still relevant in the main branch on [2025-08-08] ?

@Dave Norton Epic Grave Prank
They've managed to completely break the iconic bullsquid npc ai by removing its ability to bullrush the player, instead making it a stationary turret. The people behind this remake were completely clueless about Half-Life.

You'd think the people behind this game wouldn't have left it in such a pathetic state before moving onto another project. The entire design behind half life games is their ability to play on almost all hard ware without fault.

Mfer OVERCHARGE PLAYS BETTER LMAO

Chad

thx
this is

piola

realmente bueno

Any idea if the same problem applies to any of the stuff going on in Gonarch's Lair maps? Some of these power cables sure look like they're moving ever so slightly and my framerate gets wrecked in those areas.

Holy shit 😂

why does the developer NOT fix this?

Looked up for this in source engine code. In game/client/c_rope.cpp it appears that _back material is used for "fake AA" it can be disabled with rope_smooth 0

Whenever you get to Surface Tension and Gargantua shows up, it adds too much to the rendering process and will throw you the [code]Failed to lock vertex buffer in CMeshDX8[/code] crash, there's few other places same crash happens with this error with Gargantua on the map, especially in Xen. Usually to avoid those crashes is to speed through those areas so you spend as little time as possible in the areas that causes crashes.

@Iisakkiiii; I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you mean c2a5a, the first map of Surface Tension. There are a number of factors at work there - the 1.5 terrain has a lot of polygons, which makes it more expensive to render; it's a large outdoor space, which Source isn't really designed for; and the water reflections mean the engine has to render the scene twice. Unfortunately, unless there's some significant optimization work that can be done on the 1.5 terrain models, there's really not much that can be done about this.

If you're talking about Surface Tension in general - some maps could certainly do with better optimization. That's on my to-do list for BMSC, but like c2a5a, there's only so much that can be done, so I can't promise anything.

this game is so fucked

Can you figure it out why bm_c2a5 is taking so much performance?

@Anschluss; It's not included, but it's compatible. BMSC doesn't add or change any cable materials, so there's no chance of file conflicts.

Additionally, this should be fixed in BM proper in the next patch, though I don't know if there's an ETA for that yet. This should do the trick for the time being nonetheless.

Is this fix included in your Black Mesa Classic maps?

this is huge for me, thank you so much for this!!

A savior

@White and Birdy™: Haha I hear ya. I had tried looking on VDC first before asking my question and when I found no explanation, I had assumed it was a Black Mesa exclusive thing. I wouldn't be surprised if your guess is what actually happened lol. Thanks for the response!

Honestly? No idea, lol. VDC doesn't appear to have anything written about them, and there don't appear to be any obvious visual bugs in BM related to them not existing. My best guess is it's a leftover from early in Source's development, but even then, I have no idea what purpose it might've served. Maybe ropes didn't have backface culling disabled at first and had to have distinct "front" and "back" materials, before someone decided there was no real reason to not just use the same material on both sides.

I'm just curious, what are _back materials even, what do they do

You could say this is a ''bad cable management''

❤️

Interesting Performance Fix,
I still Remember having 10 - 20 fps in chapter "On A Rail"
and was almost not possible to defeat those H.E.C.U. on My GTX 1660 Super.
Including Chapter "Residue Processing" And Especially The Start of "Surface Tension" on the Hoover Dam where you press the button to Open the Flud Gates, Getting there 12fps