Skycastle

[J-M v2.5.5]

Ah yes, Skycastle, that wonderful-looking map. I'm not being sarcastic here, I really like it.

If only it would stop crashing for like fifteen minutes, I'd like it even more.

I was in-game with five others. First we get denied access to the map ("lol idiot dick u kant spaewn hurr") even though we had transitioned in a perfectly legal way. After a second run through the other CotBG maps we finally arrived in the Skycastle.

Just before the stone dudes spawned, CRASH LOL.
Map restarts on Skycastle, we get to the boss (wow, yes really), but OMG CRASH KBAI.
Map restarts, we're all seriously pissed off, but we get to the hatch leading to the boss room. Just for fun, I say "hey guys, in before crash ^_^".
And then it crashed.
Map restarts on Skycastle, and I'm like "sorry guys, but fuck this".

What the hell is going on? My connection to Picadilly's server is fine and the others weren't complaining about lag either. Last time I checked, Skycastle did not suffer from the Wicard Oven syndrome.

 

[HumanSteak]

All I can say is that I never crashed on skycastle and I played it yesterday a few times so... that's weird :? .
And to not get the anti cheat thingy in yo face, every players gotta touch the transition to skycastle in lostcastle before.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

All I can say is that I never crashed on skycastle and I played it yesterday a few times so... that's weird :? .
And to not get the anti cheat thingy in yo face, every players gotta touch the transition to skycastle in lostcastle before.

Yeah I'm kind of surprised by the sudden crashes too.
And the second time we transitioned, only two or three of us were actually at the transition, yet we still were able to spawn in Skycastle.

 

[Thothie]

I've seen it finish several times on my server, been there for a few of them. I've also spent hours trying to get to that freaking clip-brush staircase to the castle easter egg.

It's got a fair amount of sprites, but it's not a huge map, and it has less than other maps that are generally considered stable. The most complicated beasts on there are of course the bear gods. The Bear God of the Frozen Tundra's uber-blizzard is fairly simple, but the only crash reports I've had seem to center around that, and the Uber Reaver uses the same Uber Blizzard so... The only other dicey bit I see is The Bear God of the Forbidden Forest's doom trees, because they spam so many projectiles so quickly - tis why he's only allowed to make so many.

There is a very complicated set of models and illusionary’s in the bear god chamber. There's in fact, an entirely different environment for each bear god, each enabled/disabled via env_render (snow and ice for the polar, grass and trees for the thundering plains, and dead trees for the forbidden forest), those are likely adding to the engine’s workload.

Still, it seem stable to me… It may simply be you had someone with a bad character connecting repeatedly, or some such.

First we get denied access to the map ("lol idiot dick u kant spaewn hurr") even though we had transitioned in a perfectly legal way.

If you crash on skycastle, and reconnect, you shouldn’t be sent to oblivion. …and I probably shouldn’t say this (lest someone find yet another work around for the gauntlet system, and I have to do something even more drastic), but one of the keys to getting the gauntlet system to work, is to make sure at least one of you is INSIDE the transition when the map changes. If that person connects on the next map, the map will be validated for everyone, regardless of where the game thinks they came from. If you, on the other hand, start a vote for the next map, and everyone leaves the transition, there’s a chance none of you will be able to trigger the validation for the next map.

In short, try to be inside the transition on map change, even if you don't all fit.

 

[Picadilly]

All this talk of server load, I remain unconvinced. Something more diabolical is at work here. I also remain unconvinced of magic FX crashing (sometimes it does... but not all the time...) I also had a problem tonight with transitioning on WW1 to WW2... the dam door wouldn't open and the server lagged out to K1'mskrewed for like 20 seconds and kicked back in ... door still there (at skellie room b4 trans).
Believe it or not, I think ur reaching the limits of what HL1 can do... MSC is very ambitious for its engine (at this particular point.) There have been lots of HL1 mods adding in content to games that render FX and so on, but most of them have been server-side scripts and sprites laid over solid HL1 code... MSC is far more ambitious and complex than any of that and I wonder if a point of no stability has been crossed...

 

[Thothie]

Well, it's that too... It's also that MSC is built up on old buggy code, piled on by even more buggy code... No one has started this thing from scratch since, what was it - 2002? And a bunch of coders have had their hands in the soup since then - no two of which agreed on how things should be done. The whole thing is a chaotic mess. (Layer upon layor of chaotic mess). I'm amazed this game still functions at all.

Just sayin, the number one cause of crashes is no_free_edicts - and the #1 eater of edicts is sprites and fx.

It seems to be more map fx than script fx though - once upon a time I added a filter called ms_fxlimit, that capped the number of script generated client side effects - and guess what - didn't stop the crashes, even with the most restritive settings. A lot of edicts are temporarily created that you never see as well.

I should point out, that the HL2 engine has been known to crash from no_free_edict errors as well - which pisses me the hell off. >_> We may hit this wall again in MS:S.

 

[Picadilly]

Well u look at how much $$ has been dumped into a game like ES4 (and the like) and u see why they're able to pull stuff off that MSC, as of yet, can't. I mean if ur going to build ur own engine then it's going to do exactly what u want. MSC is a wicked, addictive game and everyone loves it. But, I think that stability should take precedence over any kind of FX or anti-cheat loops...

 

[Thothie]

Oh, if we took that philosophy to heart, this game never would have been released.

We, frankly, have no one who knows what they are doing well enough to make this game stable anyways. Anyone who did, would run screaming, tearing their eyes out, after having seen the horror that is the source code.

 

[ITS'aME'aMARIO!!!!]

Oh, if we took that philosophy to heart, this game never would have been released.

We, frankly, have no one who knows what they are doing well enough to make this game stable anyways. Anyone who did, would run screaming, tearing their eyes out, after having seen the horror that is the source code.

lawl...

still happy to see this mod get this far.