The background story for my level calls for a clever means of breaking into the administrator's new secret base. An abandoned and forgotten mine that leads under the base will fill this need nicely. Should be a piece of cake, right?

I've begun by creating the player start area, a short length of mine tunnel, with a little outdoor area visible (but not accessible) at the entrance. I didn't want the mine tunnel to be too boxy, so I used vertex manipulation to add a little extra face in each corner.

Whoops! Remember rule number 2 of my "Rules for the Novice Mapper"? The "brush outside of world error" again. Well I finally stumbled across this tutorial - Using the Vertex Tool - at EyeRoniK, which explained what I was doing wrong. So that's what an invalid brush looks like. Who'd have thought you can't have brush faces that face towards each other?

Anyway that problem is solved, and I now have my first screenshot to show off.

The stone walls and the railroad track are custom textures I made myself. The wood and dirt floor textures are from the IK2K texture set, by Likka "Fingers" Kernen, downloaded from The Wadfather. The lightbulbs are a modified prefab taken from one made by Tanny "Clone" Lund, downloaded from PrefabLand.

I've heard a lot about r-speeds in Half-Life, and how very important they are. To find out more about them (including what the heck they were) I read an article about them over at Wavelength. Afterwards I naturally decided to go ahead and check the r-speeds on my own fledgling level. After all, I was just getting started - how bad could they be ? (will the experienced mappers please stop snickering!)

Well my little 100 foot section of mine tunnel was already pushing the limits of what is considered acceptable, with a wpoly peaking at over 450, and an epoly (thank you Barney!) at nearly 800. The level still runs well - but since I wanted to add a great deal more to that 100 feet of tunnel, I clearly had to get a better handle on this r-speed thing.

Many articles at other sites have a lot of helpful suggestions on how to reduce r-speeds, but I wanted something a little more concrete. Which changes would be the most effective, and just how effective would that be? Hard data and actual examples seemed to be missing, so I decided to collect the data myself with a series of more-or-less scientific experiments (mine went somewhat better than those of the Anomalous Materials Division). Go to the Test Chamber to see what I discovered.

I now have another entry in the Rules for the Novice Mapper:

5. Check your r-speeds early and often. They are much easier to fix as you go. If you wait until your level is almost done, you'll have a huge mess that will be impossible to fix.

At this point I'm ready to move ahead with my level.

Emerging from the Test Chamber after two weeks with a new understanding of r-speeds, I renewed the work on my first map.

The first order of business was to get those r-speeds down. Unfortunately that meant I had to take all textures that had been reduced in scale (which had improved appearances but were the single greatest cause of the problem) and return them to a scale of 1.00 . I redid the rock wall texture to mitigate the loss of detail a little - not perfect but good enough.

I moved the wooden supports a bit further apart, so that there are now only 6 in this length of tunnel instead of 8, and I took out one of the fancy lightbulbs so that now there are only 2. Finally I made better use of Func_wall entities, applying them to the diagonal wood braces and the power cable that the lights hang from. The main parts of the wood supports were already placed 1 unit away from the adjacent brushes, and since they served to block vis a bit I left them as world brushes.

My efforts were successful. I dropped wpoly down to under 250!

Other improvements I made, unrelated to r-speeds, include the softening of the border between the dirt floor and the rock wall (achieved with a custom transparent texture), and the addition of unseen clip brushes to help prevent players from getting hung up on the wooden supports.

The results can be seen in the screenshot below.

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