Technical question

[masonface]

My map has been compiling the vis stage for over 36 hours now because I have an outdoor area in my map that I didn't plan through well enough, as well as a few other mistakes that vis is known to hate.

My question is:

Because my map is essentially a few large rooms and an outdoor area, is there anyway I can manually create the portals so that vis will only construct a visibility matrix of each individual room and its contents as one leaf, rather than construct a visibility matrix of each individual brush and entity?

Also, would cleaning up the csg clipping, such as having pillars clip the floor and subdividing the geometry, help the vis compile times? Would reducing the volume of my skybox help?

I know this is kind of a technical question, but I'd appreciate any advice.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Crispy]

Make the skybox smaller, as small as if can possibly be, all the extra volume is adding to your compile time. Since the sky will essentially look the same whether the texture is 10ft away from the player or 100ft, there's no point in the extra space unless there is some important scenary of perhaps special effects (like fog) in between.

Have a look at the Fog Controller entity. This can help you control the overall draw-distance of your map and help make optimisations. Note: you don't necessarily have to use fog in your level, you can just edit the draw distance part of this entity.

Use func_detail for any small objects that connect with large brushes, expecially if they have are non-cuboid.

If you have any very large brushes, try to manually split them into brushes according to the x^2 rule of thumb (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc.) so the compiler doesn't need to split them up itself (sometimes it splits them up in a crappy way).

Experiment with hint brushes to see if you can further optimise when your map locations are being drawn.

Make sure all of your unseen faces are textured in 'NODRAW'. All the exterior faces of the map will automatically be culled but the ones within the outer boundaries but still not visible to the player can be changed to NODRAW. Any faces the player cannot see (such as backs of buildings, tops of buildings, etc.) are having their texture memory added into the calculation process in the compiler unneccessarily.

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See the tutorials on the Valve Dev Wiki for lots of help on optimisation, func_detail, hint brushes, etc.
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Optimization_(Geometry)
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Optimizing_and_Checking_Your_Map
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Controlling_Geometry_Visibility_and_Compile_Times