The stupidest mapping mistake you have made

Stili_z301™

L1: Registered
Jan 16, 2017
14
5
thats a neat solution acctualy

ps: ok now that i think about it its not that good. but i didnt mean to say it was good from the start i ment to say it was interesting and diffrent.
 
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MaccyF

Notoriously Unreliable
aa
Mar 27, 2015
914
1,544
thats a neat solution acctualy

on the surface sure, it gets rid of the leaks. Unfortunately it also breaks optimisation and pretty much makes your whole map render all at once, all the time

p.s., don't feel bad about the disagrees you're getting, we're only giving them to make sure you and other newer mappers don't make this mistake :)
 
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Crowbar

Spiritual preprocessor
aa
Dec 19, 2015
1,455
1,297
Hammer was crashing upon loading the map. I'd revised the entire VMF in notepad part by part, to find that it was a static prop offending. Selecting its model in the model browser froze it... Ended up finding out that manually editing the .MDL files that I had done the other day had not been a good idea.
The whole process only took 2 hours.
 

Cytosolic

L5: Dapper Member
May 1, 2015
201
169
I accidentally compiled with HDR only and didn't realize. Everyone who tested it without hdr lighting enabled saw Fulbright.
 

FloofCollie

I really suck!
aa
Nov 5, 2016
600
669
This.
1Fq403j.jpg

And this Control Point.
9O1APBL.jpg


And the entire map in general. >.<
But to be fair, I feel like its quality was decided more by my struggling to get to grips with Hammer's interface than with my level design skills. For a first map, I think I learned a lot... but I don't really consider it my first map... in fact, I prefer to think it was never released to the Internet.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
Got tired of constantly getting leaks in my map, so I surrounded the whole thing with nodraw to contain them
I actualy still do this while the map is in alpha state (realy, if this extra processor cost would already be a problem in alpha, there are much bigger problems in the map). So for timesaving i actualy think that during alpha its a good thing to do that. Although when doing that a normal compile on vvis should still be done since the small tricks a fast compile can normaly do, these no longer work with such poor skybox. It shouldnt be any problem to render almost the entire skybox around it because in the later versions of the map, the detail is going to be way heavier.

But with that, i still try to seal as much as possible (generaly the side skybox textures that go all the way to the top). This helps later on when going for a beta since you already should have thought out most of the skybox areas. So you arent going to misjudge positioning as fast. The remaining minor gaps (usualy below the skybox level) can usualy be solved in beta where you will have to alter at least half of the brushwork for detailing. And when its only these lower gaps, even with such huge box skybox around your map, the effect is going to be minimal.

There is no need to perfectly seal an alpha, you want to be able to quickly change the map. Any effort you spend into perfectly sealing is going to be a waste of time the moment you need to edit it.
 

FloofCollie

I really suck!
aa
Nov 5, 2016
600
669
What you say is very true, and that's how I usually go about testing my alphas. But it's worth keeping in mind that you'll want to be flitting between testing and tweaking your level often, and this enclosing method can slow down the compiling process. (That being said, you shouldn't really be using excessive amounts of brushes at this stage, so I guess it all balances out in the end??)
 

SnickerPuffs

(*single chuckle*)
aa
Apr 10, 2014
1,315
1,857
When I was working on one of my first maps, I accidentally set the group mode to "Solids", so when I copied the map from one side to the other, I though I had to rebuild everything