Where and When do i use Hint brushes? Created 3 years ago2021-04-28 21:49:08 UTC by BachoAUB5

so I've been recently going through .rmf files of already made maps, and noticed that most of them, if not all of them, have too many hint brushes
I'm a bit confused with where i should put the brushes, what face must the hint texture be on, and do they really matter?
tutorials didn't do much for me

any help is appreciated

They matter, of course, but they have to be used properly. They are used to make a forceful cut in a map so that the engine does less rendering at a point in time (Depending on the position of the player). I never used them and my opinion is if you make your map well enough with the usual methods you wont ever need to use them either (Especially today, unless you are mapping for older hardware).

Hint brushes give you some control over how a map is split up into vis nodes by the compile tools. The 'HINT' side creates a new splitting plane, the 'SKIP' sides are ignored. In some cases you can improve performance by strategically breaking up nodes. Personally I think they're rarely needed if you keep limiting visibility in mind when designing a layout.

Here's a very crude example, showing a U-shaped corridor from above:

┌──────┐                ┌──────┐      ┌──┬───┐      ┌──────┐      ┌──┬───┐
└──┐   │  splits into:  └──┬───┤  or  └──┤   │  or  └──┬───┤  or  └──┤   │
┌──┘   │                ┌──┴───┤      ┌──┴───┤      ┌──┤   │      ┌──┤   │
└──────┘                └──────┘      └──────┘      └──┴───┘      └──┴───┘

As shown above, there are multiple ways in which this corridor can be split up into vis nodes. In the first 3 cases, every node is visible from any other node. But in the last case, the top-left node is not visible from the bottom-left node, and vice versa. With a hint brush, you can force the compile tools to produce that particular space partitioning.

thanks for the explanations!
helped a lot