User:Pinsplash/Reoptimizing maps

CSGO: Nuke
I'm making an edit of this map, so I've been getting a good look at how this funky map tries to keep you from lagging.

Areaportals
Every opening has an areaportal on it. Every. Single. One. The map is pretty fine in this regard, but there are a few huge portals outside the play space in the Outside area which hide almost nothing at all. I had no clue what they're for and deleted them. There's a single areaportal over the windows to an inaccessible room in Tunnels. It does have a lot going on in it, so a portal on it seems warranted.

Doors throughout the map have their areaportals open all the time. They could be changed to be closed at the appropriate times, if the OnBreak output wasrealthanksvalve.

Func_detail
Func_detailing is done well in this map. It's basically as good as you can get it.

The scaffolding on B Site was detail, but I made it world again so that player models wouldn't render through it.

Occluders
Most occluders in the map are around the main part of the building and hide things around corners and on the roof pretty well. One in CT Spawn is pretty useless because there's an areaportal right next to it doing the same job. This occluder does catch just a few things the portal doesn't, but the benefit is still marginal from any angle. One near Roof was replaced with an angled hint, and then a different occluder.

Hints I added did make the occluders less useful than before, but the delta wasn't worth the extremely bloasted compile, so I ended up extending the occluders surrounding A Site to catch even more objects than they previously did. It might work even better than the hints.

Hints
Of course, what is a Valve map without 50 useless ? ...Oh, sorry, 271. Imagine Silent Hill, but the fog is PURPLE. There is not a single angled hint in the entire map. There are countless hints accomplishing nothing due to the areaportals everywhere. (Remember, areaportals are like moving hints, so if you have a hint brush touching an areaportal, really consider if it's a good hint.) I know bashing Valve gets old, but damn is it easy. Valve put nodraw blocks inside Silo for obvious reasons, but it's almost as if they forgot about these, because there are occluders there as well...

I deleted all the original hints because it was simply too much to comb through.

Other
Many props render at illogical times due to poor static prop combining. I spent more than one week fixing this problem only. To fix this, I examined the combined props in Hammer and rebuilt them using their original props. It was unfun. I mostly limited myself to rebuilding props which intersected the floor separating A site and B site, and even then I didn't rebuild every single one because the work was extremely tedious, but I think I've definitely made a positive impact. I was going to recombine the props to reduce the draw calls, but I encountered a fair bit of difficulties and was too fed up with them to bother. All this hassle would have been avoided if Valve had compiled Nuke with, but they did not, so I'm gonna give Valve a fat F- here for combining like idiots. Combining should always consider vis. I've also noticed that VBSP combines props in very counter-intuitive groups in general. For instance, there's an airduct prop in Garage which was combined into a different group than all of the smaller props which surround and literally touch it. You can see this if you go into Secret and look up with. Note to future self: implement combining and uncombining on demand.

The way Valve cut their walls up for adding windows and doors is terrible to work with and adds more brushes than needed. This was easy to fix. The skybox brushes were also a total mess.

There were no func_visclusters, at least in the decompile(?) I added one above the main building's roof, which catches a good number of worthless leaves, but won't exactly save the compile time.