first, do what necros said. Then, use *waterskip on the internal faces of the water brushes. So when inside the square, you can see into the rectangle. 

The volumes will be correct (but can only be rectangles, like triggers) but internal faces you have to cull by hand.

So, uh, what Metl and Necros said... 

To my astonishment breaking both func_water funcions in two separate ones clears out the greying.

Another thing I learned is that a very thin brush above the big one conceals the visible watersurface.

Just trying to change e1m3 with a changeable water level, but the z-buffering wrecked the view in other places.

Skipping tool can work as the sides of the brushes are still breaking up. 

Thanks guys! So it doesn't matter whether I use Tyrutils or Bengt Jardrup his stuff? It just basically a matter of preference?

Convmap from Bengt Jardrup is actually Aguirre's convmap tool? 

Convmap from Bengt Jardrup is actually Aguirre's convmap tool?

I guess you could say that. 

What Mr Useless is not saying is that aguirRe is Bengt Jardrup's nickname. I would recommend using Tyrann's tools as they are actively developed, fast and have great features. Check out http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60967 

Which compiler you use depends on what features the compiler has. I tend to use Tyr's BSP most of the time and I revert to Bengt's Treeqbsp tool when my geometry microleaks (it rounds vertices to less decimal places, plus I can never get the portal file to work with Tyr's utility). 

Have detail brushes and a load of other handy features.

Detail brushes make your vis time reasonable - recently I heard a case of a map taking half a day reduced to >2 hours by application of detail brushes. 

Thanks guys! 

I would like to have the player start with no shells and the axe selected.

My attempt: I thought the easiest way of doing this was to have console run the command "give shells," but I could not get that command to execute from a .cfg file.

Is there a way to complete this task without compiling with QuakeC? 

Yes. 

Make an 'info_notnull' entity underneath the player start.

Add the following keys and values:

"think" "PlaceItem"
"nextthink" "0.2"
"touch" "BackpackTouch"
"ammo_shells" "-25"

This basically makes an invisible backpack item, like monsters or deathmatch opponents would drop, and contains -25 shells. 

You don't need to do all that if the player is sure to have only the shotgun and axe and 25 ammo. 

 

I was able to implement this within 5 minutes of the post.

Is there a way to suppress the pickup sound? 

 

if the info_notnull is right on top of the player such that they pick it up as soon as the map starts, does the sound still play? 

 

and no-one can hear him. Is he still wrong? 

I keep getting crushed by my func_plats when going up, even though they're damage 0 and have nothing out of the ordinary applied. They seem to be touching me more than once per frame and doing 1 point of damage, stripping off my armour before hurting me.

Is this an engine issue? Framerate?

It isn't happening with func_doors but in some cases I need platforms. 

it is a bug with the collision detection of the engine.
i forget exactly what it was, but it had to do with bounding boxes.

if you are inside the bounding box of a mover, this can happen. the solution (i think?) was to make it so you were standing on the top of the bounding box of the mover pushing you up... 

Ok, thanks. 

It seems its an accuracy issue - my platforms were just too thin. 

Preface: I understand that this is in no means practical.

Has anybody ever tried starting with a large solid and carving the map from that? A subtractive rather than additive process? 

i tried it for my first failed map in 1996. after 5 rooms the qbsp process started taking many minutes. Probably the tools aren't designed for it. (of course, the issues isn't qbsp, it's the editor that has to chop up the brushes into normal additive brushes that get sent to the compiler.) And really, most people here will tell you not even to carve a single hole in a wall in an otherwise additive map, since most editors carving tools are so bad.