he process for maps getting in Sauerbraten at this point has basically been me or Aard crawling quadropolis or the author shows it to us, and if its a cool map, we include it. But there are a lot of recurring problems in maps, so I'd like to lay out a slightly more official set of map guidelines for inclusion: * Water: every plane of water requires a separate rendering pass for reflections. This is expensive. Keep the number of water planes (heights) in your map to at most maybe 3, and there should never be more than 1-2 visible on screen at once (and ideally at most 1). Multiple bodies of water are cheap so long as they are on the same height/plane, so try and put all water at the same height when possible. AVOID elaborate multi-level waterfall thingies - they are pure evil. * Geometry: With the new grid sizes in Sauer, I must emphatically say: DO NOT make large structures out of tiny cubes. DO NOT copy paste an intricate tiny cubed creation in tens or hundreds of places all over the map. They bloat the number of triangles the map generates. Keep the "wtr" stat to less than 100K, and 60K or less if your map is very open. If your map is EXTREMELY well occluded, these numbers can be relaxed somewhat, but not much. Look at the prettiest maps in Sauer, and the best mappers, and what makes them stand out is the LARGE detail, NOT the small detail. You can make visually impressive/suggestive features out of coarse/large cubes, not by cramming in a bunch of overwhelming visual complexity that will look randomly noisy and go unnoticed when you are rocketing by at Ogro speeds. * Heightmaps: if you are going to use the heightmapper a lot, don't use it with small grid sizes. This is a quick way to unnecessarily bloat/slow down your map performance-wise, and will usually look like crap anyway. * Grass: at this point, I'm trying to move away from using this. It's too expensive for older video cards and I usually disable it in maps that are included now. So I would advise not to depend on it for the look of your maps visually. * Hallways and platforms: Just say no to cramped hallways! What is a hallway in another game is a crawl space in Sauer. If two players can't comfortably strafe-circle around eachother moving at Ogro speed, then it will suck to play on. If you've built an entire map out of hallways, this is an immediate disqualification. This is Sauer, not Metal Gear Solid. * Layout/navigation: Try to keep various key places in the map distinctive. Getting lost in maps suck. By the same token, avoid labyrinthine/complex layouts where the player can't keep in his head where everything is and where he needs to go. If you have to spend the majority of your time looking for action, rather than engaging in it, it just gets incredibly boring. * Hidden passageways/death traps: Better to just avoid these. If you do have them at all, they should be clearly indicated somehow. * Jumppads: avoid hidden jumppads. When possible, use the jumppad mapmodel or indicate them in a very obvious manner with geometry. * Capture bases: avoid putting a ton of bases in your maps or spacing them too close together. This just leads to never-ending capture games that get boring quick. * Tree mapmodels: These are slightly expensive, so don't make dense forests out of them, for roughly the same reason as you don't want to paste a bunch of little cube constructions all over your map. * Blockiness/Sharpness: If your map is made entirely out of solid cubes, you likely went wrong somewhere too. Again, some of the best maps can take a single large cube and make it suggest "round". However, going to small grid sizes and making your map very sharp and brittle looking won't solve the problem either, and will just cause problems as described above. Do more with less (suggestive detail), but not so less your maps is just a bunch of solid cubes. * Texturing: try to keep the texturing consistent. Avoid cramming a bunch of different-looking obtuse textures into one place, or even the whole of a map. By the same token, do use trim and accents strategically to get rid of blockiness/flatness, subject to consistency. The textures can in many cases suggest detail better than actual geometry can, but like geometry can be abused on both ends of the spectrum. * Lighting: There are so many different ways to do it, I will just say that if your map has no lights in it, or is almost entirely pitch black, then no. Just no. On the other end, avoid making your map so lit that its fullbright, as shadows are what give your map the most contrast, after large geometric detail. Lighting and shadowing, like textures, really helps to make the geometry come alive.