I'm making a map which is insanely huge (for garrysmod, but this is a hammer issue, not a Portal issue), has 2 superb high towers, 1 very deep pit and a very large flat grass which can slide aside with the press of a button to make room for water.

Problem is, at bsp compiling it yells to me that I've reached my Max Vertexes. It won't compile the bsp and will just quit the compiling progress.

What excactly are vertexes? how can I optimize to create less vertexes?and what is the actual limit of the vertexes?

I might wanna down on using the carve tool so much, if this is caused by using carve tool.

A vertex is the point of geometry that defines a corner. For instance a cube has 8 vertexes (or is it vertices?). 4 on top and 4 on the bottom.

I'm pretty sure that the only vertices that count are the ones created in hammer. So world geometry, func_detail, func_brush and stuff like that adds to the vertex count. I think displacements might add to it as well.

As far as reducing them goes, well you'll have to combine brushes into single ones as much as you can to lower the number or the problem could be that theres too many vertexes visible to the player at any one time. I'm not really sure but if you can copy the compile log and post it then we can get a much clearly picture of whats going on.

Also this is a portal mapping site so these questions should really be asked else where or better yet search to see if anyones having the same problem, that way you don't have to wait for a reply.

Hope you fix it anyway

I am also a portal mapper and I've asked some questions regarding portal before, just now I had a small issue with the hammer editor.

It's fixed though, I had a very messy hill in the middle. It was a complete mess with many different brushes. I cleaned up that and now it works.

After a bit fiddling around further with the map... the game crashes after loading the map. I guess it's my PC which needs a reboot, but if anyone has seen this before, games crashing after loading map, I would like to know when they appear to avoid them in the future.

I guess the amount of vertexes is the amount of triangles of the final bsp.

I have 4 towers now and when I added immensly long bridges between them, the problem of the limit returned.
I took a close look at how the towers were build. I saw that I could remove over 50% of the brushes used in the construction of the tower. However, after doing this for a whole tower, it didn't change the 'max vertexes reached' error.

After removing the very low-detail bridges consisting of in total 18 brushes, the max vertexes dissapeared. This is why I guess that the amount of vertexes is the amount of surfaces or triangles on the final bsp file.

I wonder if the size of a surface matters anything. Or the total volume of the brushes. This might also cause 'max vertexes reached' because these factors didn't change when I optimized the tower.

I'm going to try make the map details look simpler. I really want at least 2 of them bridges in my map. It's really a cool garrysmod map. Especially with Stargates, because of its total size.