There are spots and places and faces in my map that only spectator can see. How much should I worry about detail in these places if I know player will never get there. Should I texture certain faces (as opposed to putting caulk on them) even if I know that only the spectator will be able to see them or should I not take the spectator under consideration at all.
Basically, what’s the etiquette on spectator.
A lot of mappers will use clip brushes to bring the “spectator ceiling” down to a reasonable height–this not only frees you from the worries of “what can the spectator see?” but also allows you to caulk parts of your map that you might have had to texture otherwise.
I’m not talking just about the extrema of the map. I mean like little things too that are on the players path, and he can go all around them but he can’t see certain parts of it from any of his accessible positions. A quick exmaple of this are the tops of the high floor windows in goldrush. These tops are actually just caulked by SD even though spectator can see them. This is just one example but there are always little things like this (top of a pole for example) that spectator can see but the player can’t.
Anyway I just wanted some opinions on this since it’s mostly a question of esthetics and it doesn’t really affect the feel of the map. I know that you should try to caulk as much as possible, but should you actually completely ignore what the spectator sees? After all most people will fly around in spectator mode for a while when they first get your map and first impressions are important.
I wouldnt be overly concerned with dressing up the map for the specator…within reason of course. People can always load the map with /devmap and then run around with /noclip on. 
Dont worry about it. Just caulk the unseen faces from the players point of view and lower the .bsp size.
That’s probably the thing to do. For most things like this it’s usually only the maker that notices them. I made it so I know they’re there but a player will never even think about it.
I was wondering this too.
The official RTCW mappers caulked just about everything that players couldn’t see, but SD don’t seem to do it as much.
Also seen some people on here talking about it like it was a bug for specs to get hall of mirrors.
I go by the rule that players are the ones using the map, spectators are just spectators and if they want to look at the walls, outscirts and other stuff than the game going on then fine…i dont make maps for spectating i do it for the ones actually playing.
Well you should give the spectator some consideration. It makes the map look more professional i think. I don’t like on some of these custom maps where the spectator can go so high you see the whole map and the void (well not void but skybox) outside of it. Some maps you can even find holes here and there and get out of the player map and wonder around in the sky box. The SD maps on the other hand are almost perfectly clipped. You can wonder around in them for hours and never find a flaw, or a spot that they ignored. Of course if you run it a as a devmap you can see the outside as well but we’re talking about standard spectator.
P.S.
Some people are putting their sky too high. Don’t do that. Put it only a little higher than your tallest structure, the shader for it can be made to look like it’s further away than it seems.