Very large meshes and gunshots

[Clueless Newbie]

I'm working on a map which is one big room with two giant meshes (landscape) with rocks and stuff scattered around. (no, this is not Caverna)

The framerate is between 60-200, depending on where I am on the map. But if I fire the shotgun into the ground/mesh the fps drops to single digits. Shots fired in to the sky have no such effect.

What causes this? How can I fix it? The level is playable as long as nobody shoots.. ;p

[Spaceman]

Does it also happen to other people playing your map? Could it be a driver problem?

[Clueless Newbie]

Does it also happen to other people playing your map? Could it be a driver problem?

There are no other people on the map. Just me, all by myself.

(and no servers are hosting this thing)

[leileilol]

Did you try turning off decals?

[Clueless Newbie]

Did you try turning off decals?

Tried it just now. Made no difference. Turned off everything else while I was at it. Still no improvement.

[torus]

Are they .ase models, or something else?

[Clueless Newbie]

Are they .ase models, or something else?

The map has three types of components:
1: The outer box, brushes, which are solid.
2: Two huge meshes that cover the entire floor of the map.
3: Some detail brushes scattered around on the meshes.

Plus a skybox, which in addition to the box itself also has a mesh - to provide a distant landscape. I'm currently building a version of the map without the skybox mesh, just to see whether there is any improvement.

The "map info" in radiant tells me that the map has 160 brushes and 34 entities.

[torus]

No, I meant- are the models .ase or some other format? iirc (but maybe not), there is a size limit to .md3 models.

[TVR]

The 'radiant, and I suppose it's derivative games are extremely buggy in handling meshes over 512 qu... this means that you need to either split up those meshes, or better yet, replace them with tri-soups.

Don't use detail brushes as so; structural brushes block visibility, therefore they will increase FPS by limiting what is drawn on screen.

[What you've been told about detail brushes is a lie, they actually reduce compile time at the expense of in-game FPS]

[Clueless Newbie]

The 'radiant, and I suppose it's derivative games are extremely buggy in handling meshes over 512 qu... this means that you need to either split up those meshes, or better yet, replace them with tri-soups.

What's a "tri-soup"? And how does one split up a mesh?

Don't use detail brushes as so; structural brushes block visibility, therefore they will increase FPS by limiting what is drawn on screen.

On the other hand, structural brushes create portals(?) and they can - if I understood correctly - reduce the framerate. But I'll try reverting all the brushes to structural brushes and see what happens.