I'm not quite sure I understand func_detail. Does it just turn the brush into an entity? Is this something that's fairly safe/advantageous to use? Any tips or knowledge on the application of func_detail?

I realized making floor grates/grids from regular brushes is really expensive. Each "hole" is just as pricy as a cube, minus two faces. I went in and removed some from a small room and got about 5k verts back. The effect was cool, especially the way it cast light, but too expensive.

Now that I'm pressed for space I'm going back and seeing how I put high detail in the wrong areas.

From now on, action packed or dark areas will be relatively low detail, while slow, well lit areas will be for the scenic stuff. I know this is a no-brainier but it's also my latest epiphany...lol...

tangent: is it possible for one to manipulated the way light is cast with an "invisible brush", in other words, is there a brush that only effects light, so no visibility, collision, etc.

On could use low detail invisible brushes to cheaply cast light that looks as if its coming from behind a grate and just use a texture with transparency as the grate. I think. 

Detail brushes (func_detail) are for speeding up the VIS process. They are brush entities in the editor, but a QBSP with detail brush support will turn them into world geometry while not creating vis portals for them.

Attempting to lower verts/marksurfaces etc, one can use func_wall entities instead, for instance. 

Ok, got it. Not what I was hoping it was. 

Making grates would be good to use a texture, but doing it this way means you dont get the nice shadows.

I'm assuming you're making the grate by making individual brushes and not by using a carve tool. If you're using a carve tool I would stop straight away.

The general rule of making geometry for me is to stick to 16 units as the smallest sized brush and *only* go below that on rare occasions. Quake is a big chunky evil looking game, it's rare that you need fine details. 

In even the worse implementation of a carve tool, you're probably fine using it to create on-axis grate holes.

overlapping brushes get merged during bsp anyway.

it's off-axis carving that can lead to microleaks and such. 

Yeah I know the faces get split during the bsp process but it also makes it a bitch to go back and edit the brush later on if you're relying on the carve tool (I once made a level this way and wanted to change a couple of things and realised what an error I have made, it changed my entire philosophy on mapping)...

Though I knew the faces get split up I thought the way which you made the brushes determine how they split? 

but it also makes it a bitch to go back and edit the brush later on if you're relying on the carve tool
definitely. if you're making a grate or something similar, i recommend putting it in a func_group and then doing your carving so that the resulting dozens of brushes are still part of the func_group. you still can't edit them easily, but at least they're all contained.

I thought the way which you made the brushes determine how they split?

Not that I'm aware of? afaik, merging and splitting is all done at once.

for carving, i would say doing things like grates and such is up to you. i'd only recommend staying away from it with things like big world geometry for exactly the reason you mentioned. 

Clip tool is the same thing, or CSG subtract? I'm a nublet, I apologize. Of those, I've only used subtract, and very judiciously for that matter. gets messy. fast. 

We all started somewhere.

I'd offer more useful descriptions but I'm a bit hammered. 

carve = subtract 

I thought the way which you made the brushes determine how they split?

As far as i know, no. For example, I have a map where i cloned a brush and its surroundings several times, and almost every clone is split in a different way, in cases some brushes merged and split again in a different way.

#13682 : thanks for the link, Spirit.

So i have to suppose that the tutorial Iika made has been lost forever. 

I meant the link as incentive to add map performance tricks there... 

Interesting, I haven't looked at the door code much. 

What's the usual entity count for the standard quake maps?

It feels fairly easy to hit the 512 entity limit! 

I hope it's not 512... 

Pretty sure it's 512 entities before you start getting in-game error messages.

(it might even be less because I t hink if you're shooting nails and stuff that adds to the in-game count or something) 

If you're refering to the edicts limits, that's 600. 

so far I've got 2161 entities and no warnings or errors.

I'm using TxQBSP 1.13 and Light 1.43, release 2, the one modified by MH for colored lights and multithreading. Can't remember which vis. 

As far as i know, lights are count as ents by light.exe, but they don�t add to the edicts. 

lights are not edicts, unless they have a targetname.

KillPixel: don't worry too much, modern engines handle well above 600 edicts. It's just that the standard id engines can't go over 600. 

Are things that do stuff during runtime.

A light without a target name is effectively deleted before runtime, and so not an edict. 

i believe light.exe actually delete them if they don't have targetnames? 

I use Worldcraft 1.6. Working on a Quake level, I compile to check my latest round of progress. Oddly, the batch file I'm using to run TXQBSP returns 28 warnings.

Checking back with the rmf. file, it claims that I have 28 instances of invalid structures. Which is odd since I've been careful about my vertex manipulation. When I zoom to the problem, it's a shapeless object at the grid's top view origin. It's a solid with one face, larger than the grid itself. 28 of them.

I deleted them all, and progress continued, but I'm wondering if anyone's ever come across this before. And what it may possibly mean... 

probably just a bug with the editor. i've seen that kind of thing is just about every editor i've used at one point or another. 

A blog post on when light gets removed and how to remove other things. Save entities, save the planet!

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/saving-entity-tricks/