[Crizz]

for testing I suggest:

bsp as it is (blank)
vis: -fast
light: -fast -bounce 0

-bounce 0 makes it very fast!
I´ve compiled DesertBase-final with:
bsp: -blocksize 512 (the -sand version with the default 1024)
vis: (blank)
light: -final -bounce 0

I´ve chosen bounce 0, because the regular final produced unwelcome light fx. Touching brushes, although with the same texture on it, didn´t look like one wall. You could clearly see where the brushes touch each other, arrrghh. With -bounce 0 this effect was reduced. These light errors aren´t visible with -fast but -fast has bad shadows and doesn´t compress the light that well (also bad for performance a very little!? - but no idea why!)

Time to complete: I had around 410.000 vds for the -sand and approximately 2 hours for the vis compiling. The -final with blocksize 512 took 18hours vis compiling(1.800.000 vds).
Nothing compared to my first attempt back in may: 4 days for 275.000 vds!! It´s very important how you build a map, and not only how large is the vds.

Crizz