Okay, I have this huge dilemma with the cs_fallingwater map.
Until today, I hadn't properly decided which brushes would be world brushes and which would be func_detailed. Which means I never ran a full VIS of the map (not even the HL2 version) because it took many hours.
Today I turned basically ALL of the brushes in the house to func_detail. VIS only takes 59 seconds now, but a normal RAD can be somewhere between an hour or two. If you add HDR, it takes more than twice.
Bad optimization = long VIS
Good optimization = full VIS = long RAD.
By turning everything to func_detail, several lighting problems have shown up, mainly sunlight affecting parts of brushes that should be in shadow. Solving this is possible and I have worked on it.
However, performance is still far from optimal. I have placed several occluders throughout the map, which hide only some models. Trees, for example, are never hidden by the occluders!!! I have checked the budget with r_occlussion 1 and 0, but there seems to be hardly any change in the fps. On top of that, the occluders that seem to work stop doing so when you get too close to them. For example, if you are on the first floor directly below the hostages in the 2nd floor, they suddenly appear in the wireframe even with the occluder and a world brush between them and the player.
I don't know exactly how the performance compares with the beta, but my guess is that even turning the furniture into props won't help much. I really don't know what to do.
Any ideas on why the occluders don't want to hide certain types of models?
