Adding brushes to maps

This is an idea that I've played around with only a few times over the past couple of years.

Basically, I decompile a .bsp (unless I have the .map, which is very rare), and add some brushes. It doesn't matter what they are, but it would be something like text, to substitute tracking in another program. Of course, the workability of this is very slim, because it's rare that the .map is available, and decompiling a .bsp is very buggy: Texture co-ordinates, lights, and a number of other things are lost, which makes cleaning up the .map not really worth it. There are cases where the .map, along with the compiling settings (!!!!) are available, though, and in these cases, it's very worth it to at least try this.

I'm going to figure out just how doable this is. I made an empty box, recorded a demo of me walking around in it, then added some "TEXT" (I made a few brushes and shaped them so they spelled out the word "TEXT"), and recompiled. However, I decided to play around with the compiler settings, and NOT using -fast on the light stage is just ridiculous. This map has a total of 16 brushes and one entity, but the light stage has been processing for at least ten minutes.

The demo wasn't really what I wanted, and I recorded it on the map without the text, so I'm re-recording it with the one that has text, then duplicating the demo and changing the mapname so I have one demo for each .bsp, which is a waste of time but if I were to give this to someone else, it would be necessary.

I'm curious to see how this works out, though I don't expect it to be any different from what I expect. This room only has one vis leaf, and it hasn't been retextured or anything, so it doesn't really matter much how it works out. It would be much more fruitful if I retextured a map with actual structure and multiple vis leafs, for realistic testing. I'm not nearly skilled enough to do that, however, so it's going to happen my way.