off topic stuff:
ratty: I hope your eyes get better, mapping with impaired vision cannot be easy, especially with the long hours that is required.
thanks sock and since I`ve lived with a cataract (a clouded, opaque lens) in one eye for several years, I got pretty used to it so kept putting off the op to get it fixed.
but what was more alarming was recently I started loosing vision in both eyes in the form of sporadic blurring of my vision, some days it was so bad I couldn`t read or work at all, other days it was perfectly fine and I could work for 12 hours or more with no problems.
after a few tests we found this was being caused by a vitamin a deficiency, which was apparently easy to cure, I`d just have to eat a few carrots every day... and somewhat surprising this does work very well, so luckily I didn`t need any prescribed medicine or even high does vitamin tablets, both of which would of come with their own risks.
anyway, after that little scare, I decided to finally get the cataract fixed and already their is some improvement, so with the blurring cleared up as well, all is working out well for me it seems ...it also has made me really appreciate the days when I could work, or game even more then before :)
sorry all that is very off topic ...however if anyone else here can one day benefit from what I went through, then I hope it was worth me mentioning, but I`ll get back on topic now, before I sound too narcissistic.
on topic stuff:
Originally I used nicely cut alpha fade brushes in my map, but after a while I could not see what was going on due to all the overlapping brushwork everywhere. Then I experimented with excessive use of the alpha fade brushes and ended up with very un-natural looking terrain. You can still see the results of my excessive alpha fade brushwork in the canyon area of my example map. The best solution I found was to use very few alpha brushes and only when the blends needed them.
that does make sense, and I have too noticed my radiant windows getting more cluttered since using alpha volume blending, but the results can be worth it so I`m not complaining, just like yourself, trying to find the best uses for it and not get too carried away, similar to my use of shader stages ...at first it was tempting to pile on as many effects as I could find, but I`m trying to optimize my maps more and if I can make a tex which saves on shaders then I`m trying that route atm, although I hope I don`t abuse that engine resource either.
One thing I did find useful when viewing a lot of alpha fade brushwork at once in the editor, was to use the region function. It is much easier to work with smaller sections of the map than the whole thing at once. I also used the farplane clipping tool in the editor as well.
I too use the region function a lot, for example, to select say the alpha volume brushes and perhaps a just few brushes either side of a blend, I find it makes the work much easier to see from different angles in radiant`s 3d window, as well as editing the brushes around without tons of other parts of the map obscuring what I`m working on, plus it helps radiant`s screen refresh.
I`m not familiar with the farplane clipping tool, do you mean the 'cubic clipping' or is this some new feature to radiant? I`m using the 138 et version for both et and ja which I recently started mapping with the latter.
The alpha brush “poles” idea was so that I could see the edge of the terrains easier and the angle of the paths. I spoke to ydnar on several occasions about if there was any overhead for using this method and he said no. Plus it is very quick and easy way for creating blends and moving paths/borders around.
understood and I will definitely try your method :)
If you have been using Alpha fade/Dotproduct2 already, your current map will look different with the new compiler. It much easier now to predict what is going to happen with the terrain but it does require a different approach to layout.
I`ve personally been doing a ton of work with both of those, and have now updated the q3map2 dev build link in my forum sig and dl q3map 2.5.16 although I haven`t done any mapping since my op, but next time I do I`ll see if I can tell the difference caused by the reordering of the blending functions, and hopefully won`t have too much difficulty updating my map files.
can I ask how you heard ydnar was going to do this? ...I know he spends less time in this forum now, but is he going to carry on updating his dev thread at the top of this forum? ...I`m not complaining as long as someone posts the updated info in here, as I don`t really want to start hanging out in another forum.
and do you think ydnar will keep the ordering this way now, or is this just a test? ...I don`t mind either way, just curious :)
ratty
…although I
…but soon I`ll have proper use of both my eyes again for the first time in years 
