I am no terrain expert and it is difficult to make suggestions without knowing what you are trying to achieve. But... if you are doing anything on a large scale, then use a terrain generator and do all (most) of the modelling in that and then import it into the editor.

I did a large lump of terrain in FMB-BDG in the form of a cavern. It was over 1000 units in each direction made up a few thousand triangles of 64 units. It took about 30 minutes to do in the generator - I dread to think what it would have taken in the editor.

http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/5075/fmbbdg16bu3.jpg

You can probably make it out in this screenshot.

When I had finished, I ran the BspEditor Brush Merge and got it down to about 900 brushes (from memory). 

1 - select the brush tool, set it to "wedge" shaped (triangular prism)

2 - select a suitable texture

3 - quicky make about 4 or 5 wedge shaped brushes

4 - in the "top" view I use the vertex editing tool to move the corners of the brushes into whatever shape I want, usually on a grid not smaller than 16x16

5 - I switch to a "side" view and move the verticle edges of the prisms up and down to shape my terrain

Notes:

Nothing ever goes off grid. The editor is set to "snap to grid" and whatever the grid size may be, the points of my brushes snap to them.

Aligning the textures better is as easy as selecting my brushes and setting the attributes back to 0 (i.e. rotation, movement x, movement y, x scale, y scale), then click a button which says "to world", which tends to look OK.

You can use this method to make overhanging rocks and other intricate shapes.

It is quite time consuming but looks good in the end! 

I've just checked that old map and the cavern is 3000 x 3000 x 800 high. 

Is there anything similar to aquire's engine for q2? I was messing with q2 map, just made the first area, nothing special so far, 2 entities (start and light), but when i load it to the engine, the game just freezes and i see q2 using 99% of cpu. Wtf? 

i couldn't get the standard q2 engine to run either. there's quake2 xp and quake2 evolved that i know of. 

Quake2 envolved doesn't run it either 

but i dont want to peruse 9192 posts for the answer

how do you make monsters not move or attack even with the player right in front?

i tired clip brushes and making secret trigger button but those didn't work :? 

Put them inside a func_wall made out of clip brushes, but whose corners (BBOX extents) have a tiny normal brush inside.

Those normal brushes tell Quake that the clip brushes are there.

Then remove the func_wall when you want them to be active.

Never actually tried it, but should work. 

are the non clip brushes supposed to be in the Func_wall or out of it, because it dosent work when there in it and when they're out i get this error:

*** ERROR 13: Line 2131: Entity with no valid brushes or textures

1 warning

Elapsed time : 0:00

Peak memory used : 1.8 MB

!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!!-!
Build failed, because it did not create the (+BSP) file: C:\Users\alex\Desktop\q
uake\tmpQuArK\.\maps\mstart.BSP 

That's why he said to include a tiny, real brush somewhere within the func_wall entity. Quake won't complain if you have at least something in the entity with a texture on it. Hide it in the map itself by making sure it's inside of a wall or something. 

 

Remember those wicked jumppads in some Q3 maps that had you fly in a curve? The same is possible in Quake. Pretty obvious, but I only just thought of it again.

Take a look at this test map: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/misc/pushtest.zip

The trick basically involves pushing the player towards a curved clip surface that determines the direction of the flight. The clip curve has to be fairly smooth so the player doesn't fall down prematurely. In the test map the small jump (1/4 of a circle) has 8 faces, the large one (3/4 of a circle) has 24. The map is pretty crude (but you'll get the idea) - it takes some experimenting with the pitch angle and the push speed. The larger such a push is (radius and distance), the uglier it becomes, because the clip wall and the pitch have to be a lot higher.

Now there aren't really that many situations where such a push would be useful. Imagine perhaps a castle with push-connected towers. Or a deathmatch map, although then one has to take into cosideration that NQ and QW handle the speed values in different ways.

At any rate, such a push can at least make for some funny wheee! effects. 

What about making a map where you fly along wind tunnels between different rooms and use keys to unlock new tunnels? Mebe with some water. And in brown... 

... antedeluvian map ? 

i has...have these new stuff in my progs that need entities placements on the map, but im finding that when i add an entitiy like ambient_drone i can't changeit, to something like ambient_front242. but i remeber doing it before somehow :S

the only solution i have is to edit it in the .map with a text editor but i find this somewhat of an out of the way solution

...i wonder if this makes sense 

why don't you just add the entity,
click on the object list,
and change your classname to monster_xxx? 

search and replace function? 

quark won't let me change classnames and i don't know why is what i meant with that paragraph and a half

and its kind of annoying because i could do it before i think 

QuArK lets you change classnames easily. Either slow double left click in the tree or edit in the detail view. 

A VIS error I could not find any documentation about. Does anyone here know what it means ?
It's a real error, not just a warning, no VIS is preformed. 

probably vis is trying to finish a partially-completed job, but you've changed the bsp since then. I think you'd just need to delete the state file, but i don't know what the filename would be (never used that feature myself.) 

I didn't know about this feature at all.
Anyway, reading your reply made try and just rename the map,that worked ! Thanks !
I've just switched to the WC 3.33 version so I might come back with some dumb questions later ... 

... aguirRe's tool tip does not mention this error :/ 

I think you just have to delete the vis file to that map your compiling and aguirre's vis will make a new one. I get this while updating and changing texture names in a wad file. 

While betatesting my level I came up to some errors I forgot how to avoid them.

First there's the monster count eror. I assumed they were caused by the fish, with its double swimmonster_start in the qc. Strangley it didn't help help deleting it, because I still get a double fish count.

Second is the strange habbit of some zombies.
Their heads seems to run on while being killed, which is rarely difficult to trace while they're in slime.
I got the effect earlier with bones. I can't find a reason for it.