If you have any mapping-related problems, use this thread to ask them, rather than creating a whole new thread. This is not the place for requests. If you want to request a map to be found/made, create a new thread. Do not post screenshots in this thread unless they are related to an error or question.
Figured I’d make a new one asap before questions start flooding in, since I made the old one close
nice thread title scrub, can a mod fix it?
Hey there!
so I’ve been working on my first Hammer map for my community, spending roughly 10 hours a day for a period of 1 month. I’ve recently completed the map and it ran flawlessly in single-player with fairly average optimization via hint brushes/farZ. Upon dropping my map on the server everything was fine, however, once my playerbase hit roughly 35-40, many players had an abrupt drop of FPS all the way down to 0 - followed by the freezing and crashing of their Garry’s mod client. One user reported a prompt stating “can’t load lump XXXX bytes”.
I’ve been very frustrated in trying to fix this issue, I figured it was an optimization problem at first, and so, I’ve done things as i’ve stated above (nodrawing unseen brushes/proper skybox/skip-hints in proper locations) but the problem continues to haunt me. If anybody has any idea as to how I could go about tackling this issue, I would be extremely happy to learn.
The compile log shows no errors other than a quadruple log of “zero area child patch” which I was notified can generally be ignored. I could not determine the location of the problem.
EDIT: in the previous thread I was asked to attach a screenshot of the map. I will do so now:
Sounds like a pretty bad error and not one I’d recommend ignoring, I suppose you can try using the cordon tool in smaller sections of the map until you find the area of brushes that cause this.
Could also (though probably not) be the gamemode the server is using?
No, I only used visclusters in the area between the top of my map and the skybox - ensuring that they do not come in touch with anything else.
Would you care to explain to me how to grab the “map info tab”? thank you!
asfar as an image of my map with wireframe enabled, I will do so first thing when I get home.
I will go ahead and try utilizing the cordon tool to pinpoint the source of that error, thank you for your suggestion. I was trying to avoid it the best I can as it seems like an incredibly tedious process, and I have no idea what to look after.
I crossed out the option of my gamemode being the issue, as I explained why in my response to taz0.
As I’ve stated in my thread, I am using zclipping for optimization, specifically, the value is at 5000. All the tress in the image are indeed static props.
While I did gather that much about the error (and yes, that is the correct error) I have been running my servers for 3-4 years, with a steady average of 40-50 users online at a time (100+ at peak times) and have never experienced such error by any user up until switching to my map. So i’d beg to argue differently.
Something like the vmt below should work. The main trick here is to use normalmaps with different reflective properties. “$normalmapalphaenvmapmask” will give the texture stronger reflections the more opaque its normalmap is, and conversely almost transparent normal maps will have barely visible reflections.
Personally, if I was just making out of brushes, I would use the clip tool to cut up the wall then use the vertex edit tool to shape the brushes. If I have time tonight I can see about making a short video clip to explain better