Also, in your last map...



The brush count explodes during bsp when it starts splitting things. Which can also be avoided with liberal use of detail brushes.

Hey, thanks JM and Dark_Knight! I'm replying to your PM right now, Dark, and JM, I never thought of it that way. Currently what my map looks like when I turn off detail brushes is a biiiiig empty (sky)box with lots of patches scattered around. When I turn them on, the terrain appears and all. I suppose what it's telling me is that this box is too big and it can't do the VIS process on it all, since all of my geometry takes place within the box. Now, I've always wondered how exactly one uses the 'hint' brushes, and I know they're a large part of the process. Should I texture these huge underground brushes with 'hint' or 'areaportal'? I've areaportaled every door in the level btw.

If you've already built everything with detail brushes, then you have a different problem entirely. Vis should, then, run very fast. Near instantly, even. Just how big IS this skybox? (Also, you should do skies in JA using skyportals; not a big box around the level.) The BSP stage splits the world on all world-brush planes, hint brush planes, and also at regular chunk sizes. So your big giant box is cut into lots of really tiny chunks. There's an option in GTK radiant to render chunk boundaries in the 2d views. Generally, you should try to align macro-geometry to chunk boundaries. Increasing the chunk size for outdoor levels will definitely help. You should try that first. IIRC, the command-line option is -chunksize, and the default size is 1024. You can measure it in gtkradiant if show chunk boundaries is turned on. For big under-ground vis blocking brushes, they should just be caulked world brushes.

About areaportals; they only work if they entirely separate two areas of the world. There can be no connection between two areas that doesn't go through an areaportal. Also, if you built the building using detail brushes, but then plug the door with an areaportal, the areaportal isn't going to do anything - the detail brushes don't block vis.

About hint brushes; in sof2map and q3map, they create a high-priority BSP split plane down the largest axis of the brush (They should be axis-aligned). In q3map2 (Which I hope you are using) they create a high-priority BSP split plane along every surface of the brush. You use them to control the BSP process, so you can create more effecient BSP trees.

There's a plugin that comes with gtkradiant for viewing BSP portals. Load it up and play around with hint brushes.

Namely, that you listened to an idiot on LucasForums that thought this was a good idea. Building maps entirely from detail brushes defeats their purpose entirely.

Quite. For a large outdoor level like that, though, especially what's shown in the screenshots; most of it SHOULD be detail brushes. The problem there is that the height-map terrain does not offer enough vis-blocking opportunities. Ideally, the terrain blocks vis all the way to the sky wherever possible. Large lines of site should be avoided, even when they are in places the player should never be able to reach.

Also, height-map terrain looks crummy. There's this pyramid map for Q3 made by Sock that shows of an awesome terrain style.

You can try and fix your vis process by adding more structure brushes I guess. Just pick some nice corridor sections etc.

If you've made everything a detail brush, there's little point in using area portals on the doors. It wouldn't do much.

Glad this has been brought up... Any reccomendations on the best way to juggle structural and detail brushes? I was brought up on RichDiesel's tutorials, and don't use a lot of detail brushes, as most everything touches the void. I try to think in terms of how the engine will split everything into triangles and focus on what is draw and nodraw. Detail brushes are added later if I decide that they are needed. Any problems with this design process, while we're on the subject?

Concentrate on how the world can be divided into convex volumes of open space, instead. The BSP process turns the map file into a structure not that different than a JK level. If you're familiar with that, it's not a hard transition to make.

The convex hull approach can be very effective when used properly.

Well, what I was doing is about half of that- you've a much better way of describing things, it seems. Thanks for the advice; I'll put it to good use.