I recently went through one of my maps and re-made most of the brushes to be divisible by 8 or 16 in as many places as possible.

Also, I made some "blocks" 256x256x256, and applied the corresponding textures to them at a 1:1 ratio,

will this reduce wpoly??

1. They brush is divisible by 16 or 8
2. The texture is a perfect 1:1 fit

It depends. In case of 1:1 textures on 256 brush it will give you 4 wpolies. Because compiler will divide it to max 224pix wide parts.

in my experiance the bigger the texture is the less wpoly ull get. but that may only be true to 1:1

increase to 1.0 reduces wpoly, decreasing to 1.0 increases it.

oh man...

we have debated this one over the years. over a year ago (i think...maybe more recent) we had a big one of these discussions about how he engine splits up 256x256 brushes with screenshots and all...it was a great thread and if i could find it I would post a link.

a major takeaway regarding 256x256 textures was that the engine sort of split at the 240 pixel mark...

lemme try to find that thread if i can.

Tommy14 says ...

http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/tex-dimensions.htm

I think you can change this setting with the -subdivide command parameter for zhlt. Never used it though so i dont know for sure if it works properly, but the zhlt readme says you can set it up to 512 if u like.

Software renderer refuse to work with higher than default values. Don't know really why but AFAIK maps should be compatible with it.
As for bumping value upper than 256 you risk incompatibility with many older video accelerators. They don't support textures larger than 256.
I you want to make your map public. you should keep with these rules.

Last I saw of the steam census there were a less than .5% of people playing in software mode. So if 256 subdivide works then I think it'd be pretty safe to use. But I'd get a variety of people with different scales of computers to test it all out first.