Common materials

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Common materials are system textures with a special behavior assigned to them.

	common/caulk A system material designed to 'caulk' or seal a map. In-game, it is a transparent solid texture. It is best applied to all surfaces which a player will be unable to see while in-game. Caulk will block VIS, so it can seal you map from a void. Tip: When you build a brush entity, mark all the brush sides that you will never see with caulk. Otherwise, the game draws every one of them. Also look around your map for brush faces that you suspect are being drawn, but are never seen: door pockets, bars, underneath bridges or very low railings and so on. It may sound like work, but attention to detail like this buys you both the appearance of greater geometric detail in the map AND faster game running speed.
	common/nodraw Non-solid, invisible texture. Just like caulk but additionally it do not block player movement and not making VIS splits.
	common/clip Invisible material which clips movement of players. Do not affects footsteps (footstep tracing skips clipsurfaces to get real material player standing on). Player clip is often useful for "smoothing" out the geometry of the map, preventing the player from snagging on objects.
	common/monsterclip Clip only NPC movement.
	common/fullclip PlayerClip + MonsterClip.
	common/origin Normally brush entities have no origin. Center of brush covered by this textures will set origin of it's parent BModel. This origin is used for movement (path spots) and rotation.
	common/black Black wall, hides any stuff behing it. Dont cast a shadow.
	common/areadisable Black wall on steroids, this also hides any transparent entities, marks, effects.
	common/ilava Invisible, sets brush contents to water. Also used on covering junction sides of water brushes (when making a long river). Water damages the player at slight rate.
	common/islime Invisible, sets brush contents to swamp. Swamp slows down player and damages at slight rate when he moves.
	common/ilava Invisible, sets brush contents to lava. Also used on covering junction sides of lava brushes. Lava damages player at hight rate (even in mist form), very dangerous to walk on.
	common/lightgrid World brush with this texture will make boundaries of entity static lighting. There is no other use.

  Rarely used common materials  

This system materials used to create very special things.

	common/blackshadow Black wall but casts shadows from static lights.
	common/lightblock Invisible surface that blocks lighting.
	common/lighthull Same as lightblock but blocks lighting from inside.
	common/hint Invisible material. Brush marked with this texture will create a portal in visibility tree. Rarely used on the places where general portal creation algorithm was failed to generate a proper vis portals, which caused a game slowdown. See surfaceparm hint.
	common/skip This special textures should be used only on hint brushes (see above for hint texture). Surfaces with this texture will not make VIS splits (so, they are just skipped).
	common/nodraw Caulk that doesnt block visibility data.
	common/dpshadow Invisible wall that cast realtime shadows. Weird.
	dpbihclip This invisible texture is inaccessible from texture window. It is ised on collision meshes to define BIH support with no reatime shadows.
	dpbihplayerclip BIH support + playerclip.
	dpbihclipandshadow BIH support + cast realtime shadows.
	collision This texture should be used with "collision" mesh only used by ODE.

Markers

This materials dont have any effects. Thay are just used to separate things.

	common/trigger All triggers should be marked with this material.
	common/roof Material to cover invisible rooftops on func_roof.
	common/mark1 ... common/mark9 Visible materials with different color to mark various stuff, like light glares, zones.

Unused

This materials are there, but have no functionality.