I've been working on honfleur_b7 for a while without compiling because I haven't gotten a chance to rebuild the skybox. I wanted to see what some things would look like ingame, so I threw a box around it and compiled. I got that max clipnodes thing, probably because of the crappy skybox, so I stuck a clip brush over the entire map and it compiled. I dunno if that has something to do with the problem. What do you guys think?

Ummm 'throw a skybox'? No. This can and mostly will screw your map over. It gives you bigger r_speeds due to leaf portals and clipnodes. Take the time, do it right, and top everything off with the sky texture, dont make a box unless you have a really complicated area thats too hard manually do it.

Also, since it says a sprite error, you think its got to do with your skybox? I'm not sure, but I'd bet a lot saying it wasn't. So I dont know why you think throwing a clip brush over everything would solve anything. Come to think of it, throwing a brush over the entire map doesnt solve anything, unless your using the big block method to find leaks.

Here's a quote from Tommy14's error thingy site...


sprites problems
Sprites are very tricky. You must use the perfect path/name, with the right capitals - or it will stop the game. The path should start with sprite/spritename, not the whole path name. Sometimes browsing to the sprite works best, sometimes typing the path/name in works best.
In WC (but not Hammer) a sprite can lock up a level map as soon as it opens, if the animated sprite is in one of the veiws. The solution is to close up all but one view and try again to load the level....or remove the sprite from the WC sprites folder.
If there is fog in a game, it reacts badly with sprites, so that the sprite may have a black border/box, instead of invisible. No solution yet

I know that putting a simple box around a map isn't good, but this is just for testing purposes. I'm not gonna spend an hour building a new skybox that will be mostly deleted anyway because I'm going to change the brushwork a lot. And I put a giant clip brush over the map because putting a clip brush on complicated geometry reduces clipnodes (I was over max clipnodes due to the simple skybox) , so I just put it over the entire map and was just gonna spectate and fly around to see what the new stuff looks like.

I thought the clip brush thing might be the problem because it might have messed up the clipnodes or something, but I don't really understand all this complex HL engine crap so I wasn't sure.

Edit, and by the way, that's not a sprite I'm usinbg so I don't think it has anything to do with any of my sprite entitys.

Ahhhh, i dont kknow crap about the clip thing .I feal your pain man... You know whats the worst thing? Compared to some other engines, HL is Uber simple.

But hopefully Angry beaver or Tommy will come and help...

Yeah...

i got this same error with getriebe. i think it has to do with too many entities. i removed a bunch and changed some func_walls to "hard" brushes and the map loaded fine.

Hmmm.... ghey.

Well...how many entities do you have? Point and brush-based combined ideally should be 500 or less. It sounds like a lot...but isn't.

201 point entitys and 330 solid entitys...

you have a precache problem (http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/errors.htm#precache) , and that can be a bugger to figure out. i know it says grenade_flash.spr - but that was just the sprite that broke the back, often the problem is in the cache just BEFORE the named sprite......isn't that fun....

"201 point entitys and 330 solid entitys" <- is ok, within limits it SEEMS.

but the solid entitys is 400, so 330 is pretty close. be careful! if you have several func walls/illusinaries in the same room, try combining them into one entity - but only if they are in the same room.

oddly enough, there have been a few cases where the skybox and clipnode problems you had caused a precache error. so i WOULD fix that SOON. stop whining about making sky piece by piece, it is part of the job! and it may fix your problem..... maybe.

other things to check:
Precache is a game memory problem. It often could be you have a bad path/name for a sprite/model/wav. But it can also be that you have too many kinds or too large sprites, models(400 obj limit?), wav sound files(limit<3min) or entitys(data limit ~0.5M) and have overfilled the space setup for them. Sometimes combining entities into fewer helps, but usually you will have to simplify to fewer kinds of sprites/models, or smaller sprites/models/wavs. Occasionally this error happens when you are using a corrupted or non-standard model/sprite. Using other folk's prefabs are often hidden reasons for this problem.
Sometimes the "too many wads" problem sets this off, or having a brush textured with AAAtrigger texture visible in the map will cause this problem.

that is about all i have.

I'll put the sky in when I'm good and ready :D