When I use the Flash ground blends in my map, I see the detail prop grass all over the place when I play it. When I play Argentan, I see detail prop grass all over the place when I play it. When I use the Argentan ground blends in MY map, I see no detail prop grass.

I've been reading around trying to find information on how to fix this (apparently Valve did this intentionally?), but I haven't found anything particularly detailed enough to help me solve this problem.

Look at your details.vbsp file and learn how to manipulate it. Valve didn't do anything on purpose...come on.

Here is something on it, it should help you understand it more.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Detail_Props

As FD said, they didn't do anything intentionally.

Your right though, dod_argentan detail props don't seem to work. I've look at all the files and I don't know why it doesn't.

The link to Valve Developer that CoolHand gave is where you should be looking. It's all on that webby.

When I did look at the files it doesn't really matter if you use Flash or Argentan, the detail sprites are much the same, unless you like the argentan material better.

I then got to the point where I started to make my own blends, it's not that difficult when you have found all the info needed, it's just finding it. It was so frustrating to find that I've started a tut on it.

Just some WiP that needs updating: http://www.mardymouse.co.uk/pages/Alpha_Blending.html

I need to add stuff about the detail.vbsp file.

FD means the detail.vbsp. It shouldn't be there but it might already be in your dod folder, if not use GCFScape to extract it.

Thanks haircut, that tut was quite helpful. I did some poking around and was able to find the .vmt files for the blend textures. Using the information I found in those and that tut, I whipped up some custom blends and performed a few tests (all done on displacements):

Flash ground & Argentan cliffside blend w/ Flash detail prop grass: success
Argentan ground & dirt blend w/ Flash detail prop grass: success
Flash ground & dirt blend w/ Argentan detail prop grass: failure

and then I tossed in the default Argentan blendgrassdirt which as expected, failed to display any detail props as well. So based on what I've gathered, the Argentan detail props just simply don't want to work for whatever reason.

Anyway, the map I'm working on had been built using the Flash textures and I'll probably stick to it at this point. The only reason I wanted to use the Argentan textures was for the grasscliffside texture blend, but now that I'm capable of making my own I can just make a blend of the Flash ground and the cliffside textures. As always, thanks for the help everyone!

Oh yea ... it's the Argentan detail prop grass reference that's screwed for me.

If you look in the detail.vbsp you will find the reference to it, argentan_grass_med ... or summit. Know idea why it don't work.

The next thing I want to try is my own detail.vbsp, just to make sure it all works.

I'm sure someone with more experiance will point out the problem with this but like I said, if you make your own grass blends then just use something like flash_grass_med it works great.

EDIT:

Just noticed the scale factor in the $basetexturetransform might be wrong. I've seen people use a different way to get it to work by using 0.25 type numbers as a scaling facter, making things smaller instead of bigger.

Saying that I can't get the scaling facter to work right anyway, need to test things more.

While I thought for a long time that I had the same problem, it was simply a matter of having the detail.vbsp file in my dod directory.

The problem is that any file extracted from the gcf will overrule the gcf file version, that's how custom skins can still work for example.

Well, when updates are made, only the gcf version is updated, but you keep the old one in your dod folder regardless.

In my case, my dod directory file was older than the Argentan (and therefore Kalt) update, and as such Hammer was telling me it didn't know the Argentan_grass_med variable, because it simply wasn't in my file.

Extract the gcf version again, and replace your old file with it, and everything works as it should.

I thought you didn't need to extract it at all?

ah well .. I'll try it and see.

Well I tried to delete it in my directory, and only use the gcf one, and it didn't change a thing.

Yea ... that's the problem I had. I did have an old details.vbsp in my dod folder and I thought that was the problem, so I deleted it but I still had the problem. I then extracted the file and It still gave me the problem.

It should work but it doesn't.

If it works for the rest of you and it's ony one or two of us having problems then it's just down to config or something like the problem you had with an old detail.vbsp file, I'll double check and I might just reinstall the SDK again and see if something got screwed up.

:kitty: