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Originally Posted by Lt Llama
But to make it real simple for a hint brush noob like me, is this a correct assumtion?:
If mat_wireframe 2 renders things you can't see you can and should block those areas with hint brushes
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It's not correct, at least not in the way you are thinking. Before you can use a hint you must understand visleafs. All the space in your map is broken up into boxes called visleafs during compile. During the vvis part of the compile, all the leafs (leaves?) are tested for each other for line-of-sight(LOS) and the results are stored in the map. This is to save the game from having to do real-time visibilty testing, which is a huge load on the CPU. All it has to do is look at what leaf the player is in, then render everything that can be seen from that leaf.
The problem is that's not very precise. Sometimes the leafs are very big and extend to where it has line-of-sight into another area of the map. (Typing
mat_leafvis 1 in the console gives you a visual of the leaf you are in.)
The purpose of a hint face is to force all leafs to get clipped off so that the above does not happen.
Look at this. in an outdoor map the leafs tend to extend all the way up to the sky, as in the left image. What this means is that when you stand on one side of the hill, what's rendered is identical to what would be rendered if you were up in the sky. The engine considers the two forts to have LOS to each other, even though they really don't.
If you use a hint like I've illustrated, you limit the height of the leafs on the ground, where the player is likely to spend most of his time. Now there's no way for the forts to have LOS each other.
(FYI a portal is the name for a side of a leaf. They don't have anything to do with areportals. Vis actually tests portals for LOS, not the whole leaf at once. You don't need to know this)