All this talk about r_speeds and how they can wreck a map's playability without even breaking a sweat, I became a little paranoid and decided to check my testmap for problems (because, after all, it is my testmap) and I thought I'd be a cautious mapper instead of a n00b who thinks he's l33t. But considering how much of a worrywort I tend to be, it was a bad idea. So here's what I'm asking. (The screenshots I show are dark because the lighting sucks and I converted BMPs to PNGs using Photoshop.) And I did read the r_speeds tut, so don't point me to that.
1. R_speeds: I know that n00b boxmaps (or "crapmaps", as I like to call them) are notorious for having high r_speeds because of their emence size and a lack of entities to fill the void (not the Void), but since this is my 1 1/2th map I thought I'd get used to checking for r_speeds. It seems that the highest rating I got was 211 wpolys, and that's standing in the rightmost corner (at the beginning of the level), and having a FOV of everything, as in this shot: http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/6205/rspeeds0012qz.png (Sometimes I get a max of 202 by stading up next to the teleporter.) In the second room there's a max of about 160something. I want to ask: Is this normal? For a boxmap, anyway? And if not, is there a way to change that instead of deleting all the stuff in my map? I'm quite fond of my teleporter in the second room (shot here: http://img226.imageshack.us/img226/7343/mappy0013bp.png ) and the radios (my first good prefab, although the antenna splits up the speaker its on in gl_wireframe mode).
2. epolys: Next, the epolys are a little high, but that's usually normal when you have entites (ie monsters) in the picture (max is 1040 epolys, 1160something when the player breaks the grating over the button on to open the portal cage in the first part.) But the thing is when I turn away to face a wall, I still get a reading of 329 epolys. Isn't it supposed to be zero, or do the epolys also go up when the player is holding a weapon?
And last but not least, gl_wireframe. When I first used gl_wireframe, I was shocked to find out how much the floor and ceiling were split up and I realized why I got a reading of 883 faces during compile. After some tinkering, I managed to shave 21 faces off that amount, but it still was high, so I had to delete this little number (my experiment with func_trains): http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/7776/decor1wc.png and then came up with 765 faces. Unfortunatly, the ground still looks fractured: http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/5247/wireframe7xl.png . I know this looks wrong because the floor is a flat surface with no VMing or anything. I forgot to mention I tried moving things 1-unit away from their surface (ie the metal prongs in the teleporter room), but it looks like those objects are just hovering above their surfaces.
Also, do you guys know where I can go with this map? I'd like to make something of it other than a crapmap. I was thinking a DM map, and make the teleporter room a trap and have walls and stuff players can hide behind. And does anyone have ideas for better lighting, because I was afraid of long VIS times being the mark of an abnormal map as well.
Anyway, I felt I had too many questions to post my map in the Map Vault, so after a struggle I finnaly found a place to host my file after TheFileHut became borked. Here's the map (with titles.txt and sentances.text). You may hear the PA announcer say "blue is a <garbled>" because I tried to make him say "color" but I'm not good with the commands yet. Also, there's two radios in my map that are supposed to play tunes. So to prevent any conflicts with 56kers, I put them in a seperate rar archive:
The map: http://www.freewebs.com/boxtopstuff/mappy.zip
The song clips Fragmeister is going to attempt to host. If he can't do it, then I'll see what I can do with the zipped version. He'll post the link in here. The first song is some smooth jazz tune, and the second one is called "Make Poop" by Mr. Safety of SMPFilms. However, these songs are optional (I think). Just for ambience.
Anyway, thanks for your help!