The Very First Post!

Hello. I'm Stephen Hart (You don't want to know my real name. Trust me.), a small time mapper and highly opinionated, completely random guy. In any case, this blog is not about my life or day to day politics like some of my other works, but rather a modding development blog. Since I have not said much about "5" at the moment, this will be the official devblog for the mod. Yes, there will be screenshots, rants about errors, and whatnot here, but first a few words of caution for budding modders:

FOR GOD'S SAKE, BACK UP YOUR MAPS. You have to be absolutely paranoid about your data. Over the course of making an internal demo of  "5," I have lost map data at least four times, even though I currently have ten seperate versions of the same map.

COMPILE EARLY, COMPILE OFTEN. Hammer will croak more if you do a large amount of new geometry and not test at frequent intervals. I suggest one compile for every man-hour of work on your maps, and save a new file for alll the new stuff.

WHEN ADDING LARGE AREAS TO YOUR LEVEL, PREFAB THE ROOM IN QUESTION BEFORE COMPILING. This particular instruction also comes from my "5" demo experiences- I lost the underground portion of the map twice, so I prefabed the whole darn underground upon each map revision, so in the event of losing my data, I would be able to stick the entire area back into the map in one operation without having to rebuild from scratch. Entities, brushes, npcs, the works. Prefab it all.

And now a teaser screenshot from the mod:



Perhaps more screens to come. Definitely more rants.