Safe Entity Threshold Created 6 years ago2018-11-04 01:54:18 UTC by F0cu5

AFAIK, the Goldsrc engine has a hardcoded limit of 512 entities per map. But, I believe this also includes server plugins - am I right?

What is a safe threshold that mappers generally use to keep themselves under so that they are leaving appropriate room for servers with tons of plugins? I don't want my map to crash some servers. What else does the 512 count include? Do texlights count towards this limit? Anything else?

The default limit is 900 and can be changed by the server owner by adding

commandargs "-num_edicts 3072"

(the number can be changed to something lower or higher) to liblist.gam. I don't think texlights count.

Oh splendid. So I can be greedy with that 512 number all for the map itself and not worry about leaving room for anything else on the server side?

512 is the number of models that can be precached. That means player models, weapon models, different sprites, solid entity models and prop models.
Keep in mind that creating, say, multiple env_sprites which use the same sprite will only take up one model.

As for the entities, just what potatis_invalid said.

You'll want to maintain good network performance.
func_train, func_tracktrain, things that move etc., they take up quite some bandwidth, and they can make a choppy server. So it's not how many entities you place, it's what kind of entities you place, and how you set them up.

The maximum number of edicts is 2048, any more than that and the game will crash when the engine tries to network an entity with an index higher than 2047.

You can also specify this in liblist.gam using "edicts". The "commandargs" key no longer works, so don't use that.

TIL. Solokiller knows the engine better than probably anyone on this site.

Awesome, thank you all for the information. With general performance as the goal in mind, are there still any hard limits you recommend watching out for just in the map itself? I am currently working on a rather large and detailed map with 409 point & solid entities combined and a lot of texlights. At the end that number will be closer to 450-470. I don't want my map to test fine on my computer and then start crashing servers.

Unluckily, even if that limit is overpassed, and making the game run, the lag will be a true problem unless someone make something to he engine to make it use all the juice from the CPU and the GPU. In my experience, HL engine (even modified and considered non-legal engines) can´t handle very well a lot of ents all together at the same time.