my mate tiddles makes awesome looking maps but he does so much detail he runs out of avaliable brushes/blocks before he's even finished the map.

he says if there were more brushes allowed he would do 10x the detail. just look how good his maps look already (http://www.imagepile.net/index.php?page=view&id=694c91424&name=buffy)

i think quake could really benefit from maps like that. any chance of this ever being raised/changed?

he uses worldcraft so i guess that would have to be edited somehow...i dunno if other map editors are different. hope someone can shed some light on to this problem :]

Uh, to be honest, that map (just like the previous ones) is done very inefficiently. It would be a bad idea to even help such mapping (and make more "detailed" maps run even worse on older hardware or different engines).

edit: And it would be possible to make it look more detailed with the same amount of "r_speeds", I am sure.

i don't really know what you mean exactly, how could he do these maps more efficiently? anyway hardware is constantly updated, and we are trying to update quake right? i don't think some people having old computers is a reason to keep making the same boring-looking maps forever and ever...

The limits are set by the mapping tools. The engine itself doesn't have any hardcoded limits, just limits due to variable sizes.
If its the compiler warning then its an easy tweek if you have the source code (try lhmap).
If its the editor complaining then you're kinda screwed, as the editors are rarly open source.
Making some solids into func_wall might confuse the editor into letting you have more brushes perhaps.

thanks for the informative reply spike i'll look into it and post again

There is no maximum limit on brushes. It's the number of faces/polys that counts.

Engines do have hardcoded limits though: marksurfaces, clipnodes, models, edicts and so on. Some engines have them raised, but they are mostly for single player (DP being somewhat of an exception). QW engines don't really need this as deathmatch maps are usually fairly small. To exceed the common limits, a map has to be either very large or VERY detailed, which hardly any DM map is.

What tiddles probably meant is that adding more details would greatly increase r_speeds (resulting in lower FPS, flickering items and gray spots) which is undesirable for a fast DM map.