Okay, I need some help on this. I know that detail brushes cannot touch the void (or whatever). They also can reduce compile time. What's the difference between brushes and detail brushes besides these differences? Can you just make everything in your map detail except the brushes touching the void?

Basically, detail brushes do not block VIS.

Here is an example (pardon the ****ty ASCII):


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^ ___ _______ ___^
^ |room w/ | ^
^ |stuff |stuff^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^ = structural
| _ = detail


In this case, every room would be rendered at all times... the walls being detail, the engine would still believe the player could see through them, even though they are solid, and the player couldn't.


Anyway, this tutorial would probably explain it better:
http://www.nibsworld.com/rtcw/tutorial_detail_and_hint_brushes_part1.shtml)

:p

Can you just make everything in your map detail except the brushes touching the void?

Just thought it a good thing to emphasise that no you cannot because large brushes inside the hull of the map could block vis...or maybe interior walls and such.

Technically speaking you could make all the brushes in a map detail excepty those touching the void tho couldn't you? It would simply lag more.. my map seems to work fine lik this but I have an uber computer, and the stupid thing has a max vis exceeded error if i use more than like 10 structural brushes, fact is I don't want my map to be smaller... anyway to up the max vis file size to stop this error and allow me to do some vis blocking in my map? Naturally as a consequence of being a large map i'd like to have lots of brushes too and i get the feeling 10000 brushes that can be seen all at once could be a slight performance hit ;).

You're making bloody large map aren't you?

Select a regular brush
Press N to get the entity window
Type a key of _blocksize
Type a value of 2048 2048 2048
Hit Enter

That'll greatly cut down the default vis splits. If you really know how vis works you can set the blocksize to 0 and do it all manually...but you need to REALLY understand vis before doing that...saying that is' probably the way to go on large maps.

lol thanks man. Yea the map is bloody big. Its coruscant streets and the map area is 10000 units squared, but there is another area even larger surrounding the city that helps create the illusion of a city that covers the whole planet.

But you think doing it all manually would be best? How would one do this?

Read this (http://www.nibsworld.com/rtcw/tutorial_detail_and_hint_brushes_part1.shtml) tutorial because it covers the hint texture.

BTW you cover a brush with "system/skip" then one brush face with "system/hint" now...I dunno if the tutorial says cover the entire brush in hint...but that's not the case anymore.

Good stuff thx man. I found a site the other day with GTK errors and their descriptions seemed pretty comprehensive in case you ever need it here's the addy: http://www.gdconnect.com/MapErrors-list-1.html)
if you don't need it you can always pass on the knowledge :). Thanks for the help. Oh, one more thing any idea what area portals are and what they do?