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Back in the day I made a lot of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament maps. The Unreal Editor was a lot buggier than Radiant but the workflow was far superior. You could bang out a floor plan quite fast with the subtractive approach. No caulk textures to deal with either (a special texture that the renderer ignored for the sides of the boxes used to create the walls that the player never sees).
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Couldn't this be solved by "map compilation"? IIRC, Hammer etc. did something like that. Occluded faces were removed.
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I know nothing about this scene, but interested to know more. I remember hearing that Unreal Tournaments engine used this subtractive model internally so it is not strictly editor ux decision?
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I don't know what Unreal Tournament did use internally, it's hard to investigate, since there is no (official) source code release for it. But I do know, that brush-based (additive) approach isn't strictly necessary for creating maps for Quake/Quake II/Quake III, it's technically possible to write a map compiler taking maps in some subtractive format. The reason why it's not done (or at least not common) is because it's not a trivial task and because existing infrastructure adds some friction.
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