Hello everyone,
a few weeks ago I stumbled upon the dark mod by sheer accident and I'm so glad I did. Then realizing that there is an easy way to create your own maps was what really got me hooked since I have some experience with sourcegold and worldcraft / hammer for which I build a lot of maps back then, nothing published though. Just for me, putting my creativity somewhere.
And since sourcegold and idtech are relatives I figured that they maybe share some of the same techniques to optimize your maps.
I watched a youtube introduction / tutorial series from Nico Autia and realised that he was doing some stuff that i did way back then when I first started designing levels for half-life but relatively quickly got rid of, since this was scoffed at by the HL mapping community, due to having a huge impact on performance, especially on bigger maps. Like using carve out / hollow tools, the best way to connect 2 walls in a corridor for example having a 90° corner was not to give them flat contact but rather move the inner vertexes so they have a 45° angle of contact, like most wodden window picture frames do, or for example dont use carve out to make a cylindrical hole / tunnel and rather use the vertexes of a prefab cylinder to manually manipulate the vertexes of the "tunnel"brushes while minimizing the amount of them (triangle brushes gave best performance in sourcegold.
Also, I switched rather quick to do all the brushwork with trigger/invis textures that weren't rendered and only texture paint the surfaces you could actually see, is this important here?
So the big question since I haven't started working with dark radiant is, are those techniques still a thing? Is it even comparable to sourcegold?
Is there a comprehensive best practice list on how to do actual brush work for maximum performance?
Sorry If I have trouble in making clear what I want to say, english is not my native language. Feel free to ask right away if my questions aren't as clear as I hope them to be / understandable.
Thanks in advance
