K.  I've been compiling this map for more than a month now.  It's not until Monday that I started running into problems with brushes not showing up.  At the corner of the map, above the player(s) are a set of long train tracks.  Where the tracks end and the sky begins, the textures and brushes smear.  Buildings made from boxes don't show up (no booleanswere used), cars with an invisible shootable over it don't show up, etc.  And it's only in this corner.  Everything else I've done is perfect.  Any ideas on what is/are causing this and how to fix it are greatly appreciated.

did u make them detail?? if so hit ctrl + d to make sure there not hiden

if not they may be corrupt, if ur using gdk run bobs tools the brush clean up one and it should fix it

there are textures on the building, yes.  What I originally did was copy/paste the building so there were 3 of the same in different locations.  There's also a street in front of the building that doesn't show up either now that I think about it.  I've had no luck with gtkradiant so I stick with the sof2mpsdk.  I'm currently trying to lower the poly count to see if that does anything.  About the brush cleanup, in the sdk there are the Rogue brush repair items... purge evil polys, remove duplicate planes, etc...

back up ur map and try the tools and see if they do anything.

if not u will need to open the map in notepad and look for iregularitys, like serch for ur road texture and see if there still there and see if anything is wrong with them.

I had a similar problem and posted it on the SP MOD forum. My problem was the that the brushes in question were tagged as detail brushes, although I had made only one of them a detail brush. Usually during as single session of Radiant the title bar of the 3d view window will say that "detail brushes have been excluded". Unfortunately, if you close radient while the brushes are hidden, the next time you open it won't give you the heads up that they are still hidden.

K.

I finally found the problem... all due to one street I had created; it wasn't right on top of the ground plane like it's supposed to be.  It had been raised somehow which caused not only the street to disappear but buildings and curbs touching it and the ceiling to smear in one corner.  

Oh ya, FYI, the 'smearing' effect you saw is also known as Hall Of Mirrors or HOM for short. You can get the HOM effect from bad visibility calculations or allowing a caulked face to be visible.

One more question.  The map I'm creating is about 5000x5000 pixels; fairly large.  Now, I don't have a whole lot of brushes that block line of sight.  A good deal of the map you can see from corner to corner.  Is this why the map's really laggy and choppy when it's played across the network?  I've tried putting up a few long and tall walls to cut down on that.

The more of your map that is visible at once, the slower it will run. To have a look at what exactly is being renderered, start your map in developer mode by opening your map using the devmap <mapname> command. Then, once the map loads, type developer 1, and then r_showtris 1. This will draw the map in wireframe, showing all of the polys that are being rendered. Also, for an accurate count, type r_speeds 1.

Through effective caulking and brushwork you can reduce the amount of polys overall. By using hint brushes, you can increase the performance of visibility. There is too much to explain here, and I would suggest looking at some tuts about it.

Ok.  I've redone a few portions of the map which have dramatically reduced lagging.  However, when it rains it pours... I added one last house and it doesn't show up in gameplay.  Now, also, the streets and random objects disappear and reappear.  I caulked the undersides of the streets that touch the ground that aren't seen.  I think this may be part of my problem.  Another question:  Is there a megabyte limit on bsp's?  Mine is currently at 12.5MB and it doesn't seem to change no matter how many more objects I place in the map.  Even after adding that complete house it's still at the same size.