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Me or Worldcraft screwed my level. Lost almost a day trying to fix a "mixed contents" error. At 11PM I finally managed to run the map. There was an infinite wall in the middle of the level. I'm sure you already got those, it's caused by brush faces without normals. Then I opened the
The level works again, but I lost all texture alignment and all visgroups. If I had to hurry to deliver something by this weekend, now I'm pretty sure it won't happen at all. There are bright sides: for the first time I got courage to make something organic with brushes and I'm very happy with results. I had a very nice and simple idea for a map to use these rocks. If only I had this idea three weeks ago... Also, I improved my method. And since the textures are all f*ked up anyway, I dropped WC and moved to Jackhammer. I'm gonna try to finish until the last minute, but honestly I don't think it's possible. Good luck everybody. That happened to me early on. It is why I have shied away from more complex geometry since. I had to move away from Trenchbroom, Obj2Map and Worldcraft early on and just focus on Jackhammer.
That sucks. Re-align the textures and keep rolling.
Just as a note, every mapper should have a backup plan. Before I start the editor, every time, I make a back up copy of the map, and after every pass through the compilers I keep a copy of that map. Periodically, I thin out some of the unnecessary copies, but save one for long term about every 10-15 versions. I have something like 500 MB of Wish 13 copies going back to 2010. Lately, when I make a backup after compiling, I've found it useful to add a short comment to the map's file name as a reminder of what was changed for that iteration. Yes, I have iteration backups. But last iteration was one whole day of work (almost) finishing the bigger room. I didn't think I was doing anything dangerous, the rocks' prefabs was already working (even posted screenies here). Don't know what caused that. Don't have this infinite wall problem since... what, 1999? Since I learnt to respect brushes and stopped manipulating vertices like there's no tomorrow.
It's cheaper to realign the whole crap again, but it will take another night. And the schedule was already tight before this big setback. I'm sure gonna try it, though. shit happens.
I found rebuilding crucial things is done quick, a day of lost work was redone in 2 hours for me, knowing what was already in place sure helps. Also things profit from being touched twice and more often in general. Go map! I think jackhammer does a backup when you save or run map. I'm seeing extra files in my map folder with date / time appended.
Get something like attic-backup and set it up for your sources as part of your build process. Costs pretty much nothing, deduplicates and rocks.
I've got my map structurally finished as of this morning. Nothing left except some trimming, lighting in one new large area, a few things for the player to do, and some monsters to kill.
Monsters could be a problem. Mostly one big area, much of it visible from the start, makes placement challenging. And I really dislike teleporting enemies in if the player can see or hear it. But I've been thinking about it for a few days and maybe I can figure out something that'll work. I'm nearly done with this small map, but I'm still thinking of the last two rooms and I'm procrastinating alot as of late.
Two areas will be largely unfinished. I am working on entities and making sure you can get through the map. If I have time I will add a few secrets (I have one right now) and additional spawns, but I don't want the map to be too hard to get through. Many ideas scrapped and I am just trying to make sure it is playable.
I don't have a ton of time to make this happen... just went too far with my concepts. :-p Pacing will be all over the place. Last night it took 71 minutes to run Light on high quality. I stopped VIS early because it looked like over an hour for that also. Why oh Why did I make a big cave? I've never had a map take this long to build. Gah, back to mapping.
the peak of my mapping skills. This is probably the biggest challenge so far: to release it anyway.
I'm still working on some of the last parts of my map, I've got to figure out what to do with the seccond part of my map, get the lighting correct and have it sent to a tester. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make the deadline, It might end up as DLC.
As we are getting close to the deadline, I should explain how you should get your level to me :) (another thing I forgot to put in the main post, yay!)
When your level is finished, you should e-mail the full compiled level, any required files (.lit file for coloured lighting etc) and a readme.txt for your level to me at Darren.Weekes@gmail.com Your levels changelevel trigger should go to "start"! Important! It will take me a few days to compile the pack together, get a start map sorted and test everything, so if you have an updated version of your level after the deadline date has passed but the jam hasn't been released then feel free to send me the updated version! Once the jam has been released, any further updates to levels or levels that were unfinished before the release and have now been completed, can be compiled into a "map jam 6 DLC" and released separately. You should really include the
Your levels changelevel trigger should go to "start"! Important!
Glad you cleared that up. I thought I was going to have to ask. Wait. I have to write a readme file? (currently up to 1108 brushes, 10 monsters, and down to only 6 CutNodePortals_r warnings) Added some new stuff, hopefully I can make this map at least vaguely worth checking out! haha :)
http://i.imgur.com/L9s3yce.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sldsDET.jpg My map is on the harder end of things right now. Not enough ammo, not enough health, and I still have to include the enemy spawns/teleports... :-p One day left!
Back up your data, then back it up some more.
My external drive has failed. Not just this map, but tons of personal work is now lost. I know most of you are probably more experienced than I am with this stuff, but in case you're not, IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU, so even now if you haven't yet, make copies of your maps and files and put them on another drive. There is still time for things to go very wrong. I'll see if some kind of recovery can be done, but this looks like the end. The bright side is I learned what I wanted to learn from this jam and I'm already working on another map during lunch hour at work (and backing that one up properly). Looks like I won't be submitting this time though. Still can't wait to play the finished pack!
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