Now you've lost me. My understanding was that clip brushes are used to force the players/monsters to not reach specific areas in a map. What else do clip brushes do? Sounds like I am missing something here... 

well, say you have a big swath of terrain. this terrain is bumpy and lumpy. all these angles take up clipnodes.

now, you put a big clipbrush over all the terrain. that means in hull1 and hull2 (but not hull0) the terrain is completly filled in where the clipbrush is, therefore less clipnodes are required.

same goes for details in walls and floors that the player can never get to anyway. you can always clip those to reduce clipnodes. 

You've mixed up clip brushes and clipnodes. The former are what you manually put in the map to block (or help) player/monster movements.

The latter is automatically generated by qbsp when transforming your map into a bsp that the engine can load. As necros points out, the more complex geometry, the more clipnodes. However, you can use clip brushes to reduce # clipnodes by doing what necros describes.

Check out my ToolTips document at http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k . There is more info regarding clipnodes and hulls. 

Just to support what is being said, fmb100 was tens of thousands of clip_nodes over the limit. If you have a look at the .map file you will see that I have some massive clipbrushes over the tops of the terrain that I thought players would not want to climb over, and also over some of the fancy ceiling areas. If you walk about on the roofs of the buildings you will hit some clipbrushes.

Clip_nodes are now just over 31K and therefore not causing a problem. 

I downloaded Texmex and am trying to convert the Tenebrea textures for Quake1 to Quake2.
As I converted the *.pgn textures to *.wall, all the maps I try to compile shut down of a GLQuake error.
How do i convert these textures to a Quake2 wad? 

marksurfaces... these are visible faces, right?

i'm guessing 51k marksurfaces is too high to run in glquake?
also, visleafs @ 9200 (8192 (?)limit): will performing a level 4 vis reduce these? (it's only fast vis atm)

lightmaps: at 78 atm. limit is 64(?)... how would i reduce these? is my only option to remove lights? 

exactly what marksurfaces are, but in normal engines they cannot exceed 32k without trashing internal heap memory with more or less random/erroneous results.

Vis leafs in excess of 8k will most likely crash normal engines and running fast/fullvis doesn't matter; map complexity is the problem.

As for lightmaps, check out my ToolTips doc. Exceeding 64 will immediately generate the dreaded AllocBlock: full error in most GL engines. Removing lights won't help at all; it's the total size of visible faces together with texture scaling.

If you send me the zipped map+wad, maybe I can see if there are any easy ways to cut down on the numbers. 

I wonder if anyone here happens to know of any mapping articles/guides/etc which deal specifically with creating "situations" and interesting gameplay moments in 3D games? 

the map isn't even passed half done yet. :(
i guess there's no real point in your taking a look at it since it will obviously need to be split into two maps. 

lol, how many brushes just out of interest? 

None that I know of. I usually find that it's best to just sit down and brainstorm. Look at other cool situations for reference (Kell has had some nice ones).

Not that my maps usually have interesting situations, mind you. Probably the most interesting gameplay in could.bsp was the slanted crate. 

I have a suspicion that you may not be receiving some recent emails of mine. Did you get today's mail? 

I got one, but I found the reply a bit odd; it seemed to refer to an earlier mail today that I probably haven't got. Please re-send if in doubt. 

done. 

I'm about to release a new map, but I'm currently fighting with packet overflow message during the game, that "troubles" sound rendering... I know it comes from the sound channel limitation of the engine, due to too much thing to perform...
So my question is: while a map without monsters is clean (no problem), how can I prevent packet overflow troubleshooting after I added monsters ?? Is there a method, or something to check in order to prevent this fucking problem ?? 

more proper visblocking, less monsters, less ambient sound sources... 

If you've fullvised your map, then you've got a problem - it you haven't fullvised yet, then don't worry about it just yet. 

For the moment I just fastvised the map (fullvised preview test ran at least for 10 hours /8( ...) so, if you're right, and I guess you are, the problem will "self-disappear"... cool...
Thx 

just a wild out of nowhere guess, is could.bsp named after that most awesomest tune in the Alice in Chains discography? 

I shall quote:

This map is dedicated to all that could have been, but never was, and all that should have been, but never will be.

ohmigosh so goth. 

but somewhere a long the line I've erased the text file. many apologizes 

the general level design advice you are looking for can be found here: http://www.planetquake.com/QuakeLab/QuakeLab2/articles.htm 

any1 got experience of lighting level with lights that go thru walls? (any geometry)
can have omni and spotlights and define radius 

That happens in old compilers before the community coders fixed it.

From your post it's unclear if you're experiencing a problem or if you actually want to achieve this effect. 

looking for recommendations, preferably from someone with experience (maybe someone made levels for engines where light doesnt cast shadows?)

and forget about quake plz, its for another game