Acutually, if you want to check what will be rendered in hammer then use the visgroups to hide all entities, displacements, water brushes and oither transparent brushes.
What you see is what VIS will work with.
Look at the pictures above. As far as the game goes, the yellow walls decide what can be seen. Things that cannot be seen are not rendered and dont affect the framerate. In your case your entire map is in a big yellow box which makes the game believe that everything is infact in sight. Therefore...
Leaf 325 (portal 989)
This probably means that you haven't been using func_details like you should. Causes VIS and RAD to fail and thus you get only direct (not so good) lighting.
Loaf up the pointfile in hammer to find the leak.
Possible cure
-bounce # : Set max number of bounces (default: 10).
and set that to 0. That will stop bounce lighting making your shadows as you would want them, but would also remove all realistic shadows elsewhere.
I think that the problem you are experiencing is due to bounce lighting. The light - the direct light - is indeed constrained to these numbers but bounce lighting has no such constraints. Test this simply by making your map leak. Yes, you heard me. Leaking will cause Vis to get upset and Rad to...
I didn't reply to help him specifically. But I hate it when I have a problem like this and I find threads like this one where the person who asks the question says "nevermind I solved it" and then doesn't give the answer.
So my answer is to anyone who might stumble upon this thread later -...
For the record, trains ALWAYS spawn @ their first track. To have a train spawn somewhere else you make the first path_track somwhere else. Then for the second path_track (which will look as the first) - you check the "Teleport to this path_track" flag.
Creds to you for googling things first...
Creds to me for being an old time mapper and knowing the ole hideouts that dont show up using google. =)
Bookmark this one:
http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/errors.htm#portalfile (except the #portalfile bit)
It contains pretty much all the...
It's been a while since I messed with this but I think i remember some.
The HL2 AI is indeed clever although sometimes it feels as though it is almost to clever and therefore does not do what it is told, because it makes desicions of it's own. So expect to spend a LOT of time tuning this...