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Leaks in The Puzzlemaker
A leak occurs when an entity touches the void. This is a problem, because maps must be completely sealed to compile correctly.
maps must be completely internally sealed. No part of the interior of the level (the world), should connect with the outside (the void). When there is any kind of gap to the void, a leak is generated when the map is compiled
A leak in a level has a number of bad effects. ... Since there is no portal file, VVIS will not run correctly/at all. When this happens, VRAD will also work incorrectly, or only perform direct lighting - no light bounces. VVIS may tell the engine to render the entire map at once, which is bad for framerates, or have entire areas be invisible.
Source: VDC
In the puzzlemaker, this may be caused by a number of things:
- A broken item
- A broken style
- An unhandled item placement ( An item that has been placed in such a way that BEE does not know how to handle it properly. )
Items and styles from user-created packages (UCPs) may have a higher chance of causing leaks than vanilla PeTI and BEE2.4 items.
Some versions of BEE2.4 are more prone to leaks than others. Versions v4.37.0 through v4.40.0 are much more likely to be affected by leaks than versions before or after.
There are three main ways to analyze and fix a leak: switching styles, analyzing it in hammer, and trial-and-error
Analyzing in hammer is the most sure-fire way of finding a leak, but the other two are much faster
If you are using any non-clean style, you should generally start with this. This will determine whether it is a style-specific leak, or not.
- Exit Portal 2 and open the BEEmod application
- Change style to clean and re-export
- Attempt to publish the map. Publishing will always catch leaks, whereas building normally may not.
Your map, if you just tried to build it, can be found inside steamapps/common/Portal 2/sdk_content/maps/styled/preview.vmf.
Do the following to locate the leak:
- Open the
.vmffile inside Hammer - Load the pointfile from the toolbar. (If it says that the default pointfile could not be found, it is unlikely that your map leaked in the first place.)
- Follow the red line that appeared after loading the pointfile. Wherever it leads to/from is where the leak originated.
- Remove, move, or replace the item that leaked.
For this method, the user must delete every item individually, and see if the map compiles after each item deletion. If it still leaks, replace the deleted item and move on to the next item. It is best to start by removing UCP items, items near the walls of the chamber, and any items that have already been reported as broken/buggy in the issues tab.