Is centering maps important?

This is relevant for very large maps in oldschool (pre-Z) formats, where blockmap overflows might be a concern. I am not sure of any vanilla implications beyond vanilla's much more stringent blockmap limits. But in Boom format, long ago, I had to neatly position a roughly 20,000-by-20,000 map to avoid this. 

As long as you're away from the edges (+/-32767 in coordinates on either axis) you should be fine.

As far as I know, there is no advantage to centering the map after you're done creating it, even in vanilla. I like to center my maps when I'm done with them, but that isn't out of some expectation of a performance improvement, but just me being idiosyncratic and like the look of a map that has the center near the origin of the grid.

There are two things you can do when centering maps that should help you avoid "stuck/unobtainable/in the void things" and misaligned flats:

1. Only move the map on the 64x64 grid. Moving the units in integer steps of 64 units means that most likely means your map will not be perfectly centered. Deal with it.

2. Select all the sectors in the map and move everything in unison. I think most, if not all, modern editors will move the contents of a sector with that sector. And if you have something out in the void to begin with, that was going to be a problem regardless of you centering your map.

2 hours ago, Pegleg said:

I think most, if not all, modern editors will move the contents of a sector with that sector.

See, I remember this too. Specifically if I copy/paste a sector -- I thought I remember that doing this in DB2, it would copy/paste the Things with the sector, as well. But it doesn't do that for me in GZDoomBuilder anymore, which can just be annoying in certain circumstances. Is there a setting that I'm unaware of?

I've actually not used any of the newer DB2 forks in a long time so I can't comment if things changed, but in the past if you needed to move geometry and things you had to select them in their separate modes, and then use the edit selection mode bound to e by default to move them both at once. This might still apply in the forks.

34 minutes ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

 

See, I remember this too. Specifically if I copy/paste a sector -- I thought I remember that doing this in DB2, it would copy/paste the Things with the sector, as well. But it doesn't do that for me in GZDoomBuilder anymore, which can just be annoying in certain circumstances. Is there a setting that I'm unaware of?

1 minute ago, boris said:

Yikes... thank you!! Gotta love when things are insanely simple and you still miss them. Kudos sir! 

I am working on a pretty huge level, which utilizes three stacked portals. Thus, I need 3 times the space and noticed that, depending on placement of the portals on the grid, I can look "through" to the other side of the map. Moving the portals more close to the origin of the grid fixed that. For now.