited for closed maps.  E.g. if you have a cube-shaped room and all the normals are facing the middle of the room, editing is annoying because in texture-view mode all you'll see is the black back faces of the walls.  Maybe there's a setting I'm not seeing to hide those.

(edit)

See below, Blender does there is an option to hide back faces.

definitely red eclipse (cube2/sauerbraten fork) but this won't work well if you want to make levels for non-cube2 games, as .OBJ export is not effective I believe :(

It's still unconventional I'd say.

GTK Radiant is still a pretty good tool (same goes for the many available forks, netradiant, darkradiant, zeroradiant etc.), back in the days when I was still modding (~1999-2001), it was superior to the unreal editor, but this has probably changed by now. I think the radiant was actually not significantly changed since then at all ;)

Still it's the best open-source level editing tool currently out there... the Cube2 editor is probably fine when using that engine... it feels somewhat limited due to it's 1st person view mode however.

There is also Quark http://quark.sourceforge.net/ but that is now officially a dead project, and was never that good anyways (+ Windows only).

The CAFU engine also seems to have it's own custom editor, so maybe that is worth looking into:

http://www.cafu.de/

pfunked in solid shading mode enable Textured Solid. In 2.49 it's shift+t in the 3d window, in 2.5 press N in the 3d window and in the side panels find the Display panel and enable the option. This will hide the back faces in solid shading view.

As I remember there was this Blender to Radiant script being developed in the old Nexuiz forums (now renamed to Xonotic), might be worth exploring.

http://www.katsbits.com/ is a website by someone who uses Blender with quake-based engines and radiant editor. He has all sorts of tutorials, including making quake 4 maps and similar.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201179 here's a FPS template for 2.54 game engine to look around your levels. I tested it with 2.55 as well and it seems to work fine.

Lamoot, thanks for the tip!

np :)

Edit: http://www.cgmasters.net/splatting-tutorial.html

There is this open-source Gtk program, I forgot the name and can't find it anymore, please help! It was really good for heightmap editing. To me it is to 3D what tiled is to 2D. You could edit the 2d heightmap with tons and tons of tools, and you had a realtime 3D preview!

The name was a portemanteau something with "terrain" or "plane" or sth. It was really really good! and at the website it had lots of explanations on the tools, some unique ones!

What you describe sounds like Terragen:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/

that is not open-source however.

No, it was not terragen, it was definitely open-source as I browsed through the code. It used Gtk and I think the author was french, not sure though.

I had the feeling that that software had the potential to become THE Tiled for 3D, if only it had a plugin architecture. I wanted to post it here some time ago already, but I was not able to find it, not remembering the exact name :-(

Might you be thinking of GtkRadiant?  It doesn't quite sound like what you're describing, but it's fairly prominent.

Or maybe Hme?  http://hme.sourceforge.net/

Or maybe Geomorph?  It seems to closest fit your description. http://geomorph.sourceforge.net/

Whatever, all of these sound cool.

YES, it was geomorph! Great, thank you so much :-P

It looks REALLY cool, but the sourcecode not. Not flexible, not easy to port or extend. I looked at it to implement save as my own format and I totally failed, unfortunately.

It would be great if someone kind of rewrote that with plugins and portability in mind, and with object orientation... but well I'm dreaming :)

Really happy you found it!

I dont understand why you guys think that blender is not good for map making..
If you are concerned about normals, there is one option called Double sided.
You can find it in properties window->Object Data tab->normals section. Ofcourse later on it would be wise to make them single faced for preformance reasons.

Depends on what kind of map you mean. Blender is missing tools to intuitively work on heightmaps! Of course, it is possible, but it is not really a pleasure to do so.

Thinking of it, maybe writing specific blender plugins could help there :)

Pompei2: what about Blender's sculpting tools for heightmap editing? You can easily limit the deformation to the z axis so you're only editing the height. In addition you can add noise and and displacement via modifiers. When "exporting", you assign the model a blend procedural texture (gradient) and set it so it goes black-> white from bottom->top and save the render with the camera looking straight down on the model.

Didn't come up with that idea, but it sounds like a good idea! Ideally a save script would automate the rendering you tell, that should be feasible. It is just missing the "advanced" tools that geomorph has, but it is a very good start if they are not needed!

Just for reference, good Radiant tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc13oaUau7c

I've been using GTK Radiant 1.4 the past 7 years to bring idTech3 (Quake 3, RTCW, etc)  engine levels to life, till this day it remains my favourite. I belive it can be used to do alot of things, idTech4 (Quake 4, Doom III, etc) mapping is also possible through newer versions of GTK Radiant (1.5, ZeroRadiant, NetRadiant, etc).

I wouldnt have GTK Radiant without my Q3map2, which is the actual compiler for the tech. :)

Have seen people convert entire Minecraft levels to idTech3 using custom modifications of Q3map2.

Its such a science though, and I'm an artist at heart. :)

Looking forward to trying the new idTech5 editor.