I'm still getting the 'hollowed effect' when looking at something through an outside brush. What am I doing wrong?

mywebpages.comcast.net/cthulu/outside.zip

i don't think u can fix that...only way i know is to change the sky and cealing arond...make the short room with a cealing and the bigger room with the sky...

Your problem comes from a logistics point of view.

Sky textures are not blocking textures.. they are to be used at the outside extremes. What you've asked the engine to do is to place a texture at the extreme outside, and then you've built something behind it.

Sky is not really at it's extreme oustide at this point.

If you're looking to block out the view of the other building, this cannot be done with a sky texture.. you must use a structural brush in order to achieve that effect.

Either move the bigger building downwards to remove it from the view from the open air of the smaller one, or move the sky texture behind the big building and add a texture to it's outside..

If you still have troubles lemme know and I'll post up 2 versions of your map with my suggestions made to it.

I put up two solid 'walls' that should have blocked off the view of the other building. But it didn't seem to work. I understand the whole point of skies being at the 'extreme' outside -- however, I just wanted to know if what I was doing was POSSIBLE to remedy without making things a large mess. If it's not possible, then hey, nothing you can do about that. I just didn't want to encompass the whole board within a large 'skybox' if I didn't have to. ;P

Thus far I haven't found anyone that could remedy that situation..

I always have to encompass the entire map in a huge skybox to get it to work.

Funny enough tho... I haven't had it ruin compile times or fps yet tho.. Just seems to work for me lol

Well see, that's the thing -- when I first was goofing around with skies, to fix the problem I DID just put a skybox over/around the entire level. No framerate or compile problems at all. However, I was running it on a fairly powerful computer, and thought that perhaps someone with a slower machine might run into problems. I had also been told/thought that including a huge 'encompassing box' like that was bad practice. And that's why I was trying to figure out a more 'precise' solution for this problem. However, if you seem to say it's ok, then I'll take your word for it: you seem to know much more about this whole mapping deal than I do. :D

I've got a new map that I'm just tweaking right now.. real small map again, good for the 2-6 people range..

this will be one with a huge encompassing sky box so when its out.. d/l and tell me if you have framerate probs..

Sometimes I forget about the smaller machines so I never get to find these probs out..

I'm running P4 1.4 w/512mb SDRAM 133, GeForce2 MX200. :)

The machine I was using was a XP2100+ with 1gb of DDR333 and a GF4ti4600...

However, THIS machine is an ole p3450, 288mb ram, GF4mx4200...so I'll definately let you know if I have any framerate problems on this machine.