If you think your map looked fat evile in hull 1, try hull 2 instead. Sometimes, the whole map melts together into a real mess ...

Fixing things in hull 2 only helps shamblers and the like, not as important as the player.

There is an interesting thing regarding the various entity sizes. I have many times noticed that scrags and spawn seem to be able to sometimes move through solids, very annoying when fighting them.

I haven't confirmed this, but could it be that they are in fact point sized entities, so the smallest crack between walls will let them through? Or is there another reason? 

i've noticed the scrag problem myself. it would happen sometimes in nesp09, in the underground lava cavern. the scrags would spawn by the falls, and would sometimes clip right through the wall into the cave. it seemed to happen when there were a lot of scrags bunched up, so i just reduced their numbers and the problem went away...
incidentally, the scrags do have bounding boxes, they are the same size as a player entity. so i don't know why this happens.

also, the hull1 hull2 thing explains alot regarding bounding boxes. i could never figure out how the big dragon in nesp06 was able to fit through smaller passageways even though it had a massive bounding box.

thanks a lot for the clarification 

maybe since they're monster_wizard they can turn on their NOCLIP? :) 

sv_move.c:SV_movestep treats normal and FL_FLY entities differently. I haven't time to examine it closely, but it looks a bit odd. aguiRe; see what you think. 

at QC, I've only made some minor fiddling with it. I was just curious whether the issue was related to the entity size but apparently it wasn't. Come to think of it, it probably would be a lot more difficult to hit a scrag with a bullet if it had no volume. 

don't actually use flying thing... they are set to movetype_step... it's confusing. 

i believe this means that the entity moves in discrete steps (becuase of the 10Hz think function) and not that they actually walk on the ground. 

makes sense, i guess. i just assumed it was walking, because there was movetype_fly as well. ;) 

aguiRe - Interesting explanation of Hulls. I learned something. I wonder if my map troubles are related to these offset surfaces. I can just imagine what Hull 1 and 2 look like on my trusses. Bleh...

BTW, I'm vising my slightly improved map. It still sucks. I'm working on the 2nd map and letting your vis program take all my PC's spare time.

I also used the light parameters (light -extra -soft -light 20 -sunlight 150 -sunmangle 225,-30 -sunlight2 40 e2m1a). It does make the map look nicer and more natural. The only drawback is that I lose some cool looking shadows (such as the lifting truss shadow against the rockface) but I think I'm inclined to go with your soft shadows anyway if this thing ever gets done. 

What do I need to do in Quake 3 so that arcitecture won't show up behind skybox brushes. There's a small part of an adjacent roof you can see through the sky in one of my maps, which is culled from some angles but not others and looks generally weird. 

Well if the surfaces you're seeing aren't ever visible by the player, you could caulk them. Otherwise, there's not much you can do.

I don't know how it works technically, but basically the skybox is drawn behind everything in the visibility table. So if VIS does not block Room A from being viewed in Room B, trying to hide Room A with a skybox won't work. This problem was evident in Quake 2 as well (load base1 and noclip to the top of the outside room; you'll be able to see the inside parts of adjacent rooms through the skybox).

The only real thing you can do is use areaportals and hint brushes to optimize VIS, or change the architecture so there's nothing to see behind the skybox (which is not what you want, surely).

I hope that made sense. If not, I defer to metlslime. 

solution: build spatially coherent maps.

if there's a room up there, wouldn't you see the outside of the building? So build that. 

Well it's just a small corner that you see. Technically you should be able to see something but it doesn't 'feel' like you should be able to. I could build an outside and make it look intersting. That would mean sealing some of the rooms in a box, isn't that what everyone makes fun of? 

try simply raising the brushes a little to block it, or adding new ones to build it up a little. 

There is a hint trick you can do that can sometimes fix that. Spog did a hint example map which you should be able to find somewhere that shows how. Its a matter of tricking vis to think that the area behind the sky can't be seen. 

That would be perfect, thanks. I couldn't find it with google but I'll bother spog about it when I see him. 

you can d/l the map files here
www.glassman.mistral.co.uk/spog_hints.zip 

.../spog_hints.zip 

http://www.glassman.mistral.co.uk/spog_hints.zip

needs the http:// to be made a link 

Spog said there wasn't. He gave me a very nice explanation about hint brushes though. 

Does anyone know if the source code is available somewhere? 

Quake1 map, which had a big content.(1.7Mb)
I have changed the textures count to its limits.
Than deleted several brushes.
Now I have a map of 1426kb, but it gets stuck!

Don't know what it is, under DOS there is no problem. But this Win98 won't play my map.

Is there a solution? possible? 

You may need to allocate more memory for the engine by adding the command line option "-winmem 16" (DOSQuake) or "-heapsize 32768" (all other engines). 

Didn't knew one could make the string longer.
Now it works with
quake.exe -winmem 16 -game aband +map start

Great! 

In the 3d section of worldcraft a texture that Ive place on an angle appears straight but when the map is loaded its turned back in the other direction, however if I change it so it looks wrong in wc it actually looks right in game, is there anyway around this or do I just put up with it?

Also I have this concrete section where it uses a tex called divider1b on the top then a seperate brush using divider tex on it but when in game it uses divider1b over both brush (they are touching if that makes a difference).