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). 

Your qbsp prog should have a command line switch like -useoldaxis, -alternateaxis or something similar. Check the readme.
Using this switch when compiling should fix the problem. 

Answer to second one:

This is a bug in WorldCraft.
If you've got a texture called divider, and another one called divider1b, if you apply the divider1b texture first, and then try to apply the divider texture, WC won't properly overwrite the string that stores the texture name, so it still reads the texture as divider1b.

A hack way to overcome this problem is to first change the texture into something completely different, (like wizmet1_2,) and then applying the divider texture.

The proper way to solve it, (besides haxx0ring WC or using GTKR instead,) is to rename the divider texture in the wad so it's named dividera1</y> or something like that.

You should make sure that there are no texture names in your wads that are such that you get another valid texture name if you append some more letters to it. 

dividera1 then... 

dividera1 

Just checking since you closed the tags wrong. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/site.php
Though, I didn't do that either, so I guess you're clear. 

Working on a map with terrain. I used vertex manipulation, and there were no errors, according to "check for problems".

However, when i compiled, i got a large amount of brush with duplicate plane errors, and when i play the map there are rocks where there are not supposed to be rocks.

Is there an easy way to fix this error? 

Importing the .map file back into your editor will show up the dodgy brushes & you can fix them.

I'm guessing you're using WC... the 'check for problems' is normally only useful for missing textures, mismatched targets or unrecognised entities etc. 

I would like to know for sure if qbsp for q1 starts the same way as q3map does, with splitting the map along each, uh, axial plane before splitting by the rest of the geometry.