1000+ hours of code? Impressive! But that's no match for the 32,382 vertices I have, or even my hidden cache of 1.75 million bytes of polygons! Touche!
Hi! The way I handle mirrored parts, is to bake with to game mesh (mirrored geo, UVs of mirrored parts offset, vertices at mirror axis merged + vertex normals averaged). This way there is no potential shading difference between mesh that's baked to and game mesh.
Whenever I want to edit the UVs of a model, all the vertices jump and stay at the top-left corner of the UV editor. Restarting Max or resetting XForms won't fix the problem. Halp?