BSP is a freeware map creation program written by Yahn Bernier for id software's game, Quake, and games using the Quake engine. The name of the program refers to the Binary space partitioning data structure commonly used by such games and the .bsp file format used by Quake for compiled maps. Level design or game mapping is the creation of levels—locales, stages, or missions—for a video game (such as a console game or computer game). ... id Software (IPA: officially, though originally ) is an American computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... Zombies attacking the player at the starting of Episode 1, Mission 3: The Necropolis. ... Binary space partitioning (BSP) is a method for recursively subdividing a space into convex sets by hyperplanes. ... . ...

History

BSP was originally written using an old version of Borland C++ and released in the latter half of 1996, when Quake was still fairly recent.

The last official release made by Yahn was 0.93b on 02/12/1998. Mr. Bernier was subsequently hired by Valve Software to work on their game, Half-Life and the Worldcraft editor (as it was then called), and BSP was abandoned. Valve Software is a Bellevue, Washington-based video game developer made famous by its first product, Half-Life, which was released in November 1998. ... Half-Life For a quantity subject to exponential decay, the half-life is the time required for the quantity to fall to half of its initial value. ... VHE is provided as part of the Source SDK. Valve Hammer Editor, formerly known as Worldcraft and now commonly called Hammer, is Valve Softwares map creation program for their first-person shooter computer game Half-Life and for all of its mods, sequels, and expansions. ...

The (broken) source code was given to a BSP user early in 2000, but it was set aside due to the effort involved in getting it back into a working state, and nearly forgotten.

Revival

In July 2006, BSP 0.94b was released. It has been ported to the Win32 API, adding several new features and fixing a number of problems in the code in the process. The current version is 0.96d, released 10/10/2007.

External Pages

• Current official site
• Yahn Bernier's old site
• Quake Expo Booth (source of some of the recent history, accessed 11/25/2006)