HINT brushes are a pretty arcane subject. I advise removing all of them unless you have a very clear idea of what you want each brush to achieve.

Also, HINT brushes should only ever be placed as blocks (please, please don't make 32-sided cylindrical HINT brushes ) Only one face should be textured "HINT"; the rest should be textured "SKIP". The face that is textured with "HINT" will define the forced BSP split. Make sure that it exactly covers the opening that it is placed over.

Note that if you texture the whole brush with "HINT", there is a good chance that you will make 6 BSP splits where you intended only to make 1.

Finally, don't try to use HINT brushes as a substitute for actual VISblocking. You cannot "engineer" lower visibility with HINTs - you can only influence the way the compile tools cut up the level.

Erk! That will cause nasty stuff to happen - at least, I expect it to confuse the hell out of hlbsp.exe

You're too kind ....../accepts sacrifice

As for overlapping brushes - well, they should be avoided unless they are entities. Overlapping world brushes will cause compile times to increase, perhaps vastly, and *may* lead to r_speeds increases.

Even one set of complex overlapping brushes can send your compile times through the roof. God only knows what a level full of them would do.

I remember my first attempt at mapping - I overlapped all the walls slightly because I thought it was necessary to seal the level Humbling to think back to that.

man, she would literally kick my ass if she knew her dad was talking this way....

....and shes actually damn good looking...ive been putting the hex on her boyfriends since she was 15....

"a little fear is a good thing....."

you guys kill me.....i sure do like this site...

tnx again man....

Doc Brass...

? posted by Dr Brasso
1. hint brushes all over the place....not that thats a bad thing,

2. many many brushes intersecting/overlapping...

3.im asking for your permission to do some actual editing on your rmf....just to test my theory....

4. btw, i compiled with -noclipnodes, and it basicly froze at about 62%.....over a nine hour period....

5....may sound harsh,

6......to be continued....

1. you make them sound random some of them actually helped out a lot.

2. honestly? the only world brushes that i can find to be overlapping, in the rmf i sent you, are brushes that had the clip texture on them before i re-textured the whole map. there's a compile paramater that gives you an indication of brush overlap in a map. i'll try it out and see what it says.

3. fire away. if you do anything that helps with the r's etc, i'd be glad to here of it.

4. retexturing the clip brushes i think is to blame here too. instead of reducing clipnodes on complex brushes, they are being horribly split by them. the compile i ran before the texturing only took around an hour and twenty.

5. not at all. i'm just a little surprised that you say there are so many overlapping brushes.

6. good, good

? posted by Gollum
1. HINT brushes.I advise removing all of them unless you have a very clear idea of what you want each brush to achieve.

2. Only one face should be textured "HINT"; the rest should be textured "SKIP".

3.Note that if you texture the whole brush with "HINT", there is a good chance that you will make 6 BSP splits where you intended only to make 1.

4. You cannot "engineer" lower visibility with HINTs - you can only influence the way the compile tools cut up the level.

5. Finally, don't try to use HINT brushes as a substitute for actual VISblocking.

1. i may remove some of them, but as above, some of them help out a lot.

2. nice one. thank you. i only wanted one face to have the hint texture, as i could see the double splits that were being caused when i was running with wireframe on. i looked for a 'null' texture that i've seen discussed, but i dont seem to have one. i didn't know i had a skip texture.
is this the same as the 'null' that i've heard of, and can it be used to kill faces that player wont see?

3. looked like more than 6 with wireframe on :/

4. hint brushes, used correctly(which would be the hard bit ), will reduce r's. whether this is done by how they influence the cutting up of the map, i dont know. but surely its the same as engineering lower vis with hints?

me and my damn semantics

5. i know they dont work as normal visblockers. i like to think of them as being a type of visblocker though, but only when they are not in my direct line of sight. it's not exactly accurate, but close.

i hope i dont sound pissed at your comments or the way i've answered them. i'm not. very much appreciated that you took the time. cheers.
i'd already written out a big post, and it got lost in a moment of madness. (i hit the back button..........duh...)

Dr B, you didn't say if you still got the leak error. i'm assuming you didn't if your compile is taking more than 9 hours. hehe, it would be one helluva map if it took 9 hrs before it found a leak.

thanks again guys.