Play your map while making it...

[Skylark]

...as the first time your map is even run shouldn't be after you think you've finished it; definitely not with 24 people on it.

After hosting and playing most map tests last week and a bit I'm pretty sure that beginners don't play their maps while making them or before releasing and I think it's because testing them can be a bit of a pain, so to make it less of a pain some things beginners may be unaware of.

• Leave TF2 open (ideally borderless windowed to make switching to and from it smoother) and set `Additional game parameters:` to `-hijack` and when running the map it will run the map in the open TF2 (you can set everything to Fast to test faster if compiling is slow). This allows you to make a change, compile, and play it in seconds; acclivity took 412 compiles to a1 because testing was easy.
  
  
• Don't worry about setting up skyboxes while testing, use the cordon tool
  
  to make a cuboid where only everything inside is compiled and skybox is around the outside. Don't leave it when releasing but it means that your maps don't start off as a cuboid to fit a skybox.
• When joining the map you're frozen for a couple of second which is time that could be spent testing, and position reset when waiting for players ends, and can't fly to where you need to go.
  I have a bind that I have on `p` to disable player freeze, disable waiting for players, and bind middle mouse click to noclip. Player movement freeze only needs to be run once, while the others need to press `p` on join, or just add the commands to `map_name.cfg` for automatic
  bind "p" "sv_cheats 1; tf_player_movement_restart_freeze 0; mp_waitingforplayers_cancel 1; mp_disable_respawn_times 1; bind mouse3 noclip"

Hope this helps people test their maps more quickly and find issues before presenting them for playtesting as it does tire the server when we play maps with issues that should have been caught from testing in single player.

(Also after you've compiled your map be sure to enter `sv_pure 2` and then `changelevel your_map_name` to see the map as how everyone else will see it, any unpacked content will show an error for props and purple and black checker for missing textures. Also compiling for HDR is unnecessary for alpha)