introduction | entities | environment | gameplay | performance | publishing

Once you have the layout and the gameplay mastered, you can start to work on the third and final variable: performance. The performance of your map is very important... if it's too slow, people are not going to like it. Many players crank their settings up as high as possible while maintaining a decent frame rate, so anything that's even a little slower than Quake 3's packaged maps will probably be too slow. Here are some tips to help you keep your maps clean and fast - if you're new to the concepts of mapping, this is probably going to seem a little overwhelming at first... you should read up on some of these in the manuals that came with your editor:

While you're creating your map, avoid building up brushes... in other words, do not put brushes inside of each other. It makes the map run slower and makes the BSP file larger, which increases your map's download size. More than one brush should never occupy the same space unless absolutely necessary. There are almost always ways to avoid this as long as enough care is given to the construction.

When editing brushes, use computer friendly numbers. Keep your maps snapping to a larger grid (8, 16, 32, etc.) as much as possible, as computers can process these numbers faster. The faster the processing, the smoother the map will run. For example, a brush that is 32 units by 32 units can be processed more easily than a brush that is 31 units by 31 units.

You absolutely must use detail and structural brushes, unless you want to wait a few days for your map to compile. If you don't understand what these are, look in the manual for the editor you are using. There are many ways of doing this - but I have found this to be the best: when you are done with your map, you should fly through your map and make all of the trim, objects, lights, etc. detail brushes. Just turn off "show detail" in the editor, and as you make the brushes detail they will disappear, making it really easy for you to see what you're doing. All objects you remove will be ignored by the VIS process when the map is compiled, so do this carefully. What should be left is a shell of your map consisting of the major walls, floors, and ceilings, to block off the different rooms... and there should be no holes to the negative gray area.

Once you make your brushes detail, caulk the unseen faces on them. This basically means that you make the invisible faces of the brush the caulk texture, which is ignored by the game's engine. There are plugins for Radiant that do this automatically. Since they are ignored by VIS, detail brushes will be processed in their entirety in the game, including the faces that are invisible. Caulking fixes this issue, making your map run faster.

Keep your texture count as low as possible. You can use the editor to filter unused textures from the selection list so that you can see how many you are using in the map. If you find that there are two or three textures that are more or less the same, consider only using one of them. The fewer the textures, the faster the map. This is also true for models and sounds. On the other hand, the more textures and sounds and models that you have, the more realistic your map is going to be - it's a tough decision that takes more practice than anything else.

Don't stack alpha-blending shaders. Using many of these in a player's line of sight will hurt performance significantly. This includes such things as fog, rain, and so on. This is why you can't make large outside areas filled with falling rain... it forces the game to blend many layers of alpha textures, which takes a whole lot of math.

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