entities blinking in and out of transpar Created 9 years ago2014-11-21 23:57:21 UTC by Tsaras

Is there a known cause for entities blinking in and out of transparency at random positions and angles of looking at them?

My scene contains few additive and texture-mode entities and a glow sprite. When I'm walking around the area some of the faces become solidly rendered (including the glow which becomes plainly rendered) and then return to additive rendering after I moved my cursor or body a little.

I've checked for leaks which was the first thing that came to mind and couldn't find any. I tried Check for problems Alt+P but nothing's there either (although I know that it doesn't find all brush problems). I am having a very weird brush bug which I'm showing in the following screenshots which could indicate something (?).

What you see is made of 2 brushes for each of left and right side, 2 brushes for the white lines and 1 brush for the middle. The side brushes were made exactly the same way for both sides. On the left image you can see that while the compiler has merged the brushes on the right treating them as one, the left ones are not. In the right picture you can see a zoom-in how the brushes are distorted.I don't why this happens to only the brushes of one side and not the other one and I also don't know if this could be causing the entity blinking.

Has anyone ever reported a cause for the blinking? Any clues that might help.

I've had a problem like this before, but it only happened with sprites, env_glow exactly.

The first thing I thought is that the engine isn't able to render multiple renders of the same type and entity in the same zone properly. Indeed, if you try to make a 3D model for GoldSrc, and make multiple additive textured faces one behind another, you're not able to see the ones that's behind the first as long as you look at it while you're in front of the first one. Basically, the first one blocks all the others for a strange reason.
I'm not that surprised though since the engine is old.

You can try to reduce the number of sprites and brush entities with the render modes, OR to move them far from each other with the sole purpose to see if you still encounter the same problem. If not, then the mistery is solved (but not the problem though.)

One last thing: be sure that everything is perfectly on the grid. Try also to move every brush entity to world, remake them, work them, and once you're done tie them to entity and never touch them again. If you need to modify them, move them to world first.
A good thing could also be to tie multiple brushes to a single brush entity, and viceversa. And if you're not using VHLT tools, start using them right now.

EDIT: I've also heard that if you have sprites' parameters like "VP_PARALLEL_UPRIGHT" and "VP_PARALLEL_ORIENTED", these could cause problems with the in-game render (don't ask me why.)

I just tested few more things and it seems that the problem is caused by the brushes I've set to render in pure color.

Is there a limit in brush render modes per scene? I seem to have them all in the same leaf (normal, solid, texture, additive, pure color). Although only the pure color ones are creating the problem. So when I have the pure color brushes AND the sprite/additive ones in my camera few faces of them are rendered out of transparency.

I don't know about that. But if you're having problems with the pure color render mode, try to create a colored texture by yourself and change the render mode. This may fix the problem.