teleporter exits blowing up

Septopus

L1: Registered
Jun 4, 2014
28
3
So, when running through my map, I encountered this weird problem: Whenever I build a teleporter and use it, the teleporter exit blows up und I stay where I am.

I know that this happens when there's not enough space above the exit to prevent getting stuck, but I placed the entries and exits all over the map and tried it in many different places, even complete flat surfaces with plenty of space all around. The only time where the exit doesn't blow up seems to be when I place entry and exit directly next to each other in front of the spawn.

Also I get these messages in console about 20 times when the exit blows up:
Cannot update control point 1 for effect 'teleporter_arms_circle_blue'.
Cannot update control point 0 for effect 'player_sparkles_blue'.

Anyone know what's up? I am kind of at a loss here.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
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We're running into it on snowplow, it's an entity thing. Frozen knows more.

Paging Dr Frozen to the ER.
 

puxorb

L69: Emoticon
aa
Dec 15, 2013
531
798
Played a round of barnblitz yesterday. Same thing happened. I can narrow it down to when, as an engineer, I am either shooting or swinging my wrench while standing on the teleporter exit. (Although, this could only be coincidence). It never seemed to blow up if I was just standing still. I have also encountered this problem while offline with bots, so its a game problem. I have no idea why it has started happening suddenly.
 

Fruity Snacks

Creator of blackholes & memes. Destroyer of forums
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Sep 5, 2010
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There's a few things that were suggested when I mentioned it to Valve.

1) It could possibly be large groups of entities (func_details discluded). If you have a large grouping of entities (Like maybe a bunch of support beams that are func_brush, or func_illusionary) they might sometimes create weird collision meshes between them all. This, then, inturn can cause the check at the teleporter exit to wrongly think that it's going to teleport someone into a wall, or something solid, even though it might not.

2) I originally thought that they were instances. For snowplow, most of the teleporter errors were occuring in stage 2, a map which I had about 5-6 instances in (Thats how I was able to get the weird off-angle geometry). Collapsing instances down didn't solve the problem, but some areas were kind of fixed, so that might be an issue.

3) The issue that WAS the reason for snowplows errors (and technically, still are there) is the trap models. When the trap placeholder models were made, the root of the model was compiled into a weird spot. So a 128x128x256 (xyz) model ended up being like, 2-3 times that in certain directions. This then goes back to point 1 kind of, in that the supposed collision of the model is bigger than it actually is (seriously, the collision isn't that big, but source thinks it is). This is also like the issue you stated where nearby-props can cause this issue. When I removed the traps and tried to place tele's, they worked fine.

Hopefully that helps narrows things down. I can't help much more on the subject until I see the areas of the map where you're having issues and what the environment around them is like.
 

Septopus

L1: Registered
Jun 4, 2014
28
3
Thanks for the replies.

I tracked back what I changed since it started happening, turns out it was some weird entity stuff and I forgot to disable the collisions from some prop_dynamics. It's working fine now, so problem solved :)
 

xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
815
531
We have/had the same issue on Stoneyridge, I was able to fix it in some cases by making sure that the playable area was not within the bounding box of any props.

I made a test vmf of a few cases that illustrate the problem:

http://xzzy.org/files/games/tf2/collisiontest.vmf

I also made a big fat post on this site somewhere, but can't find it atm. I thought it was in the stoneyridge thread but apparently I suck at searching.


The "cluster of entities" idea is interesting and I'll need to investigate it.. Stoneyridge still has a couple spots where teleporters blow up for no apparent reason that have no props nearby.