Decal bug? Mysterious Behavior.

[Atasco]

I'm having a strange issue that the Interloper's error checker didn't catch. For some reason, one (and only one) decal I've placed in my map is showing up on another random surface. I can't seem to figure out what's wrong, and going through the list of entities only shows ones I know I've placed. It's sort of only there as a placeholder, but whenever I get the final image there I don't want to have the same problem.

Here's a more visual explanation. Here's what it looks like in the Hammer editor (and what it's supposed to look like)

...and here's what happens in-game.

I have no clue. There's no other decals that I've placed by accident, and there's not really any meaningful settings on the decal itself for me to mess up. I tried googling for an answer, but for some reason the only results I got were youtube videos of airplane landings.

 

[splashy]

Have you tried using an overlay entity instead? It has a feature that allows you to select one or multiple brush faces, narrowing down potential causes for this issue.

 

[Atasco]

Have you tried using an overlay entity instead? It has a feature that allows you to select one or multiple brush faces, narrowing down potential causes for this issue.

Haven't yet :0 I'd been trying to use decals everywhere possible to save on performance, but when I get to my computer next I'll definitely try it.
Overlays have always been… fussy, fiddly, in my experience, so I'm biased against them, hahaha.

 

[Jeff Magnum]

The overlay vs decal performance difference isn't something you really need to worry about. Valve maps use overlays all over the place

 

[Atasco]

The overlay vs decal performance difference isn't something you really need to worry about. Valve maps use overlays all over the place

Ahhhh, I see. I guess I fixate on that from my web-dev days, pfft.

I tested it with an overlay, and the strange bug is gone :0 I never did figure out what it was. Definitely ghost stuff. I suppose this means Fixed?

 

[Da Spud Lord]

Decals will apply themselves to any nearby faces they find. What constitutes a "nearby" face generally depends on the size of the decal and what direction it is considered to be facing. Issues like the one you encountered are rare, but they can happen because suorc(tm). Using overlays in favor of decals is generally not something to be worried about, like Magnum said the performance difference is negligible unless you're absolutely spamming them everywhere, and the flexibility of overlays (not just in defining what faces they apply to, but rotating, resizing, etc) is nearly universally worth it. My own personal philosophy regarding overlays vs decals is fairly liberal: If for any reason a decal isn't satisfactory for what you're doing, use an overlay. Only use decals where what you were going to do with an overlay can be just as easily achieved with a decal.