Fast compiling tips

Making a kz map is focused intensivly on the jumps, so you should test every 5-6 jumps you make imo. But this is kind of time consuming because you have to wait some time for the map to compile, and if you have a large map it will take quite some time.

So i'm gonna show you some tricks to compile your map in a few seconds...

I use two commands when compiline.

"vis.exe -fast" - this one everyone knows it. It basicly compiles the map properly but is not optimised for best fps.

"rad.exe -chop 512" - with this one the lights will be compiled in 10 to 60 seconds, depending on how big is your map. You should not go over 1024 because the compile times are basically the same and the lights will look kind of bad. With 512 the lights are looking pretty close to a normal compile. So this option is good for fast testing different lighting styles.

Of course, for the fastest compile, you can disable rad, but than the map will be "full-bright" and i personally don't like to test the map this way... it looks ugly and my jumps feel unnatural.


If you have a large map the compile will take some time even with this commads. In this case you should use the "Cordon bounds" tool.

What this one does "Cordon bounds" do?
With this tool you can select only a part of your map to be compiled. Here is a picture with how to use "Cordon bounds"

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-klvJqZf6GZY/U7MhQfLMRSI/AAAAAAABiFU/_yj_MPIa93M/s0/cordon.png

Make sure the cordon is red before you compile the map. Also you have to make a spawn in that area, and if there's no light there, put one.
So instead of compiling the whole map, you compile only a small area of it, the area you are interested in...

It feels strange to jump on a full-bright map. I prefer it with the lightning.

I think that some mappers, especially new ones don't know about the cordon bounds tool...

I often make a huge room and copy the part I want to test into that room. I then make changes to that part and copy it back into the map when done. I did this a lot for Gigablockier when there were sections I wanted to test a lot and make minor tweaks to.

Im sorry I dont share your discomfort about fullbright, so I cant relate how important it actually is for you, but still sounds silly to avoid it completely because of that, at least suggesting that that to everyone. Im not saying no-rad is the only way to go, but its the most effective one when it comes to testing quickly such things like jumps and a lot of people use quite often without any problems.
No need to repeat yourself, I agree that using cordon is quite efficient and should be encouraged, never suggested the opposite. Anyway you exaggerate there mate, from my experience chop -512 is just about twice as fast rather than usual compilation. And Im back to my point: is it really necessary to appeal to some middle ground? Is it worth to wait 10 instead of 20 seconds (or even 30 lets say), 1 minute instead of 2... just to get slightly faster less precise compilation? Its up to you of course, and maybe even useful in some cases if you want to compile full or big map with some basic lighting for example. Suggesting mappers resort to some middle ground as only or main option is not really good idea though and in this case a bit misleading, is what I want to say with all this so far. There are a lot of options people can choose from to optimize their workflow.

SadPuppy, I use that a lot myself actually, especially while testing entity work in controlled isolated system, but yea there are better alternatives for testing quickly things like jumps alone (cordon and various compilation options)