-instead of starting a new post-

In regards to hint brushes. I have an outdoor area that I would like to use hint brushes on in order to hide the rest of my map which lies behind and below the large wall in the center picture here (center picture). Or if there's a better way of blocking off the unseen area, great! But as it is now, using +mat_wireframe, I can see things behind this huge wall and it's hurting my fps. Also, would using hint brushes all around the outside area prevent a player from seeing my city ground texture that's in a 3D skybox? Any help is appreciated.

Hint brushes don't actually occlude anything - they only cut visblocks. There is a good example map with the sdk that shows how a hintbrush is used, to block objects on the other side of a short wall (doesn't extend to the ceiling).

When the engine calculates visibility, it does so from within the visblock that you are standing. This visblock can be very large, and allow much more visibility than just your perspective. To see these visblocks ingame, type mat_leafvis 1 in the console.

Static, my bet is that your visblocks extend above the wall that is supposed to be blocking other parts of the level. This sample map (not at my pc, don't have the exact link..but it's in the sdk_content folder) on hintbrushes shows the exact way to fix this problem.

If anyone has played the new cs map cs_compound you can see how valve uses a large hint brush the exact same way as in the sdk hintbrush map. See it was useful after all!

Just want to add a bit of information to the thread:

If you build your map, and type " mat_visleaf 1" in the console, you can wander around your map, looking at each visblock, and decide which "tall" ones can be split, then go back into hammer and add a hint brush where you want to split it.

Thoughts:

You can spend a LOT of time on this problem and not impact the speed of your map. In fact, you can quite easily make it far worse. I have overloaded vis a couple of times,getting dozens of cluster-saw-into-cluster errors.

Lowering the ceilings and working with skybox textures seems to give a better result.

You can get better performance increases by following everyone's advice to make everything possible into a func_detail. That seemed to have the greatest impact on my vis performance.

Don't ignore your skybox either. I have a detailed skybox and when I put a dome in it, and didn't turn it into an entity, it gave me two dozen errors.

It's easy to look at visblock widths, but if you trim heights with hints, you often get better performance, since it's the problem of visibility going OVER architecture that's usually the problem.

Vis splits on the 1024 unit boundary (the big grid lines in hammer), and positioning your geometry so that it takes advantage of those splits is helpful.

I would like a tool that works like the nav mesh editor for pruning the vis tree. That would be useful.

Hope something above helps.