So are you using hint/skip to fill in doorways to the internals of structures to separate the outside from inside. I guess I'm somewhat confused by the hint/skip. I watched a video of this guy cutting them at corners and such but he didn't fill in doorways and windows can they be used in this way ?
Most of the time I use areaportals to fill my doors and windows, but it depends if I can easily optimize an arena or not, if the doorway lead to a plain and big area, I use an areaportal, if it leads to another small room, I use an hint brush.
Also did you draw a giant skip brush over the whole map ?
The under face is textured as a hint brush, I textured all the other face in skip simply because vvis don't have to cut these. Here is an example :
As you can see, if all your brush is textured in hint, vvis will cut the two sides of the brush, and will make appears another visleaf, the skip texture just say to vvis to simply skip this texture, and will not cut it. You need to put a skip texture on the side of the brush too.
How do you plan on doing your Skybox ? Not talkin a 3D just the regular Skybox brush.
No idea, I will probably do something like that:
I will use an areaportal for this one, because you still can see the other side if you jump high enough.
But be aware that the areaportals use a lot of ressources, especially in multiplayer when the server as to compute every areaportals for every players, that's a lot ! So use them sparingly.