Modding

[Bluz]

New guy here and i have a couple of questions. When making a map does everything have to be "on the grid" ? Some games every brush have to have its points/vertices on a grid or it wont show up in game. Second, I will use a program which will save the map as a .DXF file, which i can then export to .obj. I noticed DXF files are trianglulated, should i untrianglulate or does CS use tri's? Third , i might give a go at making some character models, what size should the tex maps be, what is prefered? (512x512) saved as a png  file is correct?

[Cyl]

You might want to unzip the models.zip in your art folder, and take a look at the textures there...

[Karyuu]

We're going to be saving textures in DDS format, actually. http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html  <-- Contains or links to all the tools/plugins needed to work with DDS files, though there's no blender support for DDS yet it seems. Textures for character models should not exceed 512x512, yes.

[Wired_Crawler]

When making a map does everything have to be "on the grid" ?

No, coordinates can be like this: (x,y,z) = (172.372553784373, 263.27374232,12.87388472522)

I noticed DXF files are trianglulated, should i untrianglulate or does CS use tri's?

Triangles are OK. In fact, they work much better in CS, and if I am not mistaken, all polygons are converted to triangles before rendering. You can use quads in CS too for objects of type "thing", but such polys should be as close to rectangular shape as possible, otherwise textures won't be aligned well.