/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3147157
It's super simple, I honestly believe it's simpler than Doom because Doom is made by raising floors to make walls and other weird restrictions. With Half-Life, it's literally just using Lego blocks. However there are a few rules that you must follow.

Always turn grid snapping on so everything connects.

Always begin every block (a block is called a brush) with a null texture (tells engine to not render) and then apply your real texture to the desired areas where the player will see. This makes sure you are saving as many polys as possible.

Brush surfaces will also subdivide everytime the texture repeats. So do not scale the texture too small or your floor is going to subdivide into hundreds of polys. Subdividing will also occur if brushes intersect in a way where they don't align well, think a pillar brush sitting off center on a tiled floor. My image demonstrates how things should attempt to be grid friendly. Which leads me to my next point.

Since subdivision happens depending on how brushes touch each other, you can make things bypass subdivision by converting world geometry (brush) into an entity (use func_wall for solids, func_illusionary to walk through it.) Entities don't subdivide when they touch world geometry. So why not just turn everything into entities? Because world geometry culls everything you can't see and can cast shadows on the lightmap. If your wall is an entity, it means any objects and polys will still render everything behind that wall, bad for optimization. That wall will also not cast shadow. Making brushes into entity is reserved for making fine details, like my barbed wire, angular yellow stripes, caution sign, and especially the black/white tile floor so it doesn't subdivide the shiny chrome brush right below it.