256 units tall, 64 unit diameter, with 48 unit radii balls.

and textured in *lava 

I think anyone serious about creating gameplay at least quietly 'counts cards' in their head while mapping. Thinking about distances is tied to thinking about what the player is going to be doing during that walk. "Is that hall too long?" "Is there enough room for a battle with fiends here?" etc etc. I doubt anyone measure most things, unless needed for a specific event.

However, I do find myself aligning things like health/armor bonuses in q3dm maps along halls at 128 intervals, or placing ammo boxes 64 units from each other.

As for measuring architecture, never do it, except for my Clockwork Droid HH3 map, and that was just becuase it had a rather tall room and I was interested. I'm more interested that something looks 'in proportion' than 'X units tall' 

I don't actually think in units, but in scales. So instead of thinking a step should be x units high, I think it should be a 4 or 5 scale high. I do my initial mapping at 6 scale and try to stay above 3 except for fine detail. Does anyone else think in those terms? 

i only measure stuff for intricate func_door things or whatever... so i know what "lip" value to give.

if just keep the grid in 16 so i know 4 grid squares in 64 and leave it at that. 

Worthwhile to take a look at the map layouts of great maps [...] ???

Yes, but only to get an idea. Imitating great maps results only in imitations, which are not as fun as originals. Obviously there are some standards that need to be adhered to (maps that are too cramped are no fun; same for overly spacious designs), but making copy-cat maps isn't going to get you anywhere except into a flame war.

Let me point to my own experience with trying to make good deathmatch maps. Back in around 2000, I made lots of embarrassing rip offs of "classic" maps from such authors as ztn and headshot. But despite the great inspiration, my maps still sucked. A lot. Why? Because even though I grasped a few concepts (room proportions, weapon/item balance) I still didn't have the experience as a player or level designer to understand everything I saw, or even to fill in the blanks with stuff that could be good. Consequently, the maps suffered from bad room design, bad connectivity, and extremely formulaic room layouts, among other things. The maps themselves actually didn't look too bad (thanks to the theft of ztn/headshot designs) but they pretty well sucked for playing.

I guess what I'm saying is that using a good idea without understanding that idea means that you're probably going to implement it badly. After you have a decent understanding, it's better to take the basic concepts that are universal to great maps, and then make something unique from them. 

<RPG|h0t> czg: go respond to my latest post on Func and tell the world how stupid/brilliant my observation is.

I can't say I really get what point you are making, RPG. You used to copy room layouts from Headshot and ZTN, but now you don't? Whatever.

On topic though; I never really look to other maps for indications of preferred distances/sizes. Since I mostly (only) do SP maps I might not fully appreciate the importance of this though. The only thing I care for in maps, is in terms of scale of things together, if there's enough room to move about/dodge enemies in, and whether the size of things looks plausible (No walls made out of 64x32 bricks that only are 16 units thick). Also I try to make sure doors etc are big enough for monsters to get through, but that really has more to do with common sense than gameplay. (Though, all the arches in februus) are only high enough for small-sized enemies to get through. This is why there are no fiends in that map although they are my favourite monsters.)

Conclusion: RPG = teh LOL 

I can't say I really get what point you are making, RPG.

Actually, I thought the last paragraph summed it up quite nicely. 

Maybe if I hadn't fallen asleep during the craptacularly retarded middle paragraph I could have been arsed to read it. 

Yeah, no I still don't want to talk about it. 

RPG is right. You need to understand why a great map does something, not just copy it.

Otherwise it'd be like taking the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet, the lobby scene from The Matrix and the uncle fucker song from South Park, putting them all together and expecting the result to be good...

Actually, I think I'd pay money to see Juliet sing uncle fucker to Romeo as he bullet times around killing Capulets. But anyway :)