Cubemaps on my custom map won't display.

[swagNswift]

I used a reflective texture, selected the faces for the cubemap to reflect, compiled the map, set building_cubemaps to 1 and ran buildcubemaps. There wasn't a single reflection, i'm using ep2 hammer and my maps are not set to HDR. I don't know what it could be. Please help!

[Matt]

By reflective are you talking about the glass/reflectiveglass001 through glass/reflectiveglass003 textures or textures that have their $envmap set to env_cubemaps?

[swagNswift]

By reflective I just meant a texture that supports cubemap reflections. I used the trainstation tile texture in Half-Life 2.

[Peter Brev]

Turn cheats on and see if you get reflections on the 6 balls with impulse 81.

[swagNswift]

I already did that.

[swagNswift]

And it said this in the console: Late precache of models/shadertest/envballs.mdl

[Peter Brev]

Originally posted by swagNswift:

I already did that.

Originally posted by swagNswift:

And it said this in the console: Late precache of models/shadertest/envballs.mdl

You're not giving me any additional information here. "I already did that" ok, sounds cool. Then what? Did you see 6 balls? Did you see reflections on them? Share a screenshot of them?

Check the crossbow's scope as well.

[swagNswift]

https://imgur.com/a/i1FoT52

[swagNswift]

https://imgur.com/KsEJEqr

[swagNswift]

Do you need any others?

[swagNswift]

I can send you a link to the .vmf file

[Peter Brev]

It would seem like Half-Life 2 is still suffering from the post SteamPipe update that broke cubemaps. I thought they fixed it since Half-Life 2: Deathmatch has it fixed.

Check this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPFmYqwxhMY&t=502s

Starting at 8:22.

[swagNswift]

Does it really have to be fixed this way. It seems like it should just be able to be fixed more easily without having to download third party tools.

[Peter Brev]

Unfortunately, for all these older games, yes, you have to go through the hassle of building them this way. As TopHATTwaffle explained, cubemaps seem to get pre-built when compiling the map. Not sure why this happens, but since textures are having envmap information embedded into the VMTs, you need to manually remove the VTFs in order to remove this envmap information so that the game can rebuild the cubemaps properly. It sucks, but you'll have to deal with it. Valve have shown no interest in fixing this. Half-Life 2: Deathmatch got lucky because a Valve employee seems to be fairly active in the game.

[swagNswift]

Valve's desks have wheels, and almost everyone at valve must be pretty lazy now. Thanks bro, i'm sure i'm gonna mark your comment as the post answer soon, but I want to see what other people say. And actually, what if you set Half-Life 2 to upcoming beta?

[swagNswift]

Do cubemaps build correctly on Source SDK 2013 Singleplayer?