Environmental lighting?

Gary · Post by **Gary** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 5:42 am

Why does my environmental shadows suck so bad? Also isn't lightmaps static? So if I move a entity that casts lightmap shadows, when it moves the shadow won't?

My current shadows:

There a way to fix this?

Also, thought for the future, a setting that would have the light_environment cast something besides lightmaps, such as dynamic light? And if someone just doesn't have the power to run something, we could also fix that:

Low would be light maps.

Med would be dynamic light but now quality.

High would be better then low quality dynamic, but not perfect.

Full would be high quality soft shadows.

shiftey · Post by **shiftey** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 5:54 am

The lighting thing in the first picture is due to the way light is calculated. The value of the light is added to the texture. Change the orange texture to something like white or gray and you'll see it shows differently.

As for the light, dynamic light the way you are talking about it wouldn't work in the source engine. Source does not have good optimized code for its dynamic lights like other games.

Steam · Post by **Shana** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 6:49 am

What Shiftey said. Fully dynamic environmental lighting and shadows in a sourceMOD? Very, VERY unlikely.

But who knows how much valve is gonna extend the source engine in the future.

Tysn · Post by **Tysn** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 7:11 am

Turn the lightmap scale on those brush faces down and set the sunspread angle to 5 in the light environment and it should look better.

Also, you might want to go off of this as a baseline for light_environment settings: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Sky_List

shiftey · Post by **shiftey** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 7:15 am

Here's another resource: http://wiki.obsidianconflict.net/?title ... _Reference

Gary · Post by **Gary** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 7:18 am

Ah, thanks for the help with the map shadows.

Also, C17 is using dynamic lights instead of the old lightmap.

Steam · Post by **Shana** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 8:05 am

Gjsdeath wrote:Also, C17 is using dynamic lights instead of the old lightmap.

Wrong, they still use lightmaps.
They use dynamic lights to some extend, but env lighting and most other static light sources are still using lightmaps.

fug's Obsidian clips · Post by **fug4life** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 9:10 pm

What thay said lol^

Vasili · Post by **Vasili** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 10:02 pm

[img]http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/169/watertower0000.jpg
[/img]

That's way too bright.

BigFoot · Post by **BigFoot** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 2:14 pm

i once heard dev textures have another parameter that automatically turns down the lightmaps to lower quality?

but basically you should do what Tysn said and it will look better

Gary · Post by **Gary** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 7:28 pm

Yes, I know what I need to do already. I am just not going to compile it like that until the pre-release build as it will take for ever.