Error Exceed MAX_PATCHES Created 12 years ago2011-09-27 21:21:57 UTC by X-LAyer2

I get this error when compiling but couldn't find it in the error guide so I have no clue as to what it means. Can anyone clarify?

From tommies site:

Exceeded MAX_PATCHES

When hlrad runs, it takes all the visible faces in the game, and divides them into sections called patches. These patches are the textures used as the lightmaps for the world. There is a hard limit of 65535 patches that hlrad can deal with. By default, a 64x64 game unit chunk of space is the size of one patch. If the texture scaling (not texture size) is larger or smaller, it will directly affect the lightmap size as well. This means a texture with scale of 2, will have at best 1/4th as many patches as a texture with a scale of 1.

Putting a 'box' around the level to protect from leaks is the most commmon cause of this error, beyond excessively large maps. The box causes vis to keep the faces on the outside which would normally be thrown away. These faces are then required to have lightmaps. Worst case, is that putting a box around the level will usually cause an extra 40-80% more lightmaps to be created than necessary.

Barring having a box, the other cause is large maps. The fixes are varied but can only help so far.
Remove any "box" from around your level and fight the leak leak leak war the right way.
If you have not boxed in your level, then the #1 fix is running HLRAD with the -sparse flag - but compile will be slower.
Using -chop values larger than the default 64 for hlrad will cause the light patches to be larger. However, for values larger than around 96 the map's lights start looking bad, and will more prominently show the 'staircase' effect on shadows.
Using a larger scale on large textures (dirt, rock walls, concrete) will help those large surfaces consume fewer patches for lighting.
see also: skyboxing

Arg, it's the textures from the compo, I scaled them down a lot to fit them to the materials I used.

EDIT: I only scaled down the textures on 3-4 brushes though (to about 0.50), does that make that much of a difference? I also scaled a few up to about 5.00, would that also affect it?

Also, is there a way to change the settings so that it will allow more?

EDIT2: I went back and scaled all the textures back to 1.00 but still get the error???

Anbody? Or should I just post the hammer file?

Odd that it still doesn't work. In your log file after compiling, how many base patches does it say your map has?
I had this error the other day, and scaling my textures up a tad really did help. Alternatively, I believe you can add -chop 96 to the hlrad.exe and that will cut down on patches (you can also use 128 but i don't think its recommended).

bump!

sure x-layer post the rmf and ill try compiling it if you want.

One thing you can try is copy/pasting the entire map into a new rmf and try compiling that. if everything works ok you can change the name back to the original map. (i always try this as a method of last resort)