Hey guys,
Today I spent most of my time, including the time I was supposed to be spending with my girlfriend, porting the code over to cleaned up version of the Orange Box SDK. For those of you that don't know what that means: HDR, Jiggle boobs, and more. This wasn't just Valve's version of the SDK, I decided to use our friends at Allied Mods' version. Whenever Valve releases an SDK, they clean it up, make it GCC 4.2 compliant, make it run better for people will older hardware, and even do something that Valve would never do: support it. At first it was a simple port, which alone took a couple hours to copy over the files and make sure to include any modified base code, as well as our implementation of LUA. The code compiled perfectly, but when starting a server it acted strange. The game would just return to the main menu, and spit two lines out in console, this is much better than a crash though. The lines were like this:
Missing RecvProp for DT_TEEffectDispatch - DT_EffectData/m_vOrigin
Host_EndGame: CL_ParseClassInfo_EndClasses: CreateDecoders failed.
It was strange, since the code was basically just the base with our files on top of the base system. It turned out to be a bug in the SDK, but guess what, Allied Mods' DamagedSoul and I tracked it down (mostly him while I watched Reno 911). Figures that he would be the one finding bugs in Valve's code. What does this say? Valve doesn't test their code enough. It seems silly to release something without testing, and I am sure we haven't been the best with that thus far, but seriously, its Valve! Anyway, Natalya's boobs might come to life before you guys know it. :)
Your coder,
Anthony Iacono