Post
by Feralidragon » Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:16 pm
Not wanting to steer away that much into offtopic, but this engine is especially unforgiving given that it plants fear into even the most experienced mappers, leading them to think way too much inside the box and preventing them to be more creative and add more detail, given that if they do they run a high risk of having all sorts of problems that Epic never fixed and never will, ranging from performance issues to bugs and even hard crashes, be them from BSP, lighting and others.
Even I, although I know my fair share about mapping in general, and don't really buy into most myths I see circulating around here and other places (especially around BSP issues), giving me a bit more freedom on how I do stuff, I still end up making maps which end up looking way too "box"-like, and almost every curvature is carefully calculated to align with every other vertex and to remain in the grid and in the same plane as other surfaces (to not create too many cuts and polys overall), and even so I still end up with some problems here and there simply because the engine is just way too buggy, especially concerning BSP and lightmaps, and especially when handling a high number of cuts in view or very big polys, it will just shit itself, not only in terms of performance, but occlusion bugs as well.
There isn't much motivation, especially for new mappers, to go wild with quality only to be hit by the overwhelming amount of engine problems, you have to know way too many tricks about the editor and the engine in general to do a high quality map that doesn't end up in the trash bin by how unstable it ends up being.