Jayarr

+1

Looks simple enough if it's utilizing the assets we currently have +1

You bypassed your ban by switching accounts...that's the whole premise of avoiding. Joke or not. Regardless, if you stand by your opinion then that's just that, I won't argue the point or clog the thread with back and forth. Good luck with your appeal.

Yes, you would have been perma banned. This is not because you used an alt, even if it did play in as a factor. It is because, as stated in multiple posts, you have nine bans in which all prove that your intentions are otherwise inconvenient to the server. You using an alt account to avoid one of your current bans only warrants further punishment. If it were simply a case where you used your alt without 8 other previous bans, you likely wouldn't have received a perma. This information isn't really relevant. You state that you roleplayed multiple times when you first joined the server. This is prior to your 9 bans in this case. Your intention may have been to RP then, but you are making it near impossible to see that perspective from any other standpoint at this rate. Having in intention to RP doesn't mean repeating your banned offenses multiple times over until it eventually, as has happened, leads to a perma ban. I know it likely is hard to prove that you want to RP at this point, but that's within good reason. You had a chance to prove yourself, and it failed multiple times over.

+1 The british rule commences

Why is this even a debate? Nine bans, plenty of chances, obviously has no intent of doing anything worth while. Just because he "can be banned again if he does something" doesn't mean that he should be allowed back on to begin with. Just because the ban reason may be incorrect doesn't mean that the ban isn't rightfully served for various other reasons. Just because he's funny doesn't warrant anything other then what his actions have already provided him, which is 9 bans. Giving someone a chance is completely fair, it's the only reason I'm still around, but after nine times you have to wake up and realize that said person has no place here. There have been far worse cases that only got one or two chances before they were completely removed from the community all together. I get it, he's funny, I personally get a good kick out of intercom spammers and the likes, but that doesn't warrant the inevitable reban he will likely receive. -1

So, in removing one of the models that was the most troublesome (the one with the cape), and having compressed the materials, the pack as a whole will sit at 12mb instead of 30mb. Still a little hefty, but if you want the model to not look like a 1990's video game, this is as good as it gets. Images provided below And a video for anyone interested: https://i.gyazo.com/0b56d0c709c102ee43f09b3dda75f53d.mp4

If y'all need the file size compressed, I'd be more then willing.

Probably not the person you want to respond, but I feel the need to elaborate. Server lag may rely heavily on the host, but in this instance there are multiple other factors. There's no real short term answer for this, but to narrow it down for you: 1. This server utilizes a lot of active scripts at one moments notice, and the more that piles up, the more the server has to process all the inward and outward information of that factor. This cannot be easily contained, and often results to chopping off a lot of useful addons when it, in my opinion, isn't necessary. The other servers you mention that seem to work fine more then likely have an active team making sure each script is optimized in a way that it can easily flow from one function to the next. As much praise as that deserves, by no means should it mean the dev team here should dump loads of hours of dedication into that fact, as making sure scripts function flawlessly with how many addons are currently present would be a nightmare. So on that end, you just gotta live with it. 2. An unfortunately common trend now-a-days on gmod is having, and utilizing, higher end models and materials. Source engine is old and unstable, and the more we push it, the more it's gonna fight. The version of source the gmod utilizes was never really intended for super high quality things, and as it's become more apparent, 4k, 6k, and even 8k texture models offer more and more strain the more they're added up. Take the current 501st models for example. Beautiful, beautiful models and textures. But put 10+ people on the job and shove them in a room, you'll notice a drastic decrease in FPS due to how demanding these high quality models are. This isn't purely the fault of the models nor the textures, as there are other factors such as how you the player are receiving this visual in response to how the server has read it, but you get the point. Generally, just as mentioned with the lua problem, it's something you gotta live with if you want a quality experience. I, for one, hope the old playdough CGI models never get picked up again 3. Communication on a case to case instance from the server to the player can often get strained and otherwise convoluted the more you pile things onto it. There are things to factor in like what specific specs the server host is using, and more often then not, the better specs are absurdly price. This roots back to what you mentioned about the server host. I personally don't know what host synergy utilizes, but I will mention how hard it is to find a single affordable host who can maintain an active population above 50 players without any strain. Ultimately, with the how much money the server may or may not make in a day, it likely can't afford to pay a monthly fee for an insanely monstrous host that can handle these things. As always, high quality = more money. This said, the current host is more then fair for being able to handle the player base at it's current rate. It certainly isn't the best, or even that good, but the bigger picture shows how well it truly does. 4. Last but not least, as mentioned in #2, source is old. Older then we realize sometimes. The active development team for gmod tries to push out what updates they can to ensure it keeps up with modern standards, but as we all know from our time playing servers, it can't really ever catch up. I personally can't name any server that doesn't lag past the 80+ threshold, especially during events or heavy simulations, and there's plenty good reasons for this. I've only just scratched the surface of some of the faults gmod has, and how that can pair with running a server. As servers vary on a case to case basis, you can only expect them to be able to do so much about it. The amount of resources, time, and effort required to hold such things up is certainly a crazy concept to ask of anyone. So in short: Source bad, gmod bad, server hosts and developers die inside.

+1 Good luck Irish man.

death

This seems familiar

+1 I got emailed that he commented on one of my documents from 2019. My man is diving through artifacts to assist in the quality of his position. Get him in there.

That's a fair process and all as it shows who's dedicated and who isn't, however I would still like my main point for development to be known. Which was, hire some people. Get good fellas over here, whether it takes trial and error or not. There's hardly anyone on the server now that can step up and say "I can put the work in", purely because no one really knows how to develop here. Jad was the last person to openly admit and even show he can do work, but no one else seems to know how. That's the underlying issue right now though, the player count and how it's hindering good ideas and processes such as the one you mentioned.

I wouldn't say so. So far multiple higher ups have read and even commented, but no one has received a ban. I wouldn't assume anyone would be unless their intentions were purely aggressive instead of constructive.

I believe I did point this out, and yeah it is a community issue. In short what I said is people like to skip over the heads of branches and either go straight to the next higher up (directors, HoA, etc) or go straight for a server suggestion. Communication isn't the greatest and could definitely be improved.

This was generally an informative post to point out whats going on and to see if the community members agree, so I expect fixes may or may not come along side that hopefully. This really depends on who you end up hiring, in general I feel like a process behind picking people (submitting portfolios, general experience, etc) would raise the bar for this a little. I was a rotten apple in the batch personally, and I'm sure there are willing people out there. And you could always get said devs to send their content to zim or other founders as a means of protecting it from anything happening. Regardless, I personally still develop, and can say there are a lot of scammers and what not out there. However, I feel the pay off for the trial and error accompanied by this is greater then the risk and could help take a significant load of your guys's chest. As for this, I've personally always gotten this. It's hard to stick to the never ending cycle of the game. However, if peoples lives start outweighing their ability to make said content good, does that not mean that perhaps someone else should take their place? All and all, I get where you're coming from. None of this is easy but I feel like everything needs a good kick to get things going again. Sometimes posts like these are not useful in the slightest, sometimes they are.

+1

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Introduction _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hello, my friends. I want to talk about this here and now, as this is meant to be a post to explain what we as a community think is wrong with the server. All I ask for is that this post doesn't get removed, as this is meant to gather community feedback to see where we are as a whole. As a community. It most definitely can collect valuable information, as long as the people who read it are willing to put in their two cents. This isn't to inspire drama or cause it. This isn't to spread hate on the server. This isn't targeted towards anyone. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ To specify _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Let me start off by saying the reason I made this post. I made it because I genuinely love the server and how much it's changed my life. This can be proven on how many times I try to come back over and over and over. I think this applies to not only myself, but multiple others who play the server as well. We all have found a genuine home and a community which we can escape real life from and come to, giving us the ability to socialize with a multitude of people, as well as work alongside them. This is something that people often struggle with or find overbearing to do in real life. This is why I think people have the urges to speak out and want their voices to be heard on a server like this. Because we genuinely can have a connection to what it is. There's nothing short of this other than saying how much we appreciate having synergy here for us, and what it's done and could further do for us in the past and present. We will forever be thankful for what you, the founders, the staff, and even the players. We built something very strong and connected, and that is something that none of us should live down. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ What's happened? _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Now, this is the beef of the post. This is clarifying where we are now, and why we as a community think we are close to a solid death if we continue our ways. There are many reasons that can be listed, and I am sure that I will miss more than a few. However after communing with multiple trusted community members, who I shall not name at any point, I have come to a conclusion that what I am about to list are the primary issues in more than 30 community members' eyes. I will be listing them, then elaborating on them further. Development/Updates Communication with community Staff programs Lack of events Toxicity/Stubbornness Playability incentive Player income _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Elaborating _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Development/Updates This right here is giant. Monumental. It is the key in what shapes how a community can survive and what satisfies their needs, giving them the ability to continue playing as they will. There has been a big update as of recent, and that has pushed the founders to take what I believe is a 3 month break. This is okay at most times as you guys did just work on something big and it can be quite stressful to maintain all the time. It's best to take a break. However, the community has been slowly on a downwards trend, and taking a break that long is a surefire way to knock it out, if not for good. I'm not saying you guys should push yourselves, as it is unhealthy and shouldn't be done. However, what needs to be done in place of this is the addition of an actual development team. You guys need solid workers that you can use to maintain your server while you take the breaks you need. I know you may not want to do this as trust issues may be a concern, and it would be valid as I am a prime example, but not now. I urge you guys to heavily consider recruiting developers to do this work for you, as you guys seem to be extremely burnt out of working on the server. As for anything else, the only thing I would like to touch up on is to thank Zim for how much he dedicates himself to ensuring development is properly done when it needs to be. He seemingly does his best whenever he can. I enjoyed working with him in the past, and I'm sure he remains the same now. 2. Communication with community I feel as though we are in the dark more often than not. We are typically uninformed of what you guys do behind the scenes for a multitude of things, and this can make people very skeptical on how much information they are receiving on a day to day or even a week to week basis. First off, I want to make it clear that high staff such as Forseen, Dragon, Freck, and Anderson are doing an excellent job at staying on top of this at all times, and we cannot thank you guys enough for being here when we need it. You fellas are always there almost immediately when we need it, and that is super super helpful. However, you guys can't do it all sadly, and there is a lot that the community would personally want to hear from the founders. Community meetings are an oddity, happening every few months at best. These don't necessarily need to happen, but it would be best to post something on the forums for people to look at, as it lets them know you, as founders, are still keeping an eye on them and are connected with them. We rarely know that now. 3. Staff programs Now, this is all related to what I saw before Forseen and the new directors had to straight up dedicate a good chunk of their days to fix this. So take this with a grain of salt, as I know some of it may have changed. I personally have seen a lot of issues with who is being given head admin and even veteran admin. It seems more of a "I can do this so I will" type deal. I get this, there could be a great lack of staff to choose from. But the people that you choose reflect on staff as a whole, especially the head admins. (I know this was dealt with recently, so good shit from their part) As for anything beyond the base of staff, there has been a multitude of complaints about this and that. GM program, TR program, etc. These complaints are valid in a good chunk of cases, but I can't help but feel that people don't want to go to the higher ups of the programs to get them resolved. And I specifically will talk about this later in my post. Aside from that though, I feel these two programs have always been up and down. With the server being really low in population, I'm sure they aren't in too good of a place now. They may be trying their best to pick things up, but it's hard to see it that way. I will gather some statements I have received in the past and put them here, and possibly edit this post further on if people comment on anything else they've seen. (these are not coming from me so don't take it to me, thank you) GM: Lack of events Event requiring a full story Quality > Quantity TR: Teamspeak rule To touch up on GM, I know @Daytona211 is trying to do the best he can and I'm sure we all appreciate it. However, appreciation can be outweighed and overheard in the sea of people going on about these issues. To start, lack of events. I feel this may be due to the lack of game masters/staff themselves, but it could also be due to what's happening inside the program. For example, events requiring a story. People may not be creative enough for that, and yeah game masters need to be, but it is ineffective and generally not a good way to encourage more people to become a GM and do events. Second off, quality over quantity. With a full server, I completely understand this, who doesn't hate really poorly thought out/executed events. But we aren't full if ever anymore, and people are craving for the next event all the time, as maybe two-three happen a day, if even. To touch up on TR, the teamspeak rule is about all that remains with that. I believe joah did this, so not much is in control there. I've also heard it's because of the map, because of minges, all sorts of things. But in any light, it hinders a good majority of the rare CC we can catch these days. There is a server suggestion for this, I recommend giving it a look. Other than that, TR is looking healthy as always. 4. Toxicity/Stubbornness Now, I talked about a specific point just above about how people don't want to talk to higher ups in any light about most things. This is due to a multitude of things, mostly being that the people in charge can often be stubborn and stuck in their ways, or just won't budge at all. I feel as a higher up in any position, staff, high command, etc, you should always be open minded and able to make changes that the community wants in general without having them think it'll forever be stuck where it is. Personally I would like to ask @Daytona211 or @Sock Monkey if either of you two have ever been approached about these things I mention above or really anything you've heard about your programs that may often have a reason for it. I know that a good chunk of people will avoid CoC and complain to a director or above almost immediately about said issues. I'm sure a lot could be solved if they went straight to the heads of branches, however this isn't always the case as I know some heads can be very stubborn, as I've stated. As for toxicity, I feel that potentially this post could show toxicity as people might try to find reason to argue with each other, instead of having a civil debate/conversation. This has always been around. But I feel it now more than ever, as we are at a time where everyone is trying their best to fix what they need to, in a very stressful environment. Regardless, it isn't okay and can easily drive people away more often than not. As a community, this should be worked upon. 5. Player incentive Now, there are a good few things I want to cover here. This is all things that players can do themselves, whether it be grinding money for that next weapon or not. 1. Weapons Upon returning to the server, I noticed that perma weapons had gone up an ungodly amount in prices, as not even 3mil can afford anything of use. Grinding is what keeps people AFKing/playing on the server, but the bar has been set too high and everyone has given up at this point. It's pay to win pretty much, and as much as I once again can understand it on a more active server, now is most certainly not the time for it. 2. Simulations To put it in short, people are scared to host sims now. Realistically, they probably fear that someone will call them out for level grinding or something along those lines, and this makes it so absolutely nothing happens in down time. Once again, getting people to grind is good, with jedi and all that, but removing FFAs has caused a surge of fear for simulations in general. Bringing them back may cause people to at least do something in down-time once more. People can still grind the levels if they choose. But choice, specifically player choice, is the keyword in what makes something good and fun. 3. Maps The maps being chosen recently just aren't good for the community. The one we are on currently is cool and all the planets are nice, but we don't need that right now. These cool "big ground planet" maps are generally a hit or miss. Endor and anaxes were hits, everything else was a miss. So when we do get a hit, why do we move off it so hastily? Personally, I would advise the map rotations idea between hit venator and ground maps. This would keep things changed up, without moving to something that could generally kill the population. 6. Player Income We have arrived at the last point I would like to point out, and that is player income. Generally, I have seen returning players more than actual players. It’s not the servers fault, or is it? Everything I mentioned above really impacts this. Current players leave due to things like this, or as @Jad said to me, they generally have too much time and get themselves burnt out. It's a mix of the two, but the former feels stronger then the latter, as it could resolve being burnt out. Regardless, we don't have a solid player income and that can obviously be fixed in a multitude of ways. It all comes down to what I have mentioned and more. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Conclusion _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Generally, no one is the "bad guy” here. We are a community, we are all at fault for what we are doing/have done. Some more than others, however they wouldn't be at fault if not for us being here to work together. I've gone ahead and put up a poll that dictates whether or not you agree, partially agree, or just don't agree with all these things I have brought up. I'm interested in what this post could bring up for the community, so we can truly see what's in everyone's minds. This could be very constructive, or not at all. Hopefully the former. If the founders gave this a read, I appreciate it as I feel someone had to mention it at some point, and I wanted to do it before someone else who's possibly more aggressive did it. I generally gathered all of this from the community, so I hope you don't take this as me trying to just cause drama.

Nah, that's just fog I believe. However, spawn a fog editor for me, remove fog, and check if it stops rendering that big tower. We can check if it has render distance.

Then there are no area portals. That can be very strenuous. I'll edit my post, thanks for checking

I would like to put some perspective on this before hand, as this could be very good, yes. However, looking at it from a development point of view, eh. I'll play devils advocate here for food for thought. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pros: - Lots of space for anything you wish to do - Everything the server usually uses to function - Looks pretty in some places Cons: - Really really big. We are a 110 pop server that can barely push 90 players. In perspective, could be bad. - Judging by the developer, the map is not optimized for multiplayer. This is his first map. I will elaborate further later - Baren as can be at most parts _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Now, we have even cons and pros here, but I will move on to the topic of optimization to equal this out in another perspective. Displacements Maps with displacements (the terrain) often are unoptimized and laggy as displacements work on a sort of polygon-like basis. The average resolution for displacements is typically laggy after covering more the half the grid if paired alongside all sorts of props and brushes (walls/floors, etc), so this could be problematic. Area portals I cannot tell if these exist because they could be done properly, and they might not be. First off, what area portals do is decide what is rendered for the player depending on where they are standing/looking. These are often put in doorways or hatches. This can help heaps, but if overused, can only make optimization worse. If you could do me a favor @Kormand go into singleplayer and type mat_wireframe 1, then move back and forth between a doorway to see if anything beyond it disappears, that would be super useful. Edit: There are no area portals, so basically everything will be rendered even if you don't see it Render distance This is the most simple and effective means of improving performance. Render distance comes in two ways. One, in the shape of props. I can tell by the video, his props either have a super high render distance or he just made it so they don't disappear at all. Very bad. And two, there is visual render distance. This will cut everything out of your view the further you move away, to say the least. I'm not seeing much of that. Edit: There is render distance, so that's good. Should save a bit of FPS, but backed with these top two, maybe not. Brushes Brushes are basically the basics of a map, like the walls, the floor, the ceiling, etc. Everything that can be made in hammer. There are multiple ways of optimizing them after there starts to be too many. The most common is turning a handful of brushes into a single entity. You can figure out that these existed by physgunning a wall and it ends up moving or glowing. These may be persistent though, which means you'd have to hold C to see them. Regardless, I don't know if he included these or not, but it's for the best that he did as brushes are the most commonly used object that need optimization over time. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ All and all, I want to change maps too, but I can't certainly say that this is it. It could be, but who knows. Even the most barebones map can lag on this server, so you gotta be careful with what you pick. Big edit: So I did a bit of testing with a friend on a private server with a cap of 128 players. We basically spawned around 60 NPCs, which simulates you (as a user) having to recieve the information of looking at their models/textures. After such, we took a hit of about 20 FPS. Not the worst, not the best. We then sat there and spawned what we thought would be the normal amount of NPCs in an event, and this obviously lowered the FPS by another 30. That's to be expected, however this is excluding the packets being sent from players to server, ping, sims, as well the the variables of entities and effects being spawned/fired from guns, etc. After spawning the NPCs, we stuck around after doing an admin cleanup to see how much the FPS was effected. We started with around 200, ended with barely hitting 100. Doesn't sound too good. As an end result, I will conclude that performance will be an issue. However. We have had plenty of maps with performance issues in the past, and we came to love them regardless, like extensive. It's all a matter of what you guys think/would define as fun. Ultimately, testing the server pop on it is whats needed, but we'll see how it goes.. This was more of an info dump more then an actual vote. Just thought I'd give you some perspective, nothing else. If anything, I'd lean to a +1, but I'll keep it for now.

I've taken a look at the files. It appears that the creator of this addon has taken it and upscaled the textures by an unnecessary/ungodly amount. (4096 x 4096 to be exact) To put it simply, VTF files (the textures used for source) are often compressed, but upon extracting one out of the 10 texture files, I was met with a single texture worth 65mb. But it doesn't end there. Images themselves are often compressed, so the actual file size of one texture in this folder is 173mb. That's not okay. As as simple test, I downscaled it (to 1096x1096 to be exact) while making sure to maintain any "quality" it may have had before, and it's total file size is now 11MB. This can obviously be further improved. This can easily be optimized with the creators permission, so I'd give it a +1 as it seems a fair addon. (for proof that the model has kept its quality, click here)

If this gets accepted, I can easily work this up in less then a day for free and hand the files to @Zim or someone else, as a more trusted means so he can own the files, not me. Key phrase being "if its accepted". Regardless. +1, burnt cheetos come back. Edit: Medic done Edit 2: Officer done Edit 2: Trooper/support? done

+1 No harm in testing its performance. The GM team could definitely use a helping hand, and this may come to help in an unexpected way. Who knows.