Quake Army Knife (QuArK) is a multi-purpose tool for the games using engines similar to or based on the Quake engine by id Software. QuArK has the ability to directly edit maps, and to a limited extent, models, and can import, export and convert sounds, textures and various other game assets. It is also able to modify .pak and .pk3 files, as well as importing compiled BSP's in order to study the entities as well as add/change/delete entities from these files. No other game editing tool available has the ability to do all of these things.

QuArK is completely different from and unrelated to the desktop publishing program QuarkXPress, made by the company named Quark.

QuArK was programmed by Armin Rigo while he was a mathematics student in Lausanne Switzerland. Armin had been programming Quake related utilities since Quake's release, and was the first one to release a program (DEACC) for de-compiling Quake scripts in order to study their structure. He later produced a map editor called QuakeMap, which was then combined with DEACC and other tools to become QuArK. Armin has moved on from game-related programming and is now no longer involved in QuArK or any other game-related activities.

QuArK is an acronym of sorts for QUake ARmy Knife. Its name is unrelated to Quark, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Ferengi character, despite the coincidence that the actor which played Quark (Armin Shimerman) shares the same first name as the author of QuArK (Armin Rigo). For more information see 'What is the history of QuArK?' below.

QuArK was originally called QuakeMap, and was a map-only editor for Quake. QuakeMap broke with the "traditional" 3-view (xy, xz, yz) interface and opted to go for a much simpler to understand interface that showed just a "side" and "top" view, with a "compass" that rotated your level through 360 degrees, making the third "view" unnecessary. This opened up much of the screen real estate, and by incorporating a small uncluttered toolbar on the left hand side, along with extensive right-click functionality, this enabled new users to quickly and easily learn the interface enough to put their efforts into their creations, and not into learning the editor and its complicated arrays of views and tool buttons.

As Armin expanded the program, it progressed to the point where Quake"map" was no longer representative of its scope. The name was changed to Quake Army Knife (QuArK for short) which better signified its "all-in-one" abilities.

QuArK expanded to integrate all of its various editors and abilities into a single interface called the QuArK Explorer that allows you to control most game assets and to seamlessly integrate any and all of these items into a single QuArK file with the extension ".QRK". Items can be added, removed, and changed at will, and this means that your past projects can be included in your future projects, simply by "linking" to the .QRK file that contains them. All of your current items are shown in the Explorer, and managing the items is as simple as clicking on an entry.

As Armin approached the end of his undergraduate work, he foresaw that he would no longer have the time to continue QuArK development, and released the source code under the GPL, and begin to help various enthusiasts to begin to learn to maintain and extend it.

It is now maintained at SourceForge as the project QuArK, and has expanded its scope from just Quake to 31 different games at time of writing (maybe more by the time you are reading this).

Any and everyone who wants to create cool TC, or edit resources for their favorite game. QuArK has become an all-around flexible tool for helping development for any game or development project.

One difference between QuArK and many other editors is a consistent emphasis on an easy-to-use and intuitive interface, with extensive flyover hints and other forms of in-program documentation. No need to remember 50 combinations of hot keys to produce a map. Initial configuration is simply a matter of filling in fields indicating where the games you're editing and their compiling tools are located, and when you start the map editor for the first time, you're presented with a basic map than you can run by hitting the 'GO' button.

There has also been extensive development of tools such as 'duplicators' and 'shape builders' to help in creating complex patterns such as stairs, arches and other sophisticated architecture. If you know you need a row of pillars but can't make up your mind about what texture to use on them, you can use a duplicator, and changing the texture on the original will automatically update the copies.

A final difference is that QuArK is as far as we know the only GPL (GNU Public License) game editor that is being actively developed, and is easy to extend to accommodate a wide range of different games. The GPL means, among other things, that the QuArK developers can't impose any restrictions at all on what you do with it, unlike editors supported by games companies, which can't be used for games produced by other companies. So if you are an aspiring game-developer you can adapt QuArK for your own project, without having to reveal editor source until you release the editing tools for your game (actually you don't even have to do that, though we would certainly hope that you would).

QuArK handles more different kinds of resources with less fuss than any other editing tool, and supports more games than most editors. However, the question of which editor is 'best' is not one we care to get into. The best editor for you is the one you can get your projects completed with and like the most.

Very likely some combination of laziness, stupidity, or pressure; or perhaps nobody has asked for it. So if you think it would be cool, ask for it. If nothing happens after six months or so, bring it up again; QuArK was developed by a different person then the present maintainers, and we are gradually learning how to do more thing with it.

Also, you could try to make it yourself. The sourcecode to QuArK is freely available, and we will always welcome a new developer :-)

That depends. If the game is a Quake 1/2/3 engine game, it might happen pretty quickly if you ask. If it's a non-Quake engine 'corridor shooter' (Unreal, Serious Sam, Max Payne), it would depend on how much of the work you are able and willing to do. It's fair to say that the QuArK coders do not have time to fossick around in forums and web sites collecting technical specifications and map format information, so if you can do that and present a nice package, that would improve the chances (there's also the issue of whether the game developers themselves impose restrictions on editing their content).

If you're interested in extending QuArK to deal with a new kind of game, post a request on the QuArK forum.

If you're using a Windows binary snapshot or distribution of QuArK more recent than the beginning of June 2003, QuArK comes with the Python interpreter and all the libraries you need included.

If you're compiling from source, you have the option to compile for a version of Python you have installed on your system. Please see 'Python Interpreters & Versions' for more information.

Yes, QuArK can be made to run on Linux. See 'QuArK on GNU Linux systems' for details of how to install QuArK on a Linux system.