Troubleshooting

Contents

For Players     The console won't open
    Textures fade to black at a small distance
    Some models appear solid black, although they should be lit and textured
    When I press fire, there's a delay before the actual shot
For Developers
    I can't build the engine in MSVC 6.0 due to a compilation error

For Players

The console won't open

Make sure the gameinfo.txt file in the valve folder or your mod's folder does not have the following setting:
"secure" "1"

If this line is present, delete it. To enable the console, start Xash3D with the -dev or -console parameter.

Textures fade to black at a small distance

Try changing the value of the gl_texture_lodbias console variable. The default value is 0.0. Setting a negative value helps on some ATI video cards.

Also consider disabling the texture LOD bias feature altogether; for that, locate the following line in the opengl.cfg file in the valve folder (for Half-Life) or your mod's data folder:
setgl gl_ext_texture_lodbias "1"
and change it like this:
setgl gl_ext_texture_lodbias "0"

Some models appear solid black, although they should be lit and textured

This may be due to the way invisible brushes are used around the models as obstacles for the player while Xash3D's extended lighting is enabled. With GoldSource's lighting method, this mapping technique does not cause such side effects. You can avoid the problem by disabling extended lighting; for that, set the r_extended_lighting console variable to 0. This will make Xash3D approximate the lighting methods used in GoldSource, but will also disable some newer effects.

When I press fire, there's a delay before the actual shot

This is one of the symptoms of Xash3D's incomplete implementation of client-side weapon prediction. This problem and a few related ones are well known but have so far defied correction. You can disable weapon prediction by setting the following console variables (set both of them):
cl_lw "0"
cl_predict "0"

For Developers

I can't build the engine in MSVC 6.0 due to a compilation error

You need Service Pack 5 for MSVC 6.0. I don't know why this error occurs, but I believe it's a bug in Visual Studio. If you are a skilled programmer, try modifying the code to fix this. If you succeed, I will include your changes in the code.