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. 

unreal worked like that. 

Unreal did work this way. The tools for quake aren't really designed for it. 

Unreal got away with it because it was designed to support subtractions right from the start. Quake was not. 

you didn't really subtract but you could only create playable areas, not walls. 

Is also subtractive. Too bad really, I've noticed that engines that use that method didn't get a lot of 3rd party mods or levels like additive ones did\do. The subtractive method is an inherently non-intuitive way to make content which made a lot of people shy away from games that used it IMO. That the first major games that were modded by a lot of people (Doom and Quake specifically) used additive geometry probably didn't help in getting people to switch over. 

I found Unreal editing much easier actually. No need to seal, just map away. 

I really prefer subtractive mapping, I find it a huge timesaver. Consider the following scenario:

have 2 cube rooms with a single straight corridor connecting them.
Minimum amount of brushes for additive: 22
Minimum amount of brushes for subtractive: 3

Of course, there's no reason you cannot just carve out a big box and map additively inside it, just like you do with Quake style map editors. The only difference is you don't need to bother with sealing your map. 

maybe because i'm used to it (17 yrs. experience!), additive building doesn't bother me. But it seems like, when dealing with very detailed architecture and not cube rooms like in the example above, the advantages of subtractive are reduced. Instead of 22 brusehs vs. 3 brushes, it's more like 1022 brushes vs. 1003 brushes.

If you are additive building all the details in a room, and you produce what would have been a leak in an additive map, instead what you will get is a contained, unfilled void with a bunch of unneeded faces, between the back of the additive brushes and the edge of that room. So it's better but, better still is to fix the leak.

Or map with a modern engine where details are provided by meshes and polygons don't count as much as draw calls. Then quake's building technique is pretty obsolete. :) 

Well, I think it's a moot argument. 'Subtractive' maps in UDK were really just additive maps, except with a huge brush covering the entire world to begin with, which meant you wouldn't do that if streaming the maps together. So in making a map, you really just have both methods, and they work fine together. You just add brushes as you do in Quake, and can do subtraction because it's handled gracefully without excessive polygons being generated. Any you aren't limited to convex brushes. It would honestly be great if something like that could be handled in Quake, but I realize that would be a huge change to how maps are even handled in Quake to be done right. 

then there's the quake3 method where you build a caulk hull and then fill it will detail brushes. I guess that is closer to the unreal method? I remember that being a lot of work, though, tagging the back of every detail brush with nodraw shaders... a lot of tedious work. You're basically making one brush per poly at a certain point, or using flat 3x3 patches to mimic quads... i don't miss that. 

Edge extrusion looks like a nice method, then merge vertices with the same location.

http://youtu.be/IpQelCVPPZg?t=6m50s 

box modelling workflows are pretty good for mapping. 

for me meant working inside this sold block and generally meant carving out a lot of very boring shapes. There are some things in Unreal ED I would love to see for trenchbroom (2d shape builder yes please!!) but I find working with an open space is more creatively freeing than trying to carve out something interesting.
I made a lot of UT maps back in the day and it felt restrictive. 

that probuilder app looks awesome. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=23978

Does any of you know where to get the tutorials that are mentioned in here? At most i can only find the one by Metlslime, after checking Quaddicted webarchive and other places

It would be nice too if we could revive that thread or make another similar ... 

http://web.archive.org/web/20050304015712/http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/rorshach/ 

How would you approach a huge, huge map, something like all original levels combined into one?

Is it possible? Does Q3BSP or BSP2 offer this? 

All original maps in 1 wouldn't actually be that big. 

... episode 1 maps joined together into a single map in normal bsp format, with the version of e1m6 that wasn't used too in there. If you use teleporters, i think it would be posssible to put the four together.

Ne_qep1 is its name, from the mod ne_dynamic, made by necros. 

Hi, i am experimenting with some hollow pipe bw,
and when it comes to light the scene, i get this:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hollow_odds.jpg

Tyrlight 0.14 with -soft 1 extra 4 set.
minlight value 10.

and thats one light only in this shot, value 300, delay 2.

Moving it around, and adding more light doesn�t change this significantly. Any clues anyone? 

can you take another screenshot with r_showtris 2? the face topology looks messed up. 

indeed, the faces are split in an unusual manner.

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/odd_tris.jpg

Though its on grid. TB screenshot:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ongrid.JPG