Screen size gets cut when playing custom levels sometimes

Does anyone know why this happens? I had an image of problem vs normal but this post will not allow me to copy/paste it. (and I do not have a site to post it to) So I will try to explain the best I can. When it is normal the game fills the screen, but after editing a level sometimes when it loads up the game only fills a very small portion of the screen. (Everything above the part that the game fills is black. The game does not fill the entire screen) It is normal for me to have a black bar along the top of the screen, this is like that but the black goes down very far so that the actual game is only displayed on a few inches of the entire screen.

This happens for a variety of reasons but today this happened when I had several doors in a room. (Deleting one of them fixed the issue) But I would like to know how to avoid this in the future.

I hope this makes sense. Thanks for the help.

Host your image with http://photobucket.com/ then post the link here.

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Posting And You

Or get the addon for firefox "Imgur"
Way way easier.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Thanks for the idea omegaslayer but I do not want to sign up for anything though.

Let's see if I can give some kind of idea of the issue without posting a screenshot.
Imagine that the Xs represent what cannot be seen on the screen (just black) and the Os represent the game:

NORMAL SCREEN

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

GLITCH SCREEN

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Did that help at all?

If you don't want to sign up for image hosting just e-mail me the screenshot and I'll post it so everyone can try and help.
sgtfly@hotmail.com

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Allow me to reiterate. Imgur is an addon for firefox. It will load a screen and host it for you.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

I am sending the images to you now sgtfly.

I see what you mean, I'll post them later today. Sorry about the delay but I'm worked a double yesterday. I'm @ work now and I can't access my image hosting from here, maybe @ lunch I'll run home and do it.
I haven't seen that problem before though.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Ok, here they are.

[IMG]http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/boppa54/normal_screen.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/boppa54/glitch_screen.jpg[/IMG]

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Could it have anything to do with D3D or software mode?

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The best things in life, aren't things.

I noticed these things, I'm not sure what caused it but the shading is different in the two pics and not sure what the other thing is. Is that your door you deleted?
It almost looks like you have some brush blocking your view, or some goofy lighting problem

[IMG]http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/boppa54/normal_screen_copy.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/boppa54/glitch_screencopy.jpg[/IMG]

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Thanks for posting my screenshots.

I do not think that the difference in shading is the issue. Because that is the same thing that happens for example whenever a door opens and you look at the underside of it, it is black as well. It is just because there is no light shinning on that face. And if it matters, there is only 1 light in the room. So the undersides just don't have the light applied to them...like what I stated earlier.

And, no that was not the door that I deleted...the door is not in these screenshots. The "door" that I was referring to earlier is actually several 64 unit squared blocks that I made into "doors" so that they could move. The screenshot is actually an after screenshot of when the "doors" or cubes moved out of the way. I hope that wasn't to hard to follow. Basically just an elaborate transition to the next area without being too repetitive.

But the main reason for this is that if at all possible I would like to find a way to avoid this. And for the record this problem happens somewhat regularly (and no it is not always caused by doors either...so although that might be a contributing factor somehow in this case it is not universal throughout all levels with this problem.

So far the only way that I found to resolve the issue is by deleting the new things that I created since the last compile until I get lucky and the screen returns to normal. But I have no idea what causes it. Any new ideas now?

Just wanted you to know I'm still trying to figure out what this could be.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Just wanted you to know I'm still trying to figure out what this could be.

Thanks for letting me know. And anything you may come up with will be greatly valued.

I thought you might want to know that it happened again. Maybe giving another situation in which it happened could help with what the issue is.

Well I had some more "doors" (again I want to make sure it is clear that this doesn't only happen with doors) and their width was set to 64 units. Then I tried changing the width to 16 units. Then the error occured. Then I tried changing it to 32 units. Still the error. Then I put it back to 64 units. The error went away.

Did this help at all in determining a potential cause?

It may be depending on the game, it looks like portal to me.
I would guess that might be the issue, exactly why I don't know.

It could be you can't change the brush size lower than that w\o getting the error.
I'm going to Seattle Tuesday so if I make to Valve I'll ask someone there. I'll only be there a couple days so...I'll try.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

It may be depending on the game, it looks like portal to me.

Well the game is not Portal. It is actually Opposing Force. But it is perfectly natural that you thought it was Portal becuase that is what I was going for! I have been working on a Portal Based level, so I guess I got the Portal look down pretty well.

I guess I will just have to delete and change things in the future if I get the error any more. (Unless you have any other ideas)

And thanks for all of the great ideas!

Okay, I get it now this does not use the source engine, it's the original game engine for Half Life. Correct? Since Opposing force is one of the older half-life games.
It could be maybe you have an incompatible texture from one of the source games? I know it's far fetched but had to ask, I assume your using all custom or original game sdk textures. Or you have bad custom texture that's screwing up the game, I know that's possible.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Yes it is the original game engine. And for the other part I do not have any textures from a source game. (I am not even sure how that would even work). And about a bad texture, I have been using the same textures throughout the entire level and everything worked out fine until I created the parts that I told you about. Also, this problem has happened to me even when using the original textures that came with Half-Life. So I do not have any idea what the issue could be given all of this.

Unfortunately I haven't done any mapping with that since a few years before the source
SDK came out. So I don't really remember the limitations of that engine.
It could be what your attempting is beyond the limits of what it can do. Again that's just a guess, but keep tinkering with it is all I can suggest right now.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

It happened again yesterday. But this time it happened when I simply moved a trigger_once to a different area. I don't know why but I just moved it from one hall to another.

Why a trigger_once would do this kind of suprised me? I guess it is possible that the way the light(s) are positioned in the level might have some kind of weird render or vis problem, or something like that. (But i didn't think that could happen with trigger_once) This has happened before but very rarely for the triggers though.

Again thanks for your help. I guess I'll just have to try to fix the error as I go when it comes up.

The trigger_once thing just happened to me again today. I think this time it did not like my dimmensions. But no idea about what happened in my previous post though.

sgtfly said:
It could be what your attempting is beyond the limits of what it can do. Again that's just a guess, but keep tinkering with it is all I can suggest right now.

Even with custom tools, you cannot go beyond the limits without some serious editing of the parameters. The map will just fail to compile.
I am not quite sure what the issue is here but looking at the pictures posted it seems to be a driver issue to me.

Also, I never seem to recall whether these pictures were taken in software mode or not. If so then textures have been known to disappear after the 1,000 r_speed limit was reached and exceeded.

As I said though, I am still unclear as to the issue being addressed. shrugs

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The best things in life, aren't things.

That's what I thought it might be also, never thought about vid drivers, that's a possibility indeed.
Just had something weird happen to me too, this weekend on a l4d2 map. My nav mesh got borked somehow and my player start is in the middle of the map not in the start room, so the sdk can do some strange things to you.
I do know entities do not like to be copied alot or moved during map construction. The map bsp sometimes will get messed up because the last map bsp won't find the entity where it was previously and still tries to put it there, this can cause all kinds of trouble.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

I do know entities do not like to be copied alot

I think this could be a possibility, at least for sometimes the error occured. Cloning is how I made most of that stuff. However, the issue does not always happen with that, it could be something I put in only once (no cloning, copying, etc)

But I'll take what I can get though. Again thanks.

One more thing:

The map bsp sometimes will get messed up because the last map bsp won't find the entity where it was previously and still tries to put it there, this can cause all kinds of trouble.

How is that even possible? And do you know how to fix it?

Entities can be copied as many times as you wish as long as you give them unique names.

and

The bsp can get screwed up if you do not save and export to map between each compile.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Thanks for mentioning that about the entities I forgot to say that about naming them.
Sometimes you can forget to rename them too after you've put them in the map, if you've already given it a name. (points at myself)

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

The bsp can get screwed up if you do not save and export to map between each compile

That's interesting...I never heard about that before. I have never exported to map before. Is that something that you would recommend doing everytime you compile a level?

Necromancer said:

The bsp can get screwed up if you do not save and export to map between each compile

That's interesting...I never heard about that before. I have never exported to map before. Is that something that you would recommend doing everytime you compile a level?

Depends on how you compile them. If you use hammer, it uses the save. If you use a frontend compiler, it uses the .map

So, if you do not export to map, then saving does no good if you are using a frontend. (or a batch compiler for that matter)

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The best things in life, aren't things.

I am using Hammer, so I do not have to worry about that then. Thanks for the description.

Actually I think it is very possible that the problem could be a driver issue. I just loaded a map that I made on my old computer (which ran the level completely fine) and now I played it on this computer and the screen glitch happened.

So it probably is a driver problem or something like that.