In the beginning...
Vlad was an avid Duke Nukem 3D mapper. In the great flood of 3D FPS games of 1997-1998, he decided that he would start a site about map editing in a popular FPS. In the spring of 1998, he started a cheesy little site with its first, non game-specific tutorial: Level Design. All that was remaining was deciding on the FPS. Actually, he had his eye on Sin and Half-Life, but after their release, the choice became clear. A gaming site called Fragland offered to host the little site, and Vlad invited his friend and fellow DN3D mapper Brian to help him out. After writing a few tutorials and getting a decent flow of visitors, the guys came up with a new site design, and left the 10mb-limit Fragland for a powerful but somewhat expensive Communitech. At the same time, we got the vlatitude.com domain. The new design/content/domain rehaul was a big success, and the golden age of Vlatitude began.

Goals
Our goal is to provide you with detailed, comprehensive lessons in mapping. We hope to answer not only the how, but the why questions regarding level editing. This is why sometimes a substandard tutorial will be temporarily removed from the site, and why we don't hesitate to give links to other editing sites that may have better resources than we do.

About the Banners
We pay for this site's hosting out of our tiny, shallow, college-student pockets. To help us pay for the site, we have the ad banners. No, the current banner revenue doesn't even barely cover the hosting costs. However, we are hoping that you can help us with that. It'll at least make us feel that this site is worth something to the readers.

About the webmasters
The two mysterious webmasters, enigmas no longer!

And, following today's hottest and most pointless trend, here are our system specs:

Vlad's System: Asus A7V motherboard AMD Duron 650MHz CPU, running at 850MHz 640MB PC133 Cas-2 SDRAM Quantum Fireball Plus LM 30GB ATA/66 Hard Drive Seagate 4.3GB Hard Drive Asus V6800 GeForce DDR Hauppage WinTV PCI TV-Tuner Card Diamond MX400 Sound Card Yamaha YST-MS50 3-piece speakers (holy sh*t) Samsung SD-612 12X DVD Drive Mitsumi 4x4x24 CD-RW Drive Linksys USB NIC Linksys PCI NIC Samsung SyncMaster 950P 19" Monitor Microsoft Optical Mouse

Brian's System: FIC AZ11 motherbaord (modified for multiplier adjustment) AMD Duron 650mhz CPU, running at 700mhz 256MB PC133 CAS2 Mushkin SDRAM IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB ATA/100 Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar 10GB Hard Drive NVIDIA GeForce2 MX Hauppauge WinTV PCI TV-Tuner Card with FM Radio Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 Monsoon MH-500 Speakers Goldstar 24x CD Drive Acer 8x4x32x CD-RW Drive Kingston 120x NIC KDS Avitron 17" Monitor IBM Rapid Access Keyboard Logitech MouseMan Wheel Optical