i have no idea if i actually know how to use the source engine or not

For one of my bigger projects, Hat-Life 2 (which is essentially putting A Hat in Time's player character into HL2) I've had to do a lot of changes. and because of that some things just stop working, which is fun to deal with.

One of the major things that caused the entire mod to pause development is the viewmodel randomly vanishing when transitioning levels, interestingly only in games that are derivative of the Half-Life 2 game code (Half-Life 2, Episodic, Portal), stuff like Half-Life: Source are fine. I even compared my changes between base SDK 2013 and HatL2 and undoing some of the changes I made did nothing. The DataDesc is fine, other entities that the player has are being saved, how is this happening!?

This engine is a confusing hodgepodge of chaos, but at the same time that's why I love it.