Mapmaking Guide for Idiots

[Daddyo]

I personally love making prefabs - and they can be a quite powerful tool in mapping.

That makes you an 'object oriented' OO mapper. Good info.

I saw on another site that talked alot about this stuff for alien vs predator that the dedit sdk had a manual, since it's pretty close to jupiter I was thinking on installing it, except it might hose up my jupiter.
http://www.planetavp.com/modmaker/modmaker1.html

[Layer]

There are some differences between Talon (the AVP lithengine Dedit) and the Jupiter version. Mainly with how a map must be constructed and the way in which the window cameras in the editor behave. As amazing as it is to say..TRON's editor is actually more technically advanced in a lot of aspects.

[NicolA.exe]

I like the title of this topic. But what about we rename idiots into "gamegrid-retards" ? That would suit better to us.

[Daddyo]

Is there much of a difference in live performance of a brush plane that is small vs one that is gigantic (like 60k dedit units on a side)? Assuming I've mapped the texture to the size of the brush plane that is.

I know it takes forever to do the static lighting during the build, but once that is done, isn't it the same job of rendering regardless of dimensions? Sure seems to me it would be. I can see a game that is dynamically lite that it might be a harder job. But Tron isn't dynamic it?

[xistence]

Sure there are differences, already in the float-values defining the verticies of the plane. Also lightning won't be possible if the plane gets too big, but you'll get errors if that happens. Then lightning (most time gouraud-type set) will be ugly on big planes, as the shadow value is calculated on triangle-base, the more smaller part the construction has, the more precise and correctly the lightning will look like. The alternative would be lightmap, but this is not recommend as being extremly complex in calculation so performance will drop extremly in the game. Using one huge big plane and a lightsource might end in a effect that everything is too much lit up or not, but nothing between.
And yes, Tron uses dynamic lightning. You can turn it off in the map-processing-options, but the results will might look bad and ugly up to the fact you won't see too much in the resulting map.