I have made a huge (12,000 units vertically, more horizontally) downtown set for my machinima. It is comprised of about six blocks of 20-90 story buildings. It takes up most of the hammer grid.

And i want to make it functional. Currently, it compiles slow and crashes with (too many verts for DYNAMIC_VERTEX_BUFFER) ingame. I've already used nodraw textures on most places, and have minimized skybox size. I've been looking into vis and portal optimization, which i still dont fully understand, but nothing ive seen seems like it would work on such an open map (ex - hint brushes seem designed for rooms and corridors)

I'm wondering what any hammer users here could tell me about optimizing a huge open map without getting rid of the six core blocks.

I created the custom maps for Shelf Life and Charles house map had problems compiling and also crashed with errors. It is not that huge but something about the way I created the landscape or something caused problems.

The only way I could fix it was to turn a lot of things into func_detail .

The map works perfectly for us to load and film in but I don't know if what I did is the best thing to do for a map you are releasing.

I assume you were looking here: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Visibility_optimization#Detail_brushes

Under the detail brush section is what I am talking about.

I still have a lot to learn about optimization so I don't really know the best ways to optimize huge maps, sorry.

Thanks. There's not that much stuff which is valid to be detail though, most brushes are the buildings themselves. I'm not releasing it by the way, its my own special set for a series.