Tips on Making a Good Map

These are some tips and tricks from some mappers on the forums, the original topic is here: http://forum.sandboxgamemaker.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3244&p=30242

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Chocolatepie33:

• 1) read eihrul (lee salzman)'s inclusion standards, found here http://forum.sandboxgamemaker.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3206&p=29442&. This explains a lot of good stuff.
• 2) use a lot of editing commands to your advantage. Lighting commands are especially nice to use.
• 3) ALWAYS remip your map after once in a while. With 2.7, remipping can dramatically increase fps.
• 4) Follow Gridsize rules http://quadropolis.us/node/2328
• 5) Use copy and paste to your advantage, whether this means geometry or entities.
• 6) Watch your proportions. I can't make that any simpler.

jSoftApps:

• 1) Don't overuse materials such as lava or water. The animations cause the map to be slower. Only use them if you need to.
• 2) Too many mapmodels slows down sandbox. I would use less then 100 per map.
• 3) Make sure that your lightmap uses less than 100 textures. That is the recommended amount for lightmapping.

Runescapedj:

• 1) When you make lava, make some respawn material above it, otherwise you can stand in the lava when it's not too deep.
• 2) When using heighfieldmode, alwasy select the area you need to heighfield NEVER MORE this can ruin your entire map.
• 3) Make sure there's nothing under the area you want to heighfield, or this will get messed up.
• 4) NEVER use different gridsizes for the same area of heighfieldmode, because you can't fix (or it's really hard, and you might forget stuff by not seeing it) it afterwards, unless you don't save and reload the map (undo won't always work)
• 5) After adding lights, remember to quick-light first, you can simply do this by pressing F3 and then selecting quick-light.

java.x.beast:

• 1) Always texture before you use heightmap mode, unless you want it to be the default texture.
• 2) Never EVER use hightmap within 3 size 2 cubes of a wall or anything you don't want it to touch.
• 3) ALWAYS use clip around the borders of the map. In the words of Hirato - "Cons - No clip around the border, people won't like it when they fall off your map".
• 4) USE DIFFERENT TEXTURES! The roof and wall textures should almost ALWAYS be different form each other.