My first post here in like 4 years. I fired up an old Quake3 map and decided to finish it. I started it about 4 years ago, I think I might call it forgotten. Anyway, I am a bit rusty.
I know that no brushes are supposed to overlap. Does this also apply to playclip? Or can I just do a big square clip over a complex collection of brushes that I need clipped. I don't really see any performance or compile differences, but I was wondering if it was the right/wrong way to do it.
Overlapping other brushes isn't automatically a bad thing either, provided you don't just do it just because you're building sloppily, and don't overlap textured faces. In fact, overlapping detail into structural brushes is very much a necessary part of the caulk hull construction technique.
In other words, overlapping is actually OK as long as you are careful and understand what you are doing. There is some stuff in the old Radiant manual saying it increases compile time but that's BS as far as I can tell.
To expand on what dnky said.... if you completely encapsulate a brush in a clip brush, it's removed and ignored when compiling the AAS file.
Therefore if you 'remove' lots of your brushes with well-placed clib brushes in your final build, you can end up with a very tiny bot file and often bots that play better.
"Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do."
― Terry A. Davis
That's good to know, thanks for all the replies. I am pretty careful with overlap. Maybe a little over kill. Even my clip brushes except for a few do not overlap, but I started looking at my map and there are hundreds of clip brushes that could really be just one clip. Like I have a lot of supports that a player can get caught on so I clipped between each one, but I guess from what you are saying I could have just clipped the entire wall with one clip brush.
Foo wrote:if you completely encapsulate a brush in a clip brush, it's removed and ignored when compiling the AAS file.
Not sure if that's entirely true - it's my understanding that while enclosing brushwork does effectively remove it from the final AAS but it does not make the overall BSPC process magically ignore it. It's quite possible to exceed BSPC limits with complex patchwork even if its fully encased in botclip for example. If you ever find yourself needing to have BSPC ignore surfaces, you'll need to apply non-solid shaders to them. ISTR the Tribal CTF team having problems with this back when the mod was still going, I think Mr Elusive eventually compiled a version of BSPC with raised limits for them.
I can't comment on the limits of the compiler, I've never reached them. I think it goes without saying that BSPC would need to inspect all solid brushes in order to discard some.
"Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do."
― Terry A. Davis
I know this is getting a little off topic, but aseing geometry would have the same effect as applying a trans shader would it not?...also for really complex levels the fix -ext switch can be used cant it to allow a simplified level to be used to compile the bot file from?
I fired up an old Quake3 map and decided to finish it. I started it about 4 years ago, I think I might call it forgotten. 
