Proper way to create a cube dropper
So far I have two cube droppers in my map and I've used the func_instance to get these (from a youtube tutorial). However, I think I've seen a tutorial somewhere when I started mapping that showed how to create your own cube dropper instance and not using the ones from Valve.
Are the ones that I can build better? Perhaps cheaper? Because I've seen a lot of "home made" cube droppers in different community maps (and not to mention some Valve maps).
But when I compile the map I get a lot of yellow error messages about the too many lights. I guess that it would be easier to correct if it wasn't a instance.
Yellow errors are usually not important, and they happen all the time. I doubt you have too many lights.
They do I think have orange and blue lights, but it shouldn't matter.
I'm pretty sure the yellow warnings came up when I implemented the Valve cube dropper instances. When I tried to block the light with the blocklight texture I got fewer yellow messages at the compile... But the result didn't look too good so I skipped it.
So, what you all are telling me is to stay with the Valve instances and ignore the yellow messages? Thanks!
The VALVe instances include orange and blue lights, which tend to cause "too many light styles on a face" errors. In many cases this won't cause noticeable problems, but occasionally it will. When that happened I duplicated the instance and deleted the problematic lights, which fixed it (it helped that it was a destroyed model which could reasonably have broken lights).
You shouldn't really be worrying about your budget while you are still learning Hammer. The budget is quite a bit larger then you think.
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Creating your own dropper is good training and getting known to basic things you can do with hammer. I created pretty much every element as an instance from scratch (various sizes of fizzlers/laser fields, w/e they're called. Stackables and single 128x heights) and it makes blocking- and puzzle phase ALOT faster, when you know what you have and how it works.
About the Valve instance: Their dropper instance do have lights and they'll turn on/off when dropper is active. Lights that have on/off setting will be calculated twice as on "on" and "off" state, which may cause errors in compile log, because of large amount of different light settings compiler has to go through on a single face. Also this consumes more time in compiling process. Correct me if I'm wrong. This is just basic understanding what I've had.
You shouldn't really be worrying about your budget while you are still learning Hammer. The budget is quite a bit larger then you think.
Id say its good to get known on this stuff even you're just learning. If you're recklessly progressing through your map not paying attention to optimization or expensive/cheap things, it will shoot you down at some point and it is really discouraging. On my every map, yes just two of them. Some people has complained about its optimization and performance issues they might've had. So its not just a simple thing you can work out later.