Talk:Basic Construction

To be honest, this tutorial (and the ones following) are very basic and teach the player a few things that, in my opinion, could be taught more efficiently. The whole idea of a wiki is to change things like this yourself, but as I'm rather busy with my own mapping work, I won't be able to this right now.

However, for anyone taking up the task of rewriting, here are some tips:

• It's probably a good idea to start out with a little basic description of the basic concepts: brushes, entities, models, etc. It's in the best interested of the future level designer to know such stuff if he wants to understand what he's doing.
• It's best to use thumbnails which, upon clicked, link to their larger counterparts. This makes the text more readable as there are no large objects in the way. Example images serve to clarify: the text itself should actually be descriptive enough to find all the buttons without the images.
• Being over-descriptive might work counter-effective: things such as "The tools are selected by single-left-clicking on the icon." will probably make the user think that everything is more complicated than it is in real life. (Example, just say: "Tools can be selected by clicking on their corresponding icons.")
• In the case of Hammer, it's best to learn the user the shortcuts on the fly. For instance: an example is given that an object is created by clicking on your right mousebutton and selecting "create object". This, of course, is true. However, this would work much better: "Create the brush by pressing enter. Alternatively, press the right mousebutton and select "create object". Though this might be a bit longer a sentence, it will make the mapping process less tedious to the user.
• Learn the user how to change from wireframe to textured view, etc. He'll need to know that. Teaching that using "z" in the camera screen to move around will also be a lot easier and less time consuming by using that camera-tool each time.
• Tell a bit about sizes. It's useful to know how thick your average interior wall should be (16 or 32 units thick) and how big your average outside wall should be. (32, 64, 128 Or thicker, depending on the structure.)
• Very important: teach the user how to make a room with 6 individual brushes instead of the hollow method. This takes up more time, but as soon as the user understands this simple concept, he'll know how to create rooms in all shapes and sizes. (Otherwise he'll be making hollowed out brushes all the time, ungrouping them and resizing them. Very tedious..)
• Perhaps a reference to a full entity-list where the user can look up all the entities?
• Minor: a brightness of 800 for a light? Teeheeee.. ;P
• Mention that the player can, alternatively, use the following for increasing or decreasing the grid size: scrollwheel and the bracket keys. ("[]") Perferrably, mention this at the beginning.
• The compiling information is fine, just make a link to the expert compiling page.

SEThorian

Tell us more about sizes.

You introduce to us the whole grid scheme in this article, but don't give us any idea of what these sizes mean to us.

What's the size of our average player? I don't even know how big I should make a door.

Two things: 1.) Dimensions and 2.) --volt 23:10, 26 Nov 2007 (PST) (use your signature)