Troubleshooting

From Garry's Goons

Contents 1 System Requirements 2 Stuttering and Long Load Times 3 My game keeps crashing! 4 I am having Graphics Problems, or my game crashes and the error says something about Direct X 5 Garrys Mod is crashing and saying something about shaderapidx9.dll 6 I see huge-ass red blink errors in the game 7 I get an error about file or dirrectory already exist when I try to update with SVN 8 I get an error that says Reliable Snapshot Overflow every time I try and join 9 The server isn't showing up for me or something else is going on that's just weird when I join 10 The lag is pretty bad, what do I do?

System Requirements

Here are Lowen SoDium's recommendations for bare minimum system requirements (And I mean bare)

• 1.5 GHz processor AMD Athlon or Intel Core (Solo or Duo) or 2.0 GHz Pentium 4

• 1 GB RAM

• DirectX 7 level graphics card

• Internet connection (broadband)

• Windows XP

Here are Lowen SoDium's real recommendations

• 2+ GHz Athlon 64 X2 or Core 2 Duo

• 2 GB RAM

• Mid to upper range DirectX 9 Graphics Card (especially for the new real time shadows)

• Internet connection (broadband)

• Windows XP

You can run Garry's Mod under Vista, both 32bit and 64bit. However, it is not recommend unless you have a pretty beefy machine with lots and lots of ram due to Vista's higher requirements mixed with GMod's already high memory usage.

Stuttering and Long Load Times

The add ons we use on our servers will use near 1 GB of system memory. This combined with your already running system task and programs will push you over 1 GB. The number one thing you can do on systems with 1 GB or less to improve performance is add more ram.

Defrag your GFC files. To do this, start Steam, go to "My Games" and right click "Garry's Mod". Select "Properties" and go the "Local Files" tab. There, click on the Defragment cache files. Repeat this for every game that you own that Garry's Mod uses. (HL2, HL2:DM, HL2:EP1, HL2:EP2, CS:S, DoD:S, TF2)

Defrag your hard drive. I recommend JkDefrag [1] which is a free fast defragger, but the standard Windows Defrag will work fine.

Some users have reported that the first time that they load Garrys Mod with our addons takes longer than subsequent times.

My game keeps crashing!

Some people have reported that defragging your drive might help (see above). Also, try to avoid spawning 80 thrusters onto your rubber manhack giant robot cannon bus. If the game is incredibly choppy, turn down your graphics settings.

I am having Graphics Problems, or my game crashes and the error says something about Direct X

Edit your short cut for Garry's Mod (or the Garry's Mod Launch Properties in Steam) that have -window -dxlevel 70 at the end. This will force the game to start in a window and to only use Direct X 7. You can force Direct X 8 by using -dxlevel 80 and you can force Direct X 8.1 by using -dxlevel 81

Users with Radeon 9000 series card, make sure you are using drivers that are 7.4 or older. Newer Radeon drivers are fucked for Direct X on those cards.

Garrys Mod is crashing and saying something about shaderapidx9.dll

There is a thread on how to fix this in the Steam forums. [2]

I see huge-ass red blink errors in the game

Solution 1: You do not have Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, or one of the other Half-Life 2 add-ons and someone spawned something from one of those games. You should either buy those games or ignore it. Those are the only two answers

Solution 2: You fucked up your SVN installation. I suggest you start over from step one of SVN

I get an error about file or dirrectory already exist when I try to update with SVN

Right click on the folder and use the SVN 'Revert' function. This will produce a list of any file that differs from the ones on the SVN server and allows you to revert them.

I get an error that says Reliable Snapshot Overflow every time I try and join

It seems like we can't really pinpoint the problem, but I have found that if you keep joining and it just gives you the error, try typing 'retry' in console minus the quotes. I honestly don't know why this makes a difference rather than pressing join again, but it seemed to do it for me.

If you still can't get in, wait about 15 minutes, because if an admin sees it happening they will have the people who are on save their stuff, and then reset, and then it should be fine.

The server isn't showing up for me or something else is going on that's just weird when I join

The server may be down, but if you find out its just you, check your firewall and router. Also Sun Dog says:

"Out of curiosity, did you try deleting your blobs? SamuraiMushroom says it won't matter, but he also didn't try. (Shut down Steam, then goto the root of the Steam directory, and remove ClientRegistry.blob and AppUpdateStats.blob. Reboot. Restart Steam. Steam will generate fresh ones. This tonic will fix a lot of oddball problems. It's like Marvel Mystery Oil for your Garry's Mod.)"

The lag is pretty bad, what do I do?

When you play on GGG, open console (~) and type in: rate 85000. Press enter. Should help with lag. This raises the amount of data GGG will send to you. If your connection can take it, your latency will decrease.