When should I use detail brushes?

[grb]

Hi all,
At the Manstein Leveldesign site, I find the following statement in the misc tut dealing with Compilation Errors:
"Use detail for small brushes.But never use detail for walls, floors and ceilings".

OK. I have been using detail brushes to practically build every object in my maps. I thought it was good to use detail.

What should I be using for creating walls, floors, etc. and after making pieces of road beds (using the patch mesh), what shoud I then convert the road beds to?

SECOND QUESTION: What type brushes would benifit by making them
structural?

Thanks for any explaination for above two questions.

cheers all

[Jack Ruby]

From my limited experience, and I learn that I am doing things wrong every day, so maybe someone will correct me,

Detail brushes are cool inside structures, like railings, walkways anything that does not block the view ( totally ) should be made detail, this description seems to make sense as a railing is indeed just a detail,

Walls that are say the outside walls of your buildings should remain structural as these walls are used to work out what you can see from one point to another, they cause spilts in the world as the game see's it and are good for that reason, I am sure theres a better explanation of vis and stuff to come on this thread but I hope I helped a little,

[grb]

Thanks for the information/help. What you said, makes sense. For whatever reason, I had been making things detailed, because then
I knew they would be worldspawn. This worldspawn crap is for the birds!

If you create an object and do not assign it to some specific classtype such as detail, structural, LOD, etc..... in other words simply create a brush and texture it...........then it always seems to always become world spawn! And then if it is inadvertanly removed from the map! Bingo you
cannot reload your map, and it no longer works in the game! This has happened to me many times................so I got very very careful in trying my best to assigne every brush created something so that it would not become this stupid world spawn object! This was true when mapping for SOF2 also. I probably have wasted twenty weeks of lost maps over the past year!

But thanks a lot for your help! Sorry for dumping on you.

cheers

[bdbodger]

One other thing lod meshes cylinders and textures with transparency are not used in vis so no need to make them detail .

[grb]

Thanks for the additional advice. Wish there was a document available
that summurizes what types should be assigned to a given brush. Perhaps
there is. I am aware of a few large hard to read documents that have been created over the years pertaining the Quake Engine in general, that do reference how to assigne brushes. Obviously caulk is one we always
here about. Then again, perhaps my mind is just tired, and I do not
remember well. But just for example, I extracted some of the houses
that are found in the stock maps, and not one of them seems to use detail, or structural type assignments. All the parts are world spawn. So I get rather confused as to what to do often. Never the less, thanks for your input.

cheers

[chris_in_cali]

alchoholic explained vis quite simply on this thread; there's a link I think you should follow too.
/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4016&highlight=

[grb]

Thank you for the link. I will check it out.

cheers