Bug: no water reflections [SOLVED]
I've made three maps that look alike but with different solutions, when all was done and published I noticed that one of them looked a bit odd. The water does not reflect anything, everything else looks ok. Rebuilding or editing stuff out doesn't change that. The console commands have no effect either. It looks like somewhere along the editing process the trigger responsible for water behavior got broken for good. Any suggestions except living with it or starting from scratch?
Light strips are reflected in one screenshot, in the other one they aren't.
This is made in the PTI editor right?
Some water textures render differently as they are 'cheap'. Also sometimes reflections can be incorrect because cubemaps are not placed or built to the latest version of your map.
Fiddle around with different water textures.
Yes, this is only PTI made. How would I fiddle around with different water textures? I don't think I have any choice there with the PTI editor. This map is basically identical to the other two maps which had no water problem. It only had a few more light strips and a gel dropper additionally. When I removed those it didn't effect the problem.
You can export your map to hammer in the menu and change the texture in there.
Too advanced?
But still that's weird. I guess the PTI only use 1 same water texture for every map, doesn't it? So why such that variation amongst maps that only have few changes? I can't remember many PTI maps with lack of cubemaps or different reflections in water surface... I would understand a lack of reflections due to cheap water in huge maps in order to inmprove some performance, but not here...
useful tools and stuff here on TWP 
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So one of your maps does has reflections and another one doesn't? Does that one have multiple water levels? More than one "water plane" will cause problems with the reflections. It's an issue with the engine and the only way to fix it is to make all pools be at the same height.
Portal 1: Portal Pro, Resurrection, Dyad, Rexaura
Portal 2: [Coop] Electrophobia, [PTI] EotM Collection, [SP] Aperture Halloween
Mevious, I think I managed to fix that issue. I use to have several water heights in my maps, and I fixed it accidentally by having a water_lod_control over each water brush with its specific values depending on the possible height or distance the player could be... No more fickering/disappearing reflections on the water surface (ofc this can only be done in hammer...)
useful tools and stuff here on TWP [spoiler]
[/spoiler]That seems to be exactly the problem. Today I started to reconstruct the map and when it was finished it had that problem again. I started to edit details and after I removed one water pool that was below the other ones it suddenly worked. I'm almost sure I used different water planes before in other maps and didn't notice any trouble. Apparently I wasn't paying attention. But this time the problem wasn't merely cosmetic, a friend reported he could not load the map, it was giving him an error. After I updated the map without that one water pool he could load and play it.
Here was the trouble maker: