That's generally the way it was done in Quake engines, yeah. Be aware though that if you put that sort of thing on the floor it can lead to a lot of sticky collision and weird sliding if you're not careful. In my experience, anyway... 

or 'flat triangular prisms' rather than squares, cause if you have a 'square' face that isnt straight, or on one 'plane', then it is an illegal face. But if you use triangles you cant have an illegal face...

Or am I on a completely different topic? 

It's still possible to make illegal or non-vis (the solid shape is treated as a leak - pointfile line goes right through the middle) prisms. Alot of the time now I use four sided pyramids just to avoid that. Maybe going to extremes but it tends to work.

Typically you get broken collision (player gets stuck on an invisible wall when walking from one direction but not another) when the brushes are misaligned, maybe by 1 or 2 units, making the difference invisible in most editors. Normally you must delete the offending brush and all adjacent and rebuild.

Wierd sliding tends to be caused with how you've built the geometry. Basically you learn what shapes the bbox's of Quake don't like to collide with. Typically it means not making the player walk along acute angles or severe angle changes. 

I made a tunnel in my current map with a curved cieling - the tunnel also curves round a corner and drops a total of 64 units on the ground too (ughh). If it didnt slope downwards it would be OK, but because it does I had to replace all of the 6 sided brushes which comprised the cieling with FOUR 4-sided pyramids (I think there is some sort of gap in the middle of each group of four) because bsp.exe was building the original set up with gaps between brushes by the time it had corrected all of the illegal faces!

I'm just glad to hear that someone elso uses a similar technique, cause I thought it was probably considered to be shit practise! 

The idea is not to have empty spaces in between brushes cos vis'll hack it up.

You can correct it in a drawn out way by turning the curved upper part of the tunnel into func_wall, then putting a real ceiling above that, so the map doesn't leak. The func wall receives collision and light, but doesn't cast shadows. That shouldn't matter because it'll have a false ceiling above, and the ends of the tunnel you can leave as real geometry since they don't curve.

As a further geometry hack / fix you can make the curves func_illusionary, then put simpler clip brushes so the player or monsters (especially fiends) don't get stuck.

As to it being bad practice, I think that's the only way you can make a downwards sloping curve. It makes a hell of a mess and produces some weird bsp errors but it works, sort of. 

Just keep the ceiling level since the floor only drops 64 units, and then there's room above the exit of the tunnel (if there is such a thing) for a little detail of some kind. 

Its hard to describe but if you look at the picture below (ignore the disco crates) you can see one exit of the tunnel to the left of the image.

http://shub-hub.com/files/images/RickyT23color.jpg

As you can see there is a border to the point where the tunnel meets the room, which extends 32 units outwards (constructed with help from the czg curve tutorial, I might add) but there is no similar margin on the other side of the arch, in the tunnel area, so if I kept the cieling horizontal it would look crap because the verticle side edges would be cut off with banana shapes at the tops or something...

Does that make sense, or do I have to show another image?

The way Ive done it is boxed (I know, I know) and to use the 'four four-sided pyramids in place of six sided brush' technique(vertex alingnment in 3.3 on a 1x1 grid (double ugh...). There are no clipping problems though :), and no cracks neither.

But my brain cant think of a better way, can yours? 

Just keep it straight then have a "porch" of sorts with some steps down.
Or some steps inside the tunnel. 

But seeing as I've already made it, and there are no clipping problems, I think I'll have to keep it!

I think next time I run a build, I'll try removing the box. There was a problem at one point with falling through one of the faces on the verticle wall (I think I had accidentally deleted one of the pyramid brushes), but I fixed that with a brush laid against the wall. The wall in question was the source of the leak also, and I havent tried a build without the box since.

Youre right though, next time I have to address such an issue, my approach will certainly be less of a time consuming one! 

...please don't take this the wrong way, but it's probably not a good idea to ask for mapping advice in public and then ignore it. Doing so does nothing to encourage further assistance or bodies for beta testing.

It's only a small section of the map, why not address the issue now, especially if it isn't going to be particularly time consuming.

This is not a flame. 

Yes I understand what you are saying here.

I have a lot of respect for people like czg, ijed, AguirRe (blimey, who else...), er Preach, spirit, (people I cant off the top of my head remember), er Metlslime, Kell, as well as other people who help to test projects (Trinca, Maxfox, Sielwolf...), who freely give out their time and advice to strangers on the internet, for the good of Quake!

Thanks guys!

You included Distrans!

The context of the qustion I was posing above is as follows:

I had a problem, but solved it on my own terms prior to bringing it up on this thread (I only brought it up really cause somebody else (Kamikaze) was asking about terrain, and the Ijed was going on about using four sided brushes to do complex stuff).

Mr czg is somewhat of an expert when it comes to manipulating geometry in editors (not to mention design, imagination, gameplay, structure, all facets that make a really good mapper really...), so I was asking him if there was a simpler way of creating such geometry than the very amateurish and time-consuming one which I had used.

I interpreted his answer basically as 'no', which doesnt surprise me really, however because I have already spent the time making the tunnel, it seems to me a waste to disguard it now! No disrespect intended ;-P

czg is very right - certainly creating a lot of stuff in a map using the method I have used would be dumb-assed to say the least.

I have considered the unspoken ussue of rspeeds, and feel that compared to other geometry seen in maps, this example isnt really so bad as to remove it for that reason. 

...respect 

Sometimes when I go into Face Properties in WC 3.3, both the world and face align are ticked, and I can't untick either of them.

Basically I was trying to untick world so that the texture being 128x128 would perfectly align and fit the 128x128 brush without having to align it manually by the X & Y axis. 

Having trouble getting rotate_object to light correctly when using colored lighting. Getting completely dark faces. I have tried hmap2 and tyrlite. I have found if I use tyrlite and move the rotate_object to 0,0,0 I can get faces lit.
Everything looks correct with lit file support turned off. BTW using Quoth and fitzquake080.exe 

Problem solved. Was using wrong values for Tyrlite. Had 0-1,0-1,0-1 not 0-255,0-255,0-255. RTFM i guess. BTW in WC 1.6 adding to the FGD

Find
@baseclass = Light
[
light(integer) : "Brightness" : 200
wait(string) : "Fade distance factor"
]

Add _color(color1) : "RGB color"
Will give you the color picker as in quake2 FGD 

Thanks for that. 

Anyone here mapped for HL/CS etc.? Because I'm just wondering that, if I were to make something for Half-Life (the original), should I use Worldcraft 3 or Hammer (Steam SDK)? 

I think, it should have a HL1 profile built into it if you have HL1 installed on steam.

Nothing wrong with WC3 but Hammer is more up to date. 

Anyone know the command you type into the Quake console which directs you towards holes in the map? Ta. 

pointfile 

Read this: http://user.tninet.se/%7Exir870k/tooltips.txt

;) 

I moved this over to the Mapping Help thread so as not to get told off:

I have got fog working in my level (hooray!!)

BUT

I cant get rid of the centerprint command. It seems that the command itself is set by the "message" key, and aswell as 'firing' the command, it prints the "message" in the center of the screen!! This seems a bit daft to me (or am I missing some spawnflag or something?) because surely the player doesnt need to see some cvar/command!

I am using the fog in a situation where you walk down a blind corridor, and there is a trigger at either end, and as you enter a room the fog is on, and when you leave the other end of the corridor the fog is off. But I dont want to see "fog 0.08 0.5 0.1 0.1" in the middle of the screen, with a sound effect. Any ideas? 

indifferent? I seem to remember this issue, but I don't recall any details. 

AFAIK, you have no possibility to remove the message... maybe it will be corrected in Quoth2 :P 

After a bit more experimentation, I have found the answer:

info_command + trigger_multiple = no certerprint

trigger_command = centerprint!

also:

"target2" "nameofinfo_command" = incorrect command usage console error (not crash)

hehe :D