Optimising Your Level
It’s actually fairly easy to make a gorgeous Notre Dame-scale cathedral in hammer. Once you know the basic controls, you can pretty quickly lie out the brushes, apply the textures and add in the lighting necessary to make such a structure. However, it is also extremely easy to build a level that:
- Will not compile
- Will take far too long to compile
- Will run poorly in the game even after a full optimisation
This is truly where the science of level design begins to take a back seat to the art. Though there are some basic rules and a lot of guidelines to optimising levels, the best way to learn good optimisation techniques is to experiment and to carefully observe the results you get inside your levels. You must think about optimisation
right from the moment when you first begin designing your level, and you must watch the performance of your level every step of the way as you build. Unlike any other computer art product, computer games are rendered in real time, and this restricts you substantially in what you can get away with in your levels
