I imagine this is impossible in Quake but QIIIA had options for DM only, TDM only etc. If this is not possible, it would have been a great addition. 

I think setting flags of "not in easy, medium or hard" is the only way to do this? 

That's how it's done. 

Not sure if this should go here or in the TrenchBroom thread...

Just created something in TrenchBroom, saved it, and when I tried to open it again, it gave me an error saying
(line 441, column 107)Expected integer or decimal, but got 'nan'
So I opened the file in a text editor and on line 441 one of the coordinates is indeed "nan" -- but in also in a few other places as well. I am guessing "nan" means "not a number" or "not a valid number"; is this correct?

How on earth does this happen, and how can one fix it? Should I replace all instances of "nan" with something else in my text editor, and if so, with what?

(I should perhaps also mention that I have done nothing really intricate in this map; no rotation; everything on grid.) 

Okay, so this problem has been tormanting me ever since I started quake mapping: believable, compileable rock brushes.

How can I make believable enough rock brushes (not blocky) and still get vis to work? I'm wasting my time on my rejected jam6 map because of this shit. 

 

 

I like mine, really.

http://s3.photobucket.com/user/amurad/media/Games/jam6_18b_zpswa4ketjr.jpg.html?sort=3&o=2

They were made like this:

http://www.simonoc.com/pages/articles/rockwall1_1.htm

Golden rule: as long as you skew faces, you're safe.

In other words: if you're going to move vertices, you have to move all vertices in a surface together. And I said MOVE, not rotate. 

Platinum rule: your brush is always valid if all faces are parallelograms, all vertices are on grid and at least two faces are parallel to orthogonal axis.

Meaning that if you make a cube you can skew its faces at your will, it will compile.

Of course you're not skewing a face across its opposite; in this case you're just trying to troll me. 

Make a cube out of 4 sided brushes (pyramids, not prisms). That can then be duplicated and manipulated to your heart's content to produce whatever formations of rocks you like. 

For tri-soup walls and floors use 3 sided prisms/columns and move the vertexes on one end up/down (or in/out if walls). In my Jam6 map you can see how I tri-souped the walls, floor and ceiling.

There's also some randomly formed off-grid rocks that seemed to compile fine.

With careful clipping I made some columns/prisms where all the sides are formed by triangles. You can drag the vertexes around to make interesting shapes, just keep the brush convex and the ends flat. Cap the flat ends with stubby pyramids to give them a rounder look. 

Triangular faces are always valid. Diamond rule. 

How much can you actually build using brushes? For example, say you were building a medieval style map and wanted wooden barrels, wheeled carts, crates, signs or metal light fixtures etc... can you build all that detail with no problems?

What I mean by "crates" is, beyond a six sided cube with a crate texture applied. A crate that has some dimensionality to it.

Engines are more advanced, limits are increased(providing openness and crazy architecture) as well as lighting being dramatically improved. But beyond that, there is very little in the way of filling the environment with anything more than monsters still! 

trisouping makes for really wonky slopes and ramps that are very awkward to walk on. collision with lots of strangely angled walls also feels very catchy and jagged. it looks nice but it works a lot better in quake3.

use flat floors, big ramps at compiler-friendly slope ratios, and lots of small steps if you really need to break up a floor with geometry. make your cliffs out of irregular hexagonal and pentagonal prisms (with the corners on-grid and the faces also on compiler-friendly slopes) and only slant the tops and bottoms.

you will be entirely forgiven (by me at least) if your rocks look a little "quakey" but have smooth solid collision. 

So you want to cast a shadow invisibly, like the Q on the ground in e1m5? If you're using a compiler which supports _shadow, you've probably thought of doing it with a func_wall that you then killtarget, or even hacking the entities in the bsp and deleting the func_wall. But there's an easier way! Instead of making the shadowcaster a func_wall, just give it the classname info_null, and the QC will remove it for you, no mess, no fuss. 

I liked the rocks in Daz' brimstone mapjam entry - they looking volcanic rock-like despite being angular and quakey.

Making really big lumps of strata looks good and doesn't leave you with micro-clip floor problems. 

Isn't it just a matter of structural irregular rock brushes touching the floor? Isn't it just a matter of making a whole cliff or at least its bottom a func_detail? Or func_wall, if my compiler doesn't support details?

@Lunaran

Shouldn't I just "caulk" my level in a Q3 style? I mean, make a jaggy cliff func_illusionary and cover it with clip brushes? That would separate the visual cliff from its collision.

About damage_inc question, can't I just fill my level with MDL props? 

I use to smooth player collision against really detailed walls using clip brushes. Any reason to not do it? 

definitely clip off detailed stuff always.

func_illusionary won't help you though, it's not solid to weapons so the player will notice right away.

mdl props are useful if they're small, but since they're vertex lit by the ground beneath their origin they're not useful for large things because they don't get shaded, so you can't make buildings or pillars or archways as big mdls. 

By that I meant when tiny invisible misalignments in the floor form overhangs that the player gets stuck on.

Typically these are the result of mathematical inaccuracy from the editor and/or compiler.

The player will only notice them when they're part of the floor, since that's what they touch the most.

So it's pretty much what Lun says - use flat or simple brushes for your actual floor surfaces, or at least the ones the player will most use to navigate your level.

And yes, make the entire thing _detail. It has two downsides - higher memory requirement for end user (you might need heapsize >64 !!!) and the compiler will crash if there are no 'normal' world brushes.

Clipping off details is good for both the player and Quake Ai, and has a negligible improvement for the speed of calculating the hulls I believe. 

I've seen that "microclipping" thing happen occasionally. Seems to be a problem with the clipping hull because the brushes will all appear to meet perfectly. Usually a well placed clip brush will fix it. I've never had it happen enough to consider it a major problem. 

Thanks, guys. And @ijed, it's possible to pick what will be detail and what will not. In a pillar, just that lower brush that touches the floor, for example, not the whole thing. That's how I used to do for Torque Game Engine. I assume it's the same principle for modern Quake? Sometimes a touched surface can split and it's not bad. 

Lunaran

You mentioned "compiler-friendly slope ratios". Is that just wordsmithing or is that an actual thing? And, if so, is there a reference somewhere? 

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=3&start=8236&end=8240 

Yeah I know, it's just more convenient to make the whole thing one object and has no real downside.