Mapping Tips & Tricks
2. USE SEMI-SOLIDS!!! It will cut down on BSP holes, ESPECIALLY if you are using complex brushes. (proof?)
4. Save multiple copies, you never know when you need to go back.
5. Keep adding to your work! Update your map. New ideas will always come to mind :)
6. For the love of pie, dont have a non-solid and a semi-solid touch!! Unreal Editor goes 'OMGWTFBSP!!' (if something goes trough a sheet brush, make it a mover, a solid, or a mesh, else...)
Some mapping tips & tricks to avoid bsp, to make a nice map, etc.:
1. NEVER use cubes as zone separators (I made a nonsolid cube w/ sides marked as portals and it worked out fine until it cut a bsp hole through half of my map... replaced with 4 sheets (from floor to ceiling) and it worked fine).
4. Avoid using reflective surfaces (translucent + mirror) near fake backdrops (I did that because I can but only once, for lulz).
6. Basic geometry goes first (use "Set ZoneInfo AmbientBrightness 255 | Flush" while playing through"), then basic lights, then detail geometry, then fine lighting and finally items and enemies (but make sure you leave enough room for everything).
7. Save before rebuild!
8. Keep multiple copies of your map so if you fuck something up, you can easily revert (like I keep at least 100 snapshots of my virtual PC where I code).
11. If you *DO* rebuild paths every time you rebuild your map (because you didn't know this before, hurf durf), select all Inventory, Pawn, Keypoint (?) and NavigationPoint (sub)classes, right click one of the selected actors and select Order -> To Last. That will sink reachspecs like Titanic sunk itself (lol fail).
13. (optional) Delete all test rooms and test brushes before releasing your map (if you want to keep your brushes for later lulz, keep a copy of your map with them for yourself).
14. (optional) Add music and ambient sounds into your map if it's not a very silent map (like underwater or something) to keep it interesting.
18. Add pillars into tall rooms for more realistic look except if the map is abstract or something so pillars really bother and you don't want them.
1. If it's a surface, if it's flat, it could probably use more decoration.
2. Trims and borders are essential for a polished look. Trim your walkways, platforms, stairs. You can add trims to a lot of things and it's always nicer with them.
5. A noiseless map is a dead and lifeless map. Everything makes noise in the real world (outside the window). Everything should do the same in your map.
6. Emitters are cool. Trims are cool. A lot of different texture packages are cool. Sometimes, mixing everything in one huge bloated map is not as cool as the sum of the cool things it has in it.
7. A singleplayer campaign should not be the story of a man whose ship crashed on an unknown planet. We've been playing this for ten years, we know all the tricks you can come up with.
8. If you have only one height level in one room, it better be a small and useless room. If something happens in this room (like, I don't know, the player fighting), it should have at least two levels. Three is good. Four is very good. Five is too much. Six is a cheap and impossible labyrinth (or the entry hall of a skyscraper).
9. Adding stairs of 2 steps in the middle of the room does not count as a different height level.
10. A lot of textures of the original game are very, very, very abstract and can be used for a lof of different things, including things you didn't see in the game. Making a map with the exact style of an existing map is dull, useless, uninteresting and not creative. And you should be creative (one good way to do that is using a lot of textures that are only scarcely used in the game and using them for something they were NOT made to. The Skaarj.utx texture pack is used a lot at the end of the game, but you can use the ceiling textures on your walls and vice-versa).
11. If you really want to make something with the oldschool style of the original Unreal maps, make something with great amplitudes. Think Sunspire, don't think Rajigar mines.
1. Align every possible surface in your map. Otherwise it look ugly.
2. NEVER try to make your map too *cool* or realistic because it may waste too much time.
3. Make an easter egg in your map.
4. Semisolids reduce node count, but excessive usage of semisolids lead to BSP holes hell :P. It's better to think solid brushes as the hull or core structure of a map, and semisolids as the details or decorative parts that aren't essential to keep a building structurally stable. Semisolids that are nonsolid in game (i.e. player can fire and walk through it) are a sign of BSP holes.
6. Don't stretch your zone portal sheets trough the walls/floors of your map. If there is a corridor with two windows, from where you see the outside, don't place a large sheet to cover both windows at once, make one sheet per window and fit them to the window boundaries.
7. Starting off 227f, there is a new dynamic zone info actor which can create water without needing a separate zone. Take advantage of it! Pounds, fountains, pools, lagoons or a sea with nothing but a flat underwater floor can be done without wasting zones now. Note: you'll still need one or more sheets to show the water texture.
9. If a zoned off part of your map isn't being zoned off after rebuild, there is a BSP hole that is causing the zone to leak. One visual sign of a BSP hole is a invisible surface that shows up on some wall/floor/ceiling. Note: starting off 227f, zones must contain a zoneinfo actor to be counted.
10. To increase productivity use the groups feature to rebuild your map in pieces. Group structures and actors under the same group's name, then you can simply hide things that aren't hardlinked to other things in your map, speeding up both rendering in editor and rebuilding times as you won't be working with the full map everytime.
12. Vertex snap + tesselated cubes trick. With this trick you can have tesselated cylinders/prisms.
