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This article or section needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality because:

• Add feature list.
• Move information from JACK and Hammer here, and make it more professional.
• JMF file format.

For help, see the VDC Editing Help and Wikipedia cleanup process. Also, remember to check for any notes left by the tagger at this article's talk page.

J.A.C.K. (commonly Jack) is a map editor for games with a Quake-style BSP architecture. Jack is heavily based on Hammer, improving upon the experience from Hammer 3.5 by adding many quality of life features inspired by those found in Hammer 4.x, Q3Radiant, and more. supporting Half-Life, Quake, Quake II, and Quake III, along with many other games and mods running on their engines, such as Gunman Chronicles,  Hexen II, and  Tremulous.

Jack is available for free on its website. A paid version, with several bugfixes and some extra features, is also available on Steam.

Important:The map compilers which come with Jack are forked from older versions of the various engines' compile tools and are not actively maintained. Additionally, the paid version of Jack does not include compile tools for GoldSrc due to license conflicts.

As Jack exclusively uses Valve220 notation for exported MAP files (being the first editor to extend it for use with Quake II and Quake III), a supported compiler is required. The following up-to-date compilers are supported:

• GoldSrc - VHLT 3.4 and forks
  • Sven Co-op - SCHLT
• Quake (and  Hexen II) - ericw-tools
• Quake II - see MAP (file format)#Quake II
• id Tech 3 - the version of Q3MAP2 included with NetRadiant-Custom

Features

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See here.

The paid version contains additional (mostly QoL) features:

Todo: Cleanup wording; this is just a list of stuff user:SirYodaJedi came up with off the top of his head when someone asked about it on Discord

• actually showing the values of KVs alongside the name when smartedit is enabled instead of needing to click on each one
• a button to purge non-FGD keyvalues from an entity
• optional background images in the 2D viewports
• export as OBJ (but map2prop works on RMF and JMF, so that's not too important)
• not needing to have texture filtering enabled for skyboxes to show up (not an issue with quake 1+3 skies)
• an FGD for Tremulous
• steam cloud saves
• automatic game path configuration
• an achievement for using carve 100 times

Trivia

• Jack was used to make three of the four deathmatch maps that were added in Half-Life's 25th Anniversary Update. Contamination and Rocket Frenzy were built using the free version (1.1.1064), and Pool Party was built using the Steam version (1.1.2800).

External links

• Home page
• Website
• Download page
• Steam page