Func detail

Template:Entity It creates a brush that does not affect visibility or cause other brushes to be chopped. All brushwork that does not form the 'backbone' of the world (and that is not tied to a real entity) should be detail.

Valve provides an example map at sourcesdk_content\hl2\mapsrc\sdk_func_detail.vmf. You can also load up the HL2 map sources and hide detail brushes with their auto visgroup to see where Valve used them.

Tip:Alternatively, use the console variable r_drawfuncdetail 0 to hide detail brushes in any map while it is running.

Effects

The point of creating a detail brush entity is to avoid creating an unnecessary number of visleaves for a mere detail of the map, hence the name of the entity. VBSP will allow visleaves to overlay details, and thus minimize visleaves and compile time.

Above are a world brush (left cylinder) and a detail brush (right cylinder). The blue lines are visleaf boundaries. The world brush has chopped the map into nine oddly-shaped segments, leading to longer compile times and marginally lower performance, while the detail brush has not changed anything.

Caveats

• Detail brushes cannot be used to seal a map, or areaportal areas.
• Because detail brushes do not chop world brushes, light can seep underneath them if the other surface's lightmap scale is larger than the detail brush is wide/tall. If you encounter this, manually slice the underlying brush in two (with ⇧ Shift+X).
  Confirm:Doesn't VBSP merge coplanar faces to optimize world geometry (like HLCSG), making slicing the underlying brush pointless?
  • This effect can cause detail brushes with lots of surface contact to become inefficient, because the surface beneath them is being rendered too!
  • Detail brushes do chop each other, however.
• Surfaces on very thin (about 2 units thick) detail brushes have been known to disappear at certain distances. As a workaround, use func_brush instead.
• World brushes with translucent and/or transparent materials applied, or which are displacements, will be treated as detail, and cannot seal areas.
  • World brushes w/ translucent material will still chop leaves, but to no effect.

Confirm:Translucent world brushes might be able to use the BSP tree to assist in alpha sorting, like in Quake II, unlike detail brushes, displacements, and entities.

• Detail brushes will, in some cases, merge faces with other detail brushes, and on occasion, world brushes, which can cause them to create leaves.
• Under normal conditions, any time a detail brush contacts a world brush, VBSP will note the junction and optimize it. This connection is known alternately as a T-junction and a water index, and there is a limit to the number of T-Junctions VBSP will attempt to fix (65,535). Excessive use of detail brushes in contact with world geometry could cause VBSP to abort compilation with an error. Using the -notjunc option will skip this optimization at the price of possible visual inconsistencies.

Note:Water, for unknown reasons, causes the t-junction count to skyrocket. Removing/reshaping bodies of water can overcome this.

Good candidates

There's not much left of City 17 Trainstation Plaza once we remove detail brushes (and props). Valve has missed a few world brushes as well...

Any brush which doesn't significantly block the player's view should probably be detail. Specific examples include:

• Pillars, plinths and supports
• Free-standing walls
• Suspended walkways
• Steps (create a smooth wedge-shaped world brush underneath)
• Small buildings
• Rotated brushes
• Very small or thin brushes

Keyvalues

Minimum / Maximum DX Level (mindxlevel / maxdxlevel) <integer choices> (removed since )

The entity will not exist if the engine is running outside the given range of DirectX Versions.

Choices

Warning:If these are used, the object may break when the user switches their DirectX settings.[missing string] 0 - Default (no bounding) 60 - DirectX 6 (!FGD for mindxlevel) 70 - DirectX 7 80 - DirectX 8 (GeForce4 Ti & FX 5000 series) 81 - DirectX 8.1 (GeForce FX 5800, 5900 & Radeon 8500/9100 and 9000/9200) 90 - DirectX 9 Shader Model 2 92 - OpenGL аналогичен DirectX 9 Shader Model 2 (using ToGL; only) !FGD 95 - DirectX 9 Shader Model 3 (in all games since ) 98 - DirectX 9 Shader Model 3 on Xbox 360 ( only) !FGD

See also

• Optimization (level design)