Previous it was asking about "how am i supposed to save it as a .bsp?" Mind you that particular question has been asnwered, and you may proceed to the current page for more novice trivia

F9

IT SAYS IT DOESNT EXIST WHEN IT GETS PORTAL 2 OPEN

now the damn thing won't load because certain instances do not exist and cannot be found, wtf?

i just tried replacing them and now they do not appear, the connections are bad and the map wont load in portal. This wasn't happening yesterday, wtf!?!?

Now let me reiterate myself.

I followed the tutorials as explained, I got things working step by step, pressed f9, tested the map physically, kept adding more and more. Eventually I noticed that the more i added, the longer the loading time was to get the map up and running. So I decided to just copy and paste the file to the /portal2/portal2/maps folder and played the file from the tab console in the game. It played perfectly. But now it won't. In fact, some instances and files wont load in hammer at all even though i am following the tutorial perfectly. so I have no idea what the hell is wrong, so I am just going to remove hammer and sdk and reinstall and see if that fixes anything

and yes i will move my custom map somewhere it will be safe and move it back again.

So let's just see if that works

Ya, know it would actually be pretty damn helpful if all that text zooming by before my eyes could even read it would allow me to read it and know what that was. especially the red error text

From what I'm reading, you don't want to launch your map while in Hammer because it takes too long. There is an option in the Run Map menu (F9) which you can check called "Don't run the game after compiling" to prevent the map being launched after it compiles into a .bsp file. Then just exit Hammer and the authoring tools, then launch the game. No moving files around required.

You also may want to check the box that has something like "Press key after compile" or something like that so you can check the compile list for errors that may pop up also. Hope this helps you out!

Fracture wrote:
i was not aware of that.

Ya, know it would actually be pretty damn helpful if all that text zooming by before my eyes could even read it would allow me to read it and know what that was. especially the red error text

The loading thingy is the map compiling, as said before.
The files you load in hammer tell the game what should be where, and what it should do. Nothing more, nothing less. The BSP files are the ones you play. These are calculated from the vmf files. These files include a lot more information: how should the lighting be on everything? How do all the things in your map physically interact?

The more things you add the more complex this process becomes and the longer it will take for hammer to create the bsp file. There are ways to improve this, called optimization, but if this is your first time in hammer, just wait since optimization requires quite a bit of understanding of how mapping really works.

As masterlagger mentioned: it is very useful to have
Don't run the game after compiling and
Wait for keypress when done compiling both checked. This allows you to check what happened.

red things are usually bad things that create serious problems, yellow things can often be ignored, and white stuff is great!

hope that helped

i keep getting red errors on a variety of things, a bunch of yellow errors, and i haven't a clue as to what exact they are refering to. I played the bsp file anyway, and it worked just fine to me.

so does anyone know how i can find out what the red errors are refering to? should i post them here?

Fracture wrote:
should I post my compile log?!?!

There are sites which are wholly for looking up console errors. Try interlopers: http://www.interlopers.net/errors/ and paste in your code there.
There are a few 'portal 2 only' errors that exist, but mainly you can ignore them especially if the error is in yellow, this is usually just information or a low-priority error.