sky box not rendering/rendering random pieces of map outside of sky box

[Venk]

hey, this is my first post on this forum, and I'm making a tf2 map (shocking I know) and I've been having this problem that's plagued my map for months now, sometimes it stops and works other times it doesn't, I've tried taking the map apart and putting it back together and I just cant figure out what's going on. I'm still new to mapping so I know my map isn't perfectly optimized but i think im doing everything i can to stop what is happening from happening, and what's confused me more is I've ran test maps, (just little mini map that are boxes and dirt,) to see if maybe I could recreate what's going on, but all of those test worked just fine. below is a few images of what I've been experiencing as well as an image of what the sky box should be rendering but isnt.

Any help is greatly apricated, this has been killing my ability to make this map. I JUST WANT CLOSURE!

 

[Tumby]

Go to Map -> Entity Report. Do you have more than one sky camera?

Is the sky camera in the correct position? (The camera position in the skybox correlates to the origin point in your main map)

 

[Venk]

I only have the one camera, and everything should be in the correct position, from what I understand as long as the camera itself isn't to close 0,0,0, it should be fine, I have it about 4,600 hammer units below 0,0,0,

 

[Venk]

okay I found a maybe solution, Im afraid to say i have even if it is working so for some reason and it only works if i do it this way, If i put the sky box above the player map, and remove the skybox brush I have around it works, i tried something like this a while ago but it didnt do to much, for some ungodly reason if i make the map the wrong way it works. attached picture's are proof of it working. so thank you for you help. and if you can think of a better way of fixing this, that would be pretty swanky.

 

[Tumby]

I would need to see it in hammer to help any further. Ingame screenshots are useless when you don't know where everything actually is in the VMF. (While hammer screenshots would be nice, I would prefer looking at the VMF myself.)

 

[Venk]

heres the vmf file, (the right one this time)

 

[Tumby]

You need to wrap your 3D skybox in skybox brushes. You can't have entities floating around in the middle of the void.

Here are some other beginner mistakes I want to mention:

I see you have a room full of prop_statics set to "models/props_lakeside/wood_crate_01.mdl". They all have their collision disabled. I assume you copied them or somehow disabled the collision on accident. You wrapped them all in playerclip brushes. This is BAD. First of all, playerclip doesn't stop bullets, meaning you can just shoot through everything in that room. Sentries are especially good at abusing this. To fix this, simply set the collision to VPhysics. You can use the button on the top labeled "CM" to show model collisions. Yellow means the collision is enabled, magenta means it's disabled. If you can't see anything colorful surrounding a model, then it probably has no collision. In that case, wrap the model in blockbullets brushes, NOT playerclip.

I see you have func_detailed 2 brushes in your map, neither of which should have been func_detail to begin with. I'm assuming you did that on accident. You will need to learn how Source games do rendering before you can make proper use of func_detail. Learning this will also help you understand why the 3D skybox needs to be wrapped in skybox brushes. Look up tophattwaffle on YoutTube and you might be able to find some guides and tutorials on optimization.

Next up, you are using HL2 concrete and grass textures. When using the material browser, type "tf" into the keywords. Install the ABS resource pack, which you can find on this website in the misc. downloads section. It adds the tf keyword to some materials that Valve forgot to add it for. Also, install Hammer++ to have a better hammer experience overall.

Lastly, I want to talk about gameplay really quick. Your map consists of a small spawn area, a small control point area, and 4 paths between those which barely interact with one another. A team that owns mid basically just has to aim at 4 doorways to prevent anybody from coming in. Compare this to Viaduct or Lakeside where doorways are so far from the controlpoint, that you can't see all of them. This doesn't mean that your map needs to be bigger, just more spacious. Connect some paths together to create areas that you can fight in that aren't just the spawns and mid.

 

[Tumby]

You can find the interlopers.net optimization guide on the wayback machine:

HL2 Map Editing Optimization Page

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