Heh at growing pains...

[RJFerret]

So I read through the amazing A-Z tutorial (major props for that!), and proceeded to make my first room, texture it, then tossed in a candelabra, three lights, a dresser, spun it around up against the wall, added a drawer entity, girl, key to snatch from the girl, end table, and entity vase to see everything working in my "creation".

 

Things were well, then I clicked on the drawer, and it happily slid...away from me INTO the dresser! LOL

 

PS: Readily fixed with one minus sign, once I stopped laughing.

[AluminumHaste]

lol yeah been there many times, and still can't always get it the first try.

[Sotha]

I usually move sliding doors to the position they are supposed to move to, then check the origin, then ctrl z to undo the move and agsin check the origin. The difference in origin tells you what you must put into the translate spawnarg.

 

Door rotation direction can be checked like this:

look at the door so that the z arrow points away from you. Now, positive rotation angle means clockwise and negative counterclockwise opening direction.

[Gantolandon]

This tutorial is amazing. I remember how confused I was when first run DarkRadiant. Right now after finishing it, simple interior maps are coming out easily. I'm still baffled how people manage to make so detailed city maps, with buildings having stone bases and Prussian-style facades.

 

My flailing with the editor is partially covered by the newbie thread - I put an AI too close to the wall and dmap didn't include it when calculating zones. I also learned in a painful way that nodraw doesn't seal against the void and, in fact, is treated as a leak.

[Serpentine]

Mapping is pretty much entirely about speed, the faster you can do things -- the more detail you can put in without going mad. Once you've figured out making things fast, you also end up needing to learn how to deal with performance, which ends up teaching you a bit about how to think of the map in a modular way, which in turn makes you faster, and you get into swing of making large changes.

 

So for a long time you need to experiment and get used to what you want to get out of the process, then later on you learn to accommodate all of that into early planning.

 

That said, I'm hardly someone who maps often

[RJFerret]

It's still good 3D design wisdom. :-) I'm specifically exploring/poking at things to learn for the future, rather than what I'm currently working on. Not that it hasn't grown into a complete/it's own project, but I wanted to shake out the inherent mistakes I'd be making on this, rather than stumbling on what I really want to develop.

 

Meanwhile, this has been a blast, and I've surmounted the issues I've run into, and know how to avoid them in the future. As an example of that fine wisdom in practice, one room that took my several hours to set up, subsequently let me do two more with much greater detail in the same amount of time the next day, as well as enhancing the first room some more, heh.

 

Another key thing to learn in any digital design medium is when to stop creating. It's easy to get lost in the process. That helps with speed, do the broad strokes, then can refine, enhance, etc.

 

But I made the same mistake, my experience with leakage was due to caulk, nothing to do with geometry.