Prompted by a recent comment elsewhere, what’s the longest time taken for a map (could even still be in progress cough remagen cough).
I was going to say Helmsdeep (over a year and counting) but then I remembered good old MML Station which I still do the odd bit of work on now and then - this was originally going to be my third RTCW map, and the earliest file date I can find means I have been working on it roughly for 3 years!
Ok, I don’t feel so bad now 
I’ve been working roughly 6 months on my map (V2 Factory). This is my first map for anything, so the first 2 months were spent learning the basics of Radiant and how to script (lots of little test maps to figure out things like dual-stage constructions, trucks…) Sad thing is, it’ll probably take me another few months to finish it…
8 mothns from nothing to finished map is not too bad, especially if it’s actually quite good (we’ve all seen the excrable ‘first room’ or ‘my house’ maps that people do as their first efforts and wonder why in god’s name they actually bothered to release it!).
So no worries about your timescale / map 
I think maps taking years only take that long because people don’t have enough time to work on them. I take many months to make maps but thats only because i sometimes have little time/no time to work on them. If i won the lottery and became a millionaire (please 
) and had no real work to do i reckon i could make an averaged sized ET map in about 2-3 weeks. about half of that would be planning, conceptualising and drafting out areas with the rest being the meat and veg building of the thing. of course thats just my guess it might be quicker or it might be longer.
6 months and only 10% done.
I actually made a few other smaller maps in this time period to see how things would look.
I hope I finish at least one before Doom 3 comes out. 
I think the longest I`ve spent continuously working on one map was over 1 year, and nowadays I do lots of test maps but some of them can take months and I spend all day mapping, but like Gerbil I am a perfectionist and always trying out new methods or going back and rebuilding parts of my maps so they are optimized.
I can`t imagine finishing a map in under 3 months, even if I knew exactly what to build.
I want to say that Byzantine took ~2 months.
I went looking around a couple of mapping files to figure out when I started. I wrote my first shader file for the Zep map in the middle of September and the final of Byz was released on 11/10.
Then again, it had no terrain and I was able to clone tons of stuff - I got off easy
GO-Gerbil - don’t worry about Ifurita this time…Now that we’re working on a map together, I shall slow him down greatly
I’m hoping that we have a playable map (bare halls, boring textures, functional scripts, no command map) for some targetted testing this weekend to get a better sense for game flow and scale.
Fun Topic!
Rhine Bridge took me over 3 moths to make, but then i begun the map before the tools for ET was released…so i had to wait for the tools and then learn all the new stuff.
Fliegerhorst, about 1.5 months.
2hide, 5 weeks
Navarone, 9 days.
Eagles (Still in progress) Started 2004-02-23, so about a month. Almost done…hoping to release a first Alpha to my testers tomorrow.
But as i am unemployed at the moment i do have alot of spare time to map. I usually map 4-6 hours every day.
Geez nine days :eek: how I wish I could pump out a map that fast. U must be like a Japanese production line. I’m seven months in on my second map and have just got my objectives and layouts finalized (damn exams and university taking all my time (fist shaking)).
Yeah, Navarone was a nice big map too. Absolutely beautiful.
I’m working on a map right now. Took me one day to put a room in. Yeah, one day. Well, actually I fooled around with it for about a couple hours before my will collapsed and I started playing ET.
I too am unemployed but usually “work” 8-12 hrs a day, 7 days a week on my mapping, texture and shaders or concept writing.
but if I was a fast worker (or even average speed) I could probably get the same amount accomplished in a 40 hr week… but this is why I like to work from home as Im happy to put in the extra hrs, if it means my work doesnt feel rushed.
Working from home is good and bad.
I work from home, and it’s all too easy to down proper work when it gets frustrating and load up radiant!
As a result I probably map a couple of hours a day, and maybe have 1 or 2 hours playing on top of that.
Gotta change that though, both work and the girlfriend are pressing on my time.
Not that I ‘mind’ as such, since it’s how it should be, but I know I don’t have the hours to do mapping (and other game-related stuff, eg my logfile analyzer) that I wish - since the end result is you always annoy someone who wanted your next map version yesterday!
good points
although with me its not a gf, its my pet desert rats that are always wanting attention 
and I dread the day when I have to explain to a publisher, that my game demo will be delayed another few months, because one of my rats just gnawed through a power cable on my pc and blew it up…
call me paranoid, but I sometimes wonder if rodents were put on this earth to hinder humans from using technology… I suspect my gerbils are luddites :blah:
I suspect my gerbils are luddites
Conceivably true of all gerbils
Actually I often do have problems with the kittens causing issues with work / fun.
For a start, they enjoy running around the cables and regularly cut off power to my comp.
But better yet, they’ve recently learnt the joys of standing on the keyboard. As well as the obvious gibberish this causes to any open program, they also trigger the ‘one button power down’ effect - something I didn’t think worked until they ‘discovered’ it (cos you need to hold it down for a few seconds).
The power thing is a pisser though - SA uses a 2 pronged plug system (not sure if it’s the same as NA) - quite frankly it’s got to be the worst designed system ever - plugs are simply ALWAYS loose and susceptible to any jostling breaking the contact. Stupid stupid stupid (I’ve kicked the cables out more than a few times myself!). Every other day or so I find myself shouting, cursing, and begging for a plug design like the UK.
And of course, there’s also the problem where every half a dozen or so boot ups of ET, my computer will simply reset. I think this is down to the NVidia drivers, which I’ve just found out I finally CAN update (from oooold) since apparently they finally got around to fixing the PB lockup bug that they almost entirely failed to acknowledge.
TBH it’s a bloody wonder I get any mapping done at all.