[article] Assorted Mapping Hints

This is a discussion topic for the article "Assorted Mapping Hints" by Jinx which can be found here

Article description:

a grab-bag of knowledge!

Finnaly someone explained to me why powers of 2 are better than just any ordinary texture using numbers divisable by 16. I kept hearing people say that all over the place, yet no one ever explained why!

A couple of goof ups in the tutorial is your flickering sign bug, and the nowadtextures suggestion. I believe the flickering sign/wall bug was an old HL WON problem, and was rendered obsolete with Steam. I've encountered the problem on a map I made, on WON, and as soon as I played it in steam, the problem went away. I suggest under "solutions" you add; "Get steam." :P
Sadly, though, I feel that your nodwadtextures suggestion files under the category of lazy mapping. I agree that it wouldn't be fun adding in a whole bunch of wadinclude lines, but then again, 7+ hour compiles aren't fun either, but we do them anyway. You could also easily skip having to "write" the lines out by getting a batch compiler.
Despite this, this is still a good tutorial though.

Yeah, someone asked me why the paintings in Museum looked so much better than they saw on other maps; it's all in the dimensions.

I doubt it has to do with Steam itself. Maybe it was fixed at some point as part of an update to the Half-Life 1 engine? If anyone knows for sure, please chime in. It doesn't hurt to do it that way, so I will continue to do so.

I don't use any default textures, so -nowadtextures isn't lazy, it just makes sense. Better to spend that time on actual mapping.

7+ hour compiles? What are you compiling on, a Pentium I?! Even my PII could compile a huge HL1 map in 4-5 hours.

Since I always either knew which wads to include, or made one mega wad to reduce the files to be added it never caused me any grief.

/me likes this tut. Its a bit lite, when you consider just how many hints there are all told. Someday, I will need to write one of these grab bags of my own to add to yours.

Good job Jinxy
(Score = 1 point per suggestion+1 for going out of your way to post it.)

My ancient tips article from Biohazard.
http://biohazard.planethalflife.gamespy.com/drsmaptips.shtml

Nice list.
I think the following technical background info might be usefull too:

The z-buffer 'bug' is commonly referred to as z-fighting, and it isn't really a bug - it's a lack of precision in the z-buffer range that causes this. It is affected by the maximum viewable distance, at least if that value maps directly to the underlying OpenGL/DirectX far clipping plane. A lower value means more precision for all values in-between, a higher maximum view distance means less precision across the range.

As for water entities, just as all other brush-based entities, they are rendered completely if only a part of their bounding box lies within the current potentially visible area. Thus, a tower that's made into an entity, together with a few brushes spread across the map, will almost always be drawn. The problem with water brushes is often their size, which causes them to be drawn far more often than necessary.