Disaster! Can it be fixed?

[CakesOnAPlane]

I have what i believe to be a MAJOR problem and need advice on how to fix it. I'm a noob mapper so if this does turn out to be me making mountain out of a molehill then my bad.

Bascically somewhere along the line something has happened to cause my map to become misaligned like this:

As you can see in the 2nd picture (which is the bottom left box on the default windows, one of the sides) the horizontal lines seem okay, yet the rest is a complete mess

My best guess is that the entire map has been scaled at some point and i didn't notice, but I don't think I could be that stupid, at least I hope .

I think this could spell doom for the whole map as there are many tiny gaps between walls and roofs which aren't visible, but may be picked up by vvis and could totally mess things up. Even if it doesn't do this, It is impossible to add more detail and stuff unless I do it by eye without snapping to grid.

Please tell me this can be solved , if not I am determined to begin again and it may actually turn out better since I learnt about optimisation half way through making it so it wouldn't be too bad i guess...

Anyway, that's the problem, any advice at all would help, even if you just think I should start again.

 

[Altaco]

Depending on how much work you've done, you may want to start over, I've gotten this sort of thing occasionally, but only with a couple brushes, never the whole map. It always happened when I scaled things improperly.

 

[CC_ArK]

have you tried using a lower grid size or zooming out a bit? see if it matches a different size.

 

[CakesOnAPlane]

Thanks for the replies :thumbup:!

I've almost finished it, just need to tweak and optimize a bit, but it is quite open and the more I read about optimization, the more I think that my bases would be better built into a cliff, allowing them to be indoors and easier to optimize.

It's at the lowest grid size in the pics and zoomed in max. It's hard to notice
un-zoomed and basically unnoticeable in-game, yet I think that vvis would make a complete mess of it by making many tiny leafs, although I could be wrong as I'm no expert.

Luckily it's a small-ish map so it would only take 2 weeks or so now that i have a detailed layout, and at the moment I've already started tweaking the base design if I am to start a new one. So I'm very tempted just to treat this as a 'beta test' and create the final version from scratch.

Having said that it would be nice if there was a way to fix it. Could it be helped by selecting the whole map and scaling it? Or would this just make it worse?

Thanks again.

 

[Half-Life_Maniac]

You can try using Tools - Snap Selected to Grid (Ctrl+B), or maybe Snap Selected to Grid Individually (Ctrl+Shift+B), but I'm not sure how well that will work depending on how much of your map is actually misaligned.

 

[Armadillo of Doom]

For what it's worth, I made the exact same mistake when I did my first serious map for DeathMatch. You never want to start w/ a low grid size. I always start my brushes at 32-64 units, b/c you inevitably get smaller as the map progresses. You can in fact scale your map, but it could take a bit of work. First bump up the grid size to 16. Then you'll have to go through the map brush by brush, and stretch them out to fit. This also means realigning your props, lights, etc. Vvis won't give you any trouble if your stuff isn't exactly on the grid. The real problems come in when you're trying to fine-tune something, but can't zoom in any further cuz you're already at 1 unit. Whether or not this is a problem really depends on how much work you have left to do. Good luck m8

 

[CakesOnAPlane]

I tried snapping all to the grid but it didn't work since it is the whole map (apart from the 3D Skybox, so it must have happened when i had nearly finished) and it would give me a huge headache realigning it all again.

The problem is not that I can't add more stuff easily since I don't really need too, just that my roofs and walls have become misaligned too, meaning that the roof is a tiny bit smaller than the wall (or vice versa) which I think would cause extra leafs, in the end it would probably be faster to start again than to try and fix it.

Looking at the map now though I realise all the other things that could be improved and so I've decided just to go ahead and start again. Hopefully at the end of it I will have a better final product, and have it not take a whole day to compile since it's indoors more and I know alot more about compiling than when I started.

Thanks again for the quick replies and I'll be sure not to make the same mistake again :laugh:.

 

[FaTony]

That's a good reason to make a backup copy.

 

[grazr]

You can grab those with your vertex tool, move them to a vertice, and then back to the grid point you desired. If you have snap to grid on, it'll fix the problem for the brush's you can find.

This is normally caused by not paying attention to cuts you make at angles into brushes, or by creating a brush after you have selected an entity (normally a prop); as hammer will use the sizes of the last object selected as the lengths of the brush you are creating along the grid axis you are not initially using. When producing a brush after selecting entities it is a good idea to make sure you allign all your vertices to the grid.