Building new levels for popular games is one of the few creative ways that gamers get to manipulate games like Quake, Diablo, and Duke Nukem 3D. Valve's upcoming shooter Half-Life will come with the tools to make level building as easy as 1-2-3.

　　Half-Life, the premier title from Valve is built on top of the Quake engine and the company wanted to make sure that they had a killer level editor. After having built Quake's most popular level editor, Worldcraft, Ben Morris was hired by Valve Software. At that point, the gaming community knew that Valve was getting set for something great.

　　Today, Valve will release Worldcraft version 1.5. The major upgrade includes some great new features: vertex manipulation with face-splitting which will give designers better ability to manipulate brushes, clipping planes which allow easier customization when cutting into objects on any plane, texture alignment locking which will allow the designer to move a texture on top of an object and then lock that texture in place, and various user interface upgrades.

　　Valve had not planned to release a new version of the editor until its 3-D shooter Half-Life ships in November, but demand was strong enough to encourage the developer to put out the upgrade now. Also, Quake level builders would have a longer amount of time to adjust to the new enhancements (in version 1.5). Worldcraft 2.0 will be available with the shipping version of with Half-Life and will include special enhancements for building Half-Life levels.

　　Worldcraft 1.5 is free to registered users and is US$35.00 for new users, and is available for download at the Worldcraft Web site.