If you still get crahes sometimes, try to change some graphic settings, this can help to prevent them.

Yes do as he said too /\

Why the hell does this map crash when literally every other map does not need these specifications.

Originally posted by Campeon:

If you still get crahes sometimes, try to change some graphic settings, this can help to prevent them.

This means you exceeded the engine's capabilities, one graphic setting in particular (effects settings) will straight up cut some models from beeing displayed.

Originally posted by Castia:

Why the hell does this map crash when literally every other map does not need these specifications.

1 - lack of optimisation
2 - lots of custom content (textures/models, sounds etc.)
3 - too much details for an old engine

Some textures are also way to big for what they are used for. It would be nice to have all the textures downsized and optimized to be as small as possible while retaining details.

I didn't have to disable any of my addons. But I did have to change my Page Pool to low.

Originally posted by Lossy:

Some textures are also way to big for what they are used for. It would be nice to have all the textures downsized and optimized to be as small as possible while retaining details.

I didn't have to disable any of my addons. But I did have to change my Page Pool to low.

would changing page pool from high to low affect performance if im already having everything else on low? i kept crashing at a specific point during the campaign, the rest were fine. im wondering if this could fix that

Originally posted by brr ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.com ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.com:

Originally posted by Lossy:

Some textures are also way to big for what they are used for. It would be nice to have all the textures downsized and optimized to be as small as possible while retaining details.

I didn't have to disable any of my addons. But I did have to change my Page Pool to low.

would changing page pool from high to low affect performance if im already having everything else on low? i kept crashing at a specific point during the campaign, the rest were fine. im wondering if this could fix that

Your mileage may vary of course. But with all the add-ons I have for my game (Textures, Overhauls, Models and Maps), having page pool set to high for me always has a higher chance of crashing my game. Medium for the longest time; before I subbed to this series, was my solution. But I had to set mine to low in order to play it.

I was able to beat the campaign twice now. :)

I've notice my ram usage for l4d2.exe jumps all the way up to 3.3gb before crashing. Setting it to low averaged about 1.5gb ram usage. Of course everything looked like crap.

The lower the setting is for page pool, the more agressive the engine is to remove sprites, props, sprays, etc.

Agreed on low page pool averting crashes, at the obvious expense of everything looking like crap. The console is consistently complaining about running out of memory when crashing with it set otherwise.
I'm not really certain why this is apparently a DX8 message when L4D2 uses DX9, but either way it's pretty apparent that this campaign is in serious need of texture optimization. If the authors aren't able to do it, I might end up just going through things myself if I find the time.

Edit: Good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lord "texture optimization" is putting it lightly. You have opaque DXT5 2k textures over 5 mb all over the place.

The information on this thread is helpful. I always crash on part 3, just after jumping down the hole. My guess is that there are some heavy duty textures rendering that cause my PC to spike in RAM usage, making Windows force-close the game (edit: I haven't checked, but it's happened twice now).

Done. I have clamped every texture to being no larger than 1024x1024 and swapped opaque DXT5 textures to DXT1; the total size saved is just a bit under a gigabyte, and that will be reflected in the memory usage. I'm able to launch the campaign now (tested each map, no issues) with high paged pool memory. There is presumably some loss in visual fidelity, but it beats not being able to launch the campaign at all.
Unfortunately, no matter what I tried I couldn't get the game to properly overwrite the original campaign with the compressed textures in their own package, not even with load order fiddling or putting it on the workshop, so the process to get this going is rather clumsy.
1. Extract all 8 VPK's for the campaign into one folder in \Left 4 Dead 2\left4dead2\addons, name it whatever. Final output should look like this.[i.imgur.com]
2. Download the compressed textures.
https://mega.
nz/file/c4ZGGTLJ#i0hbPt-i5wQXOKD9E5d7_lxgsytDRGUjzY5mJNayL8k
3. Extract the .zip over your folder with the campaign, and of course overwrite existing files.
4. Very important. Disable/uninstall the workshop version of the campaign, and ensure your new locally extracted version is recognized and enabled. You can be certain you've done this correctly when you see the modified thumbnail[i.imgur.com] and loading screen[i.imgur.com].
5. Play a really good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ campaign.

Oh yeah, one last quirk of L4D2 maps that I forgot about: Your extracted campaign needs a sound cache or all of the nice custom music and sounds won't work. Use snd_buildsoundcachefordirectory and either package sounds into their own VPK or add a search path.

Originally posted by Shampooh:

Done. I have clamped every texture to being no larger than 1024x1024 and swapped opaque DXT5 textures to DXT1; the total size saved is just a bit under a gigabyte, and that will be reflected in the memory usage. I'm able to launch the campaign now (tested each map, no issues) with high paged pool memory. There is presumably some loss in visual fidelity, but it beats not being able to launch the campaign at all.
Unfortunately, no matter what I tried I couldn't get the game to properly overwrite the original campaign with the compressed textures in their own package, not even with load order fiddling or putting it on the workshop, so the process to get this going is rather clumsy.
1. Extract all 8 VPK's for the campaign into one folder in \Left 4 Dead 2\left4dead2\addons, name it whatever. Final output should look like this.[i.imgur.com]
2. Download the compressed textures.
https://mega.
nz/file/c4ZGGTLJ#i0hbPt-i5wQXOKD9E5d7_lxgsytDRGUjzY5mJNayL8k
3. Extract the .zip over your folder with the campaign, and of course overwrite existing files.
4. Very important. Disable/uninstall the workshop version of the campaign, and ensure your new locally extracted version is recognized and enabled. You can be certain you've done this correctly when you see the modified thumbnail[i.imgur.com] and loading screen[i.imgur.com].
5. Play a really good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ campaign.

Oh yeah, one last quirk of L4D2 maps that I forgot about: Your extracted campaign needs a sound cache or all of the nice custom music and sounds won't work. Use snd_buildsoundcachefordirectory and either package sounds into their own VPK or add a search path.

Many thanks for this! I managed to make 2 VPK's with all the content and replaced textures.

Originally posted by Shampooh:

Done. I have clamped every texture to being no larger than 1024x1024 and swapped opaque DXT5 textures to DXT1; the total size saved is just a bit under a gigabyte, and that will be reflected in the memory usage. I'm able to launch the campaign now (tested each map, no issues) with high paged pool memory. There is presumably some loss in visual fidelity, but it beats not being able to launch the campaign at all.
Unfortunately, no matter what I tried I couldn't get the game to properly overwrite the original campaign with the compressed textures in their own package, not even with load order fiddling or putting it on the workshop, so the process to get this going is rather clumsy.
1. Extract all 8 VPK's for the campaign into one folder in \Left 4 Dead 2\left4dead2\addons, name it whatever. Final output should look like this.[i.imgur.com]
2. Download the compressed textures.
https://mega.
nz/file/c4ZGGTLJ#i0hbPt-i5wQXOKD9E5d7_lxgsytDRGUjzY5mJNayL8k
3. Extract the .zip over your folder with the campaign, and of course overwrite existing files.
4. Very important. Disable/uninstall the workshop version of the campaign, and ensure your new locally extracted version is recognized and enabled. You can be certain you've done this correctly when you see the modified thumbnail[i.imgur.com] and loading screen[i.imgur.com].
5. Play a really good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ campaign.

Oh yeah, one last quirk of L4D2 maps that I forgot about: Your extracted campaign needs a sound cache or all of the nice custom music and sounds won't work. Use snd_buildsoundcachefordirectory and either package sounds into their own VPK or add a search path.

Hey there, thanks for doing this! Is it possible in any way for you to put together any sort of "optimized version" to the workshop? With credit to the original authors, of course. I see you did try a workshop upload already but I mean a version that already has the textures already overwritten, that doesn't require any extra steps from the user in order to play properly.

We can all agree how it's absurd how you need to do all this extra stuff with modifying your game settings and downloading and changing the campaign's texture and sound files just to play one campaign. And then changing your settings back afterwards.

But if you can find a way to upload an optimized version to the workshop it can save many potential players some headaches by not having to do all these extra steps.

I fixed the loading crash error by changing Shader Detail setting to Medium.

I can confirm that setting Shader Detail to 'Medium' fixes the loading crash.