Ritualistic

Generally speaking, everybody will develop their own style of mapping, but never the less there are certain rules that you should try to follow. A lot of the things stated here should be common sense under mappers.

• Caulk your brushes
  If you are new to mapping this won't mean much to you, but in a quicky, apply the common/caulk texture to every brush side you can't see in-game, this will help the performance alot.
• Detail your brushes
  Ctrl+D will "detail" selected brushes, also in a quicky, detail all bruses, that are "small", i.e. that the player can't hide or stand behind, and brushes that don't block the view of anything. DON'T detail brushes that are touching the "void". That will cause leaks.
• "Hide" parts of the map you dont currently need
  While working on a map, you will see that the views get increasingly full of mainly black lines, soon you will not be able to actually see where you are currently working, to avoid this just "hide" parts of the map that you don't currently need to edit. Do this by marking the part you dont need and hit "h" and Shift+H to make it reapear.
• Try not to go off grid
  Just do your best to stay on the grid, it will make your map file look much cleaner and professional, and the file size should be smaller.
• NEVER use CSG Subtract
  Use clip "x" insted, Subtract should only be used if there is NO other way of doing it, but trust me there is allways a better way. Subtract makes very ugly off-grid brushes, you'll have a pain getting them aligned to other brushes, and Uber has the tendency to crash when using it anyway, so just DON'T. While you're at it avoid using Hollow as well.
• Try to minimize the use of rotation "r"
  This also puts your brushes off-grid, and if you try to rotate many brushes at once, it often screws up the whole lot of them. Use it for simple forms, that you would just like to seem more "alive" by beeing off-grid.
• If you don't have a map idea just now..
  ..just start mapping anything, just some exotic shape, you'll quickly enough have an idea how to make a map around what you have built, I do it all the time.
• Don't have pitch black areas in your maps
  It really isn't fun to on the one hand not know where you are going, but also on the other hand to not see snipers at all. Just always set ambient light to a low number 50 or so, just to avoid pitch black areas.
• Pick a theme and stick to it
  Not for your whole mapping career, but for a map, it's always nice to see that there is a gerneral theme to the whole map, it just looks more realistic, sure it can be cool to mix loads of themes, but not all the time.
• Use fitting music
  I'm sure you will agree that using some circus music in your very dark and gloomy dungeon doesnt add to the atmosphere, so try to find fitting music, there is a huge database of free mp3's at www.mp3.com for good ambient music, before you use bad music use none at all.
• Give credit
  Always remember to give credit, to people who helped you along with the map, in the readme. When you grow to a good mapper and start helping out other people you will apreciate beeing mentioned in their readme, everybody likes to be credited for his/her work. And of course if you use any files you didn't make, at the very least give credit to the original author.
• Beta test
  I know I don't often do it, but get other people to quickly beta test your map. Always try to get a bug free map out, nobody likes downloading version 1.x 3 times of some map.
• Share your knowledge
  If somebody asks you something about mapping or modding, just remember you started off as a noob and probably asked people when you started. Mapping communities are usually very open, don't change that.
• Keep your mapfiles and screenshots
  I know I really miss not having taken pictures of my very first mapping attempts in Duke Nukem 3D and other games, I really wish I had something to show from my early days. Just make a screenshots of your maps or WIP's and store them on your HDD, in a couple of years you'll look back and say cool I used to be soo bad at mapping.

If you have any problems or comments concerning this tutorial, contact me via email at flix_inc@hotmail.com

This tutorial originally appeared here and was reprinted with FliX's permission.