New Mapping Guidelines!
Flayra
Game Director, Unknown Worlds EntertainmentSan Francisco Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 3Super Administrators, NS2 Developer, Subnautica Developer
Game Director, Unknown Worlds EntertainmentSan Francisco Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 3Super Administrators, NS2 Developer, Subnautica Developer
In case you guys don't read the front page news, here's the summary. There are new mapping guidelines, written by XP-Cagey. Check them out!
<a href='http://www.natural-selection.org/Mapping_Guidelines.html' target='_blank'>http://www.natural-selection.org/Mapping_G...Guidelines.html</a>
-Charlie
<a href='http://www.natural-selection.org/Mapping_Guidelines.html' target='_blank'>http://www.natural-selection.org/Mapping_G...Guidelines.html</a>
-Charlie
Comments
nj <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
[Edit] Wow, it's A LOT easier to read now, this will help the new mappers <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
nice done XP.
The secret room in my map will honor you.
I don't think any modern card sold today by the major companies even has less than 64MB... What's with the bias towards 8MB cards? Isn't Half-Life's horrible texture support bad enough without setting extremely low limits on getting around those low-res low-depth textures by using a greater variety?
btw : check my register date and my post count <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
simple reason:
Lower texture limit = more scaled textures = less w_poly = better performance for low-end.
now how do I see how much texture memory all the stuff needs that is not in TEXINFO?
simple reason:
Lower texture limit = more scaled textures = less w_poly = better performance for low-end.
now how do I see how much texture memory all the stuff needs that is not in TEXINFO? <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Better performance on low end? I'm sorry, I don't consider voodoo 1 or Riva cards to be low end, I consider them to be ANCIENT.
Heck, 4MB is not even taking advantage of a Voodoo 2!
When i want to customize my minimap.spr with custom colors what colors should I avoid (are reserved for blibs)?
*wink*
Very nice update, that should cut down on some of the hassle of new mappers trying to figure out what's expected of them.. myself included.. *grin* but now stop writing english and get back to writing that magical C that we all love you for! <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
(ah, the wonders of being a coder.. this is why I'm on vacation)
-tal
[Edit: the forum's wink emoticon looks like he's about to puke...]
Has a ton of info, <b>and</b> looks good! :)
One quick thing to point out -- now that there's a table of contents, almost any part of the guidelines can be referenced directly. The format for any link is #Section_Title where spaces have been replaced with underscores and all other characters have been preserved.
This also works for any entity, such as <a href='http://www.natural-selection.org/Mapping_Guidelines.html#func_weldable' target='_blank'>func_weldable</a>. If someone new needs a quick reference and you want to send them to the guide, you can target the section they should be reading directly.
I don't think any modern card sold today by the major companies even has less than 64MB... What's with the bias towards 8MB cards? Isn't Half-Life's horrible texture support bad enough without setting extremely low limits on getting around those low-res low-depth textures by using a greater variety? <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Since Flayra originally wanted to support software mode, I doubt he would want to upp the requirements of NS to 16 or 32MB cards we use nowdays. Half-life has lots of people playing it on ancient machine because, well, helf-life <i>itself</i> is ancient. I can't see why anyone would code a mod for half-life without its community being a factor. Since much of that community have ancient machines, I don't see why you'd want to cut them out of a mod. If you wanted to make your mod for the high-end cards of today, why not make a mod based off of Quake 3? Or NOLF2? Or Unreal 2003? Or even the Serious engine... now that's a sweet little engine for a 1/2 priced game.
EDIT: Less than 400 entities... <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'><!--endemo--> Ok then.
informative and good looking.
Nice to see those nice descriptions of the entities.
A suggestion from me would be to put a small linkt to a example under every entity-description, so newbie mappers can understand them more easily
(something like "Let's say we want a small steam comming from a vent everytime this door is shutting down, we do the following... bla bla bla" ... maybe not that complex examples)
It crashes sometimes, but it's non the less playable.
And the lack of pop-up menu has been filled with my own personnal commandmenu, with all the same stuff.
But guys.. don't think that 4 mb of map textures = 4mb off your video card...
Those 4mb of map textures go through a HELLUVA lot processes before getting to your screen, and all of it... is EXPONENTIAL.
The 400 entity limit doesn't include info_team_start, info_player_start, info_location and light entities that are either unnamed or not dynamic.
Just a small utility that runs at some point that, if it detects one or more limits have been broken, halts the compiling and displays it to the user. Or to a log. Or, whatever, point is it'd do some errorchecking <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
It could go further than that, into some more general information, such as showing with certainty just what wads the .bsp is dependent on, what texture is used most, etc. etc.
It's the errorchecking I'd really like to see though. All in all it'd be information available already, just collected and analyzed centrally.
Just a thought. Haven't searched on this either so maybe it's been suggested a thousand times already.
ok so... my map has a lot more than that ... because for example each door uses 1 multi manager 2 sounds 2 doors and one switch and all the light overlays and whatnot
I have 620+ entities without all the starting locations and my map isn't even finished yet <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
Sounds reasonable--added to my to consider list. I believe there is already a planned release from the NS dev team for a tool to detect the entity count, but I'm not sure of an ETA. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
The URL to the Mapping Guidelines is linked in one of the webbed threads, don't need to web it twice