Sascha Henrichs:
see a rare photo of my desk at PB from around sept 2000.
just found it. you can see how we had to organize the forests back then.
mesh portals had to be named in a painful process by hand and a super
strict naming convention. therefore i had to print them out and name
them all on paper before executing the task in 3dsmax

if i remember correctly, also the upsides of the forests always had to have correctly named portals.
and also the ground vertecies had to be 100% correctly placed over the over vertecies making it a complete water tight cell.
it was ridiculous to create this madness.
but i remember later on it was kinda automated to some degree..
but yea it's long ago. i do not remember anymore