"Invisible Props / Players / Entities" Bug

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Davebrown

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I am so sick and tired of explaining this to people, so im gonna try and make this statement as completely foolproof as possible.


"Help, all my props / entities / all players have just gone invisible, what the hell! What do I do?"

No doubt a lot of you who play SRP have said this at some point, or on hl2 or trp even.


The Cause -

Garrysmod 13 Update. This bug was not present until Garrys big new release. I cannot be 100% sure of the actual technical cause, because I have several theories, and Garry himself still hasnt actually acknowledged it exists.

I am pretty sure it has something to do with the total amount of entity data being handled by a client. This is because it is a client-side bug.....some people will have the problems whilst others might see everything fine, and then at a random point it might suddenly happen for them too.
This only seems to happen on certain maps.....maps with high amounts of entities. For example "rp_stalker" usually encounters the problem after about 12-15 players have joined the server. Other maps like "rp_garbage" will encounter it ONLY under heavy server strain like prolonged 50/50 with lots of props and items around. Plain and simple maps like "md_stalkerredux_b4" do not ever encounter the problem because, as far as I can see, they have a low entdata count. Entdata is the mapping term for accumulated data including props, lighting, scripted sequences, particles, sprites, effects etc.

Entity data is a non-fixed value, and is also affected by props players spawn ingame, as well as the total amount of items and weapons themselves. Thus, SRP is a notoriously heavyscript - and this supports my reasoning since I can see other servers such as TPSGamings Zombie Survival on "rp_stalker" is constantly full at 30/30 players yet dosnt have the same issue as us. Obviously their script is not as heavy duty.

As in this thread I made in Facepunch, it seems that it may have something to do with particles....although the fix that was posted has been tried and does not work.
http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1234830


How to Fix -

There is no fix.

All you can do is keep rejoining the server and hoping that it will fix it temporarily.

Avoid spawning a lot of props, emitters, or any other surplus shit that can add to the server entity accumulation.



Until Garry addresses the problem, and hopefully fixes it with the next Gmod update, we are still basically up shit creek for maps, and for future releases like rp_pripyat.
 
paraphrasing something i was told, it's something like particles getting created but not getting removed, and this eventually builds up until garrysmod decides to not render players/entities et cetera and focus on the particles?

i dont know the first thing about coding but that sounds like it would cause the issue.

also it happens on all maps, just happens a lot slower on different maps.
 
Yeh thats the gist of it.

Im gonna try removing particles on the newer compile of rp_potoky and see if that helps.
 
Well I hope we can find some way to get around this, the standard rotation of Garbage/Dolina is getting old pretty fast.


Also I'd like to try incorporating Nuclearwinter V2 into the rotation more. The map is admittedly very bland on the outside but the building interiors are quite detailed and the map has hands down the best underground out of any SRP map I've seen.
 
tl;dr:

once the entity data limit has been reached the map begins to cry, this making everything vanish.
"entdata is; map props/trees/door/'trains/anomalies/players/playerprops/weapons/npcs/everything."
there is no fix, there is no way around it. well, there is one "fix." that would be the delete every entity on the map and only have walls and the floor
 
I do not see why we don't use the underground map more often, y'know the one we used for the event.
 
The underground map was pretty boring after a couple of hours.
 
from what i've heard its particles not being garbage collected properly

this map barely had any, though.
 
Love how the first person to respond to that thread is Eldeos, calling you a gentleman
 
garry said:
Why don't you do some investigation yourself? This error message isn't useful to me. If you can find a way to cause it on demand - that's useful.

So basically this afternoon im probably gonna put rp_stalker on and we're gonna see if anything causes the bug specifically....a little test for mr newman.
 
I dont think its got anything to do with that. But we'll try it anyway.
 
On second thoughts, try creating lots of ts2_model's, it could be that...
 
ts2_ in terms of weapons you mean? Why would that be it?
 
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