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I find it a strange experience, coming across a group that hates me. Especially if that group happens to be one of the biggest, most experienced mapping groups on the internet. It's not as if I found it surprising that they look down upon my habit of hollowing out skyboxes around a map. But they've stretched it far beyond that. My name is pretty much black listed on the facepunch forums now. Anybody who posts a link to one of my videos is attacked and called a noob. They make stuff up about me, saying that I tell people to carve their maps. Huh? I've always been against that, and I've even been criticised for being against it.

After reading through this forum topic, I just had to sign up to defend my case. I don't care what experienced mappers thing about me. I'd look down on some one if they spend most of their time teaching simplistic tutorials. Well, I would have until I realised how much effort was required to make a good tutorial. And so, I posted my response. The responses I got actually made me feel better about the whole experience. I expected such a well known mapping forum to have a high standard of posts, but what I got was nothing short of a noob-fest.

I won't bother telling you what happened as you can see for yourself on those forums. In short I got attacked by everybody and they all got praised by everybody for standing up to the big bad 3kliksphilip who doesn't know how to map. Great. After posting a couple more posts, defending myself and raising points which were then ignored by them in favour of changing the topic again and again, I began to see a pattern emerging.

1) They attack me.
2) I respond with the answer and ask them some questions
3) They totally ignore my reply, almost as if they're only reading it to find something that I've typed where they can reverse the sides around and fire right back at me. They then reply with something totally off-topic so that my response was totally useless.

I've had similar arguments with religious people and people I've met in the McDonalds carpark late at night. Why bother with it? Well, Lord Ned (The one who started it all off) suddenly grew to hate me about a month ago. He then went on to tell everybody else how bad I was and it seems as if they've just accepted his word as the truth. Not only that, but he's even gone onto the official Valve Wiki and deleted any trace of me (see the History of that page).

This means that everybody hates me simply because he does. Lord Ned is a regular on Face Punch Studios and is apparently a fantastic mapper. Although I've never seen any of his work (I believe he struggles to finish anything because he sets his sights too high), I'm prepared to accept that. No matter how good he is at mapping, however, it doesn't translate to common sense or good tutorials.

Teaching is hard. Look at the teachers in school. They have to teach people of all abilities. Sitting in a room with them doesn't instantly teach you the stuff, they need to put it across in a certain way. Unless you're having a one on one with them, however, this doesn't really work in practice. One thing I've seen happen over and over again in tutorials is for the teacher to try and add as much stuff into the tutorials as possible. Pointless stuff. They'll say about 'the right way to do this' and 'you could also do it this way or that way or that way'. I teach one method. I know how confusing it can be to hear some one babble on about something and at the end you end up remembering nothing about it.

Imagine the first time you tried to map. You probably flicked through a tutorial, still wondering whether to take it seriously or just to give up. Imagine a tutorial that teaches everything. You sit through half an hour of detailed lecturing on all the different tools available and at the end of it you're able to make a person standing in a room... in one hundred different ways. I learnt the hard way that this wasn't the best way to teach and I refined my first map tutorial to make it as simple and clear as possible.

A lot of time and effort went into making this video and I'm proud of it. I don't think that I'd change anything about it even if I was going to remake it. In 10 minutes I've gone over all the basics of making a map. While most videos end with just a person standing in a room, I've covered block making, lighting, objects, weapons, stairs, and everything you need to make a decent looking basic map. I also tell people to use a hollow skybox around their map. Oh no! I'm the devil! I'm corrupting thousands of first time mappers! I'm a disgrace to the mapping community! Uh, no I'm not. I just got a load of people to make their first map. People who might have otherwise been scared off by somebody saying 'no it's important to optimize your map so seal your map with the skybox as closely as possible, placing it above the walls so that there's no gap any where and make sure there's no hole into the black blah of space and blah the area with skip and hint blah blah kill blah blah blah ...'

*Clicks off tutorial, never maps again*

That's what all the fuss is about. I'm getting people to make maps as simply as possible. Apparently I'm teaching bad habits. I say I'm giving people something to start on, something they can resort to if all else fails. Once you've made a first, working map you'll naturally want to explore and try out different things, but it's very important that you get to the stage where you can make a working map. Imagine how many people would be put off mapping if I was to tell them everything about optimizing. What's more important? Making your first, working map, or learning about complex things you won't even find useful until your knowledge of the program improves significantly?

According to most of the people at Facepunch, it's the latter. Actually, it's probably just a couple of elitists whose word everybody takes as the truth.

I was an elitist. Not at mapping, but at game making. I'd attack people for making the same, simple games over and over again. I'd start horrendously complicated projects. I've been like that since I started making games. I've hardly finished anything. In fact, the stuff I made was so unpolished that it wasn't even fun to play. The only way I could boost my ego was to attack everybody who actually made and finished well-rounded, if simplistic, games. As they built up a good all-round knowledge, I became an expert at making realistic lighting engines and physics, but I didn't have a clue about level design or story telling because I never even completed the first level of my games, before moving onto a better, more complex project.

If I had teamed up with some one who enjoys making levels and storylines, I could be uber famous for game making. As it is, I'm just a grumpy old fool who goes around picking holes in simpler (yet still SUPERIOR) projects. A bit like Lord Ned is when it comes to making maps. He's attacking me in my territory. He's using his unseen knowledge of the editor as a way of proving my tutorials to be useless. Best of all, he's starting off his own line of tutorials.
Here's a link to his youtube page
There, while he's busy blacklisting me and deleting any trace of my videos from the internet, I'm giving him praise and free advertising. Because I know they're never going to take off- they're taking the same approach as every other tutorial on the internet and I reckon he's going to start wondering why nobody's watching.

All that fuss as the elitist mappers clash with the tutorial makers and the average mapper, who's more interested in making a fun map than they are in adding detail to windowsills and optimizing their maps. Thanks for reading this post and please don't use me as the scapegoat for everything. I've read comments saying that I taught them bad habits they still haven't recovered from (Why can't they just admit they aren't good mappers?) and that I'm reducing the quality of the maps being released (I'm introducing people to the editor who otherwise wouldn't have bothered, I stand by the belief that any map is better than no map. And I'm sure that I've improved the quality of maps).

A word of warning, though- tutorials can only teach you so much. As with everything, you need practice and experience to be able to use what you know effectively. I don't think that there's a tutorial that can teach you to ride a bike if you've not got a bike and you don't practice. And as for Lord Ned, he's about to experience what it's like to be a noob at tutorial making. Though he won't admit the noob part and he'll probably blame me if his videos don't get popular. Nice to know I can help some one ;)