Hammer Editor Displacement Help Thread

Hello, I am doing a few maps for a Starfox mod and need some help.
Here is the situation:
The player is in a flying vehicle, the Arwing, and is supposed to fly around mountains and rough terrain and shoot targets down. To make said terrain, i simply use the displacement tool to make what we need. When I go to compile and test the map, the compiler takes a loong time, I figured this would be true because of the many weird shapes and faces that the vis program has to calculate. I then tried tying the mountains to an entity, func_detail. When I run this new setup, the compiler crashes saying something about an entity missing. The compile window shows it for a split second and then dissapears, i'm unable to read the whole error message. I am wondering if its something in the code, or if there is even an easier way to make mountains without being a horribly large resource hog.

Well depending on the level of detail that you are using for the mountains you may be able to use static mesh props would just have to make sure you have collisions on them.

Also this is a common problem when applying func_detail to any kind of brush with a displacement a way to solve it would be to do the following, but this resets all the displacements. If you do this you will then have a clean brush that wont cause the error again.

Select the brush that is causing the issue:

1. Turn off "Disp mask solid"
2. Go to the Auto visgroups, untick everything, then tick Func Detail.
3. Select all (Ctrl+A), then go to the Face Edit tool
4. Select the Displacement tab, then click Destroy.

The only drawback here is that if the displacement was one you'd spent time and effort on, it'll now be back to a flat brush.

Quote pulled from:
Forums.tf2maps.net

Hope that helps!

Edited by: ShiftedDesign

You said you changed it into func_detail? Man that's where the problem is. If I've got it right, It's invalid to change a displacement block into entiny. But when i use displacement block, my vis didn't take too long, so i guess there's some else problems.