Attempting to map for Unreal Engine 2

[Blastfrog]

http://i.imgur.com/Zjy4RFL.jpg

I'm recreating E1M1 by hand in Postal 2. However, I've not done much brush based stuff, so my work is a little... unoptimized. I've been screwing around with cube brushes and occasional butchering with the vertex editing tool. In order to make less orthogronal shapes and have some faces be textured separately, I've ended up with more brushes than I should have.

I've tried using this guide for merging them, but it doesn't work. Shift clicking doesn't do anything, and no matter which brushes I have selected, they just won't merge.

What am I doing wrong here?

[Nomad]

Unoptimized how? Does it lag? Brushed base mapping is quite a bit less picky about things than Doom with all your visplane limits and whatnot. Things can bug out if brushes overlap, but that's about it.

I never could quite wrap my mind around the subtractive method that UnrealEd does mapping (creating negative space in an infinite solid) though so I don't know if it has any special limitations for faces. Quake/Goldsrc/Source's building blocks style always made more sense to me. I do remember something about the compiler breaking each face down into triangles by vertex, though, and that could sometimes cause issues if you don't plan for it correctly, but that might be unique and/or obsolete issue--it's been a while. [Edit} Looking at that wiki it looks like the Polycount is what I'm thinking about, and from what that said it's not really that big of a deal unless you're compulsive about it--especially considering the systems these days.

[Blastfrog]

It causes the lightmap to screw up somehow, lighting the adjacent surfaces slightly differently. It would also make it much easier to texture stuff. Given Postal 2's already very buggy nature, I'd imagine it will treat decals inconsistently too.