All triggers can be point entities as well. 

This may be fairly obvious but how do I get a func_door to light itself in the open position rather than the closed? I have a large door entity that I want to slide into the level but the default position places most of the entity in the void - therefore, it's mostly black when it slides into the level. 

Then check the 'Start Open' spawnflag. 

Damn it, I knew it would be something obvious. Thanks! 

Sweet. Even more brushes left over now... 

Yeah, it was the drivers, by going back to 5.x catalysts I managed to get clicking to work again. The option to disable hardware rendering has disappeared from 3.4, although if you uninstall your drivers then it does default to some kind of software rendering, where selecting things works again. 

I have the same problem and am forced to map without hardware accel, making the 3d view painfully slow on large maps. Visgroups help somewhat, but it can still be a pain. 

Half my problem with attempting to map on the laptop is dealing with the lack of hardware support, and the other problem is the interface is a pain. Oddly enough, Blender, a much more sophisticated and complex app than Radiant shows very little performance loss without the HW acceleration. The source of the problem could be what Bambuz pointed out some time ago that GTK is a slow api. 

Are there any "definite quake 3 custom textures archive" sites out there where I could grab most of the decent publicly available / free to use custom texture and shader sets for quake3? 

http://fyad.org/uz3f

^ The Wadfather is the best one I can think of (shortened for ridiculously long URL) 

Lets assume you a substracted a room from the world, added some details and then proceeded to work on other areas of the map. Now, let's say we go back to the original room and decide that we need to add some variety to the wall textures and the obvious way to do this would be: reduce the height of the original substracted room brush, place a new substracted brush using the new texture right on top of the old resized room.

However, we end up with a problem: the new substracted room brush is going to "override" and erase any additive brush details that were placed in the top part of the old room. Since the old room now has lower height, these details now find themselves inside the new room brush which we added later, meaning that the brush "creation order" of the detail brushes precedes that of the new room brush, meaning the new room brush overrides/erases any such details.

What do I do? 

 

Right click on any brush and you can move it to the front or back of the list.

Or, use the geometry tools to split the brush in half using the (admittedly clunky) clipping tool. That leaves the ordering the same. 

So in your case, select everything inside the room and moving it to "last" is probably going to work best. 

Yeh, what Willem said.

Tbh I found the way unreal uses brushes so much more tolerable once I found out you could vertex edit/order shift them, spent a good while assuming Uengine mappers all did some crazy level of layout planning before touching the editor ;p 

Are there any comprehensive 3d studio max tutorial sites which walk you through most important things, from the very beginniner topics to more advanced stuff and techniques? 

http://www.3dtotal.com/

Is a nice resource for tutorials and general stuff. 

3ds max itself has a load of beginner tutorials which show how to use all the basic things like creating objects and applying modifiers, using the material editor and such. 

Assume you have a curved ramp like this one: http://utmapping.wikidot.com/local--files/smc-hu-floor2/smc-hufloor222.jpg Now, assume you want to bend it in the same way as when this same ramp is being used in Arsenal: so that it not only leads from one side to another, but also also goes upwards, still keeping the edges of both "start" and "end" nicely aligned.

I asked around and Hourences told me that UED has no way to do this directly and that since there are no prefab versions of this mesh bent the way I want, I would have to either 1) export from UED to max, edit mesh and reimport back into UED or 2) create my own mesh, texture it from scratch and import for use in UED.

Is this for real? Am I supposed to be have a modelling package like MAX and know how to use it if all I want is to simply slightly adjust an already existing mesh to suit my task? What about scaling meshes, do I also need a modelling package for this? 

 

You can't bend or warp meshes in UnrealEd, no. You can scale them, flip them or rotate them but you can't actually modify the shape dynamically. Sorry! 

As for scaling them - open the properties of the mesh once it's in the level and open the "Display" category. Fool around with the DrawScale and DrawScale3D fields. Putting negatives into those fields will flip the mesh along the appropriate axis. 

Something I've been curious about:

Seeing as modern games require bigger and bigger time investments to release a map that is at the same level of quality (let alone higher) as the stock maps in the original game, how many people have turned to collaboration instead of doing everything solo from the ground up?

I am asking because, I started playing around with UT3 tech and although I see myself capable of designing the layout, the gameplay and doing *some* detailing and visual work, it is quite obvious to me that in order to make a map that can be comparable to the one found in stock UT3, I would have to either learn modelling in MAX/Maya as well as learn to texture said models (which would probably take at least several months of intense studying before I could *possibly* reach reasonable-looking results) or alternatively I could seek-out someone who already has this skillset and collaborate with said person to work on touching up the map.

I guess wanting to do everything by yourself is partly an ego thing, but is it really reasonable in the days of modern technology? Is it really worth it? Another question: if your resume has a lot of maps done in collaboration with someone, is this a good thing or a bad thing from an industry recruiter perspective? It could be seen as good, because it means you can work in a team environment, but it could also be seen as bad, because it may not be obvious which part of that work you were REALLY responcible for, making it harder to evaluate your own potential as an individual... 

You can do it by yourself but the key would be to use the existing assets (meshes, materials, etc) in creative ways.

Maps are definitely not solo efforts around here. I touched pretty much every map in UT3 at one point or another and I'm pretty sure that's true of every level designer here who worked on it.

Now, a hobbyist LD at home who has all the time in the world can take a few months to crank out a level so it IS doable. It's just tougher. In companies with deadlines and milestones it's not really reasonable anymore. 

Long time Quaker needing some advice how to get started with Quake 1 mapping. I've used BSP and Worldcraft ages ago, but have not kept up with the content creation scene since '98. Can anyone suggest a modern editor and/or tutorial site?

Thx.