Good habits: save and save often!
1- Remember to save and save often. Try to get into the habit of backing up to a floppy at least once per session. If you're working on something that really matters to you, then it's worth the time it takes. 2- Save before you make some change in your map, not every time but when you are about to delete sectors or add to existing sectors. You will want to make sure you are saving your map before making the changes. This is not as important in the early development of your map but later when the map is getting more complex Build might let you down when you least expect it. It will be easier to copy or work on bits of the map that are no longer easy to get at. Some times there is no alternative to go back to an earlier version of the map when the most recent changes are not going to work out. When your map has a lot of sectors due to shade and light effects and other objects, it gets increasingly more difficult to manipulate the sectors within the heavily sectored areas. 3- Save. 4- Get into the habit of using the saveas function. Just pick some working name like A_1a.map and before making a major change, save it as A_1b.map, A_1c.map, etc. This way you can go back to an earlier version of your map if you find that the latest ideas are not going to work as well as you had hoped. Having various versions of your map is a good idea because you can copy areas from one version to another if you need to. If you keep saving your map to the same file name, there is no going back without tons of extra work in deleting things. Not only that, when you start working backwards you run the risk of encountering, what I call, ghost sectors. Those are pieces of deleted sectors that just seem to want to hang around. Try to delete them and they just connect to other sectors and cause total havoc. It is an ugly situation when it occurs and quite difficult to resolve, if at all. Avoid the ghosts. Good habits: ghost sectors
A map can be recovered from ghost sectors by enclosing the effected sectors using the Alt key. Hold down the Alt key while you enclose the sector(s) moving the mouse cursor. The selected sector(s) will be enclosed in a flashing green grid of lines. Move the sectors away from the rest of the map and delete them. You may have to re build those sectors but at least you can salvage the map. A lot of times the ghost sectors have been present in the map for several saves. That means that resorting to a previously saved map might not always alleviate the map of ghosts.... they are there lurking, waiting to mess you up when you least expect them <shudders>. Now, do not go away thinking that you don't have to bother saving your maps often. You must save your maps often if they are at all important to you. The thing to gather from this addendum on ghost sectors is that you can salvage your map from an infestation of ghosts, if not in whole, then in part and that is better than nothing. This addendum on ghost sectors brought to you by: Bob Masters. Visit Bob Master's Nukem Map Page
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