ZAPHOD/MACMAN: Lighting in de_prodigy, reveal your secrats!?

[Defrag]

I would have to agree that prodigy is one of the most beautiful pieces of level design I've ever witnessed. It's just a shame the rest of the CS:S maps (except Aztec) look rather plain compared to it.

I'm having real problems getting acquainted to the Source lighting system. With HL1 I could create any mood I desired and accentuate certain architectural features. Now I seem to always have a pitch dark room with very bright lights that only light up small portions of the room. I've tried fiddling with various entities and values, ambient lighting settings and more.

Can anyone suggest any good values to get me started? My geometry is looking grand, but it's hard to appreciate it when my lighting looks like it was put together by Marilyn Manson.

[Tequila]

I would have to agree that prodigy is one of the most beautiful pieces of level design I've ever witnessed. It's just a shame the rest of the CS:S maps (except Aztec) look rather plain compared to it.

I'm having real problems getting acquainted to the Source lighting system. With HL1 I could create any mood I desired and accentuate certain architectural features. Now I seem to always have a pitch dark room with very bright lights that only light up small portions of the room. I've tried fiddling with various entities and values, ambient lighting settings and more.

Can anyone suggest any good values to get me started? My geometry is looking grand, but it's hard to appreciate it when my lighting looks like it was put together by Marilyn Manson.

I don't know, the standard values of around 200-300 are fine for standard lights, while spotlights look good in the 1000s. Valve also sometimes mess with the 'constant' value to create amazingly intense lighting, but I've had no luck with it so far. It would help if you posted pics of your problem!

[Defrag]

I'll post a few pics tomorrow as I can't show the map I'm working on right now (see siggy ). I've tried using the spotlights with various settings including quadratic, linear, constant (500,000 like valve used for dm_lockdown) and large/small inner/outer angle values.. but I still typically end up with a very intense look sporting big contrasts between light/dark. I'm not sure whether Source is particularly suited to the option of texture lighting either.

*edit - This is the sort of lighting I typically shoot for, nice and warm -- reminiscent of scary one's HLDM maps. http://img142.exs.cx/img142/5082/scorpius22ae.jpg . (Screeny is from someone's WIP map posted on the other forum. Looks very nice, too. )

[Tequila]

I'll post a few pics tomorrow as I can't show the map I'm working on right now (see siggy ). I've tried using the spotlights with various settings including quadratic, linear, constant (500,000 like valve used for dm_lockdown) and large/small inner/outer angle values.. but I still typically end up with a very intense look sporting big contrasts between light/dark. I'm not sure whether Source is particularly suited to the option of texture lighting either.

*edit - This is the sort of lighting I typically shoot for, nice and warm -- reminiscent of scary one's HLDM maps. http://img142.exs.cx/img142/5082/scorpius22ae.jpg . (Screeny is from someone's WIP map posted on the other forum. Looks very nice, too. )

Texture lights are old-hat as far as Source is concerned. Also, are you trying to you spotlights soley as a room's lighting, because you're going to want to have normal lights to 'fill out' space. I wouldn't bother messing with quadratic and linear values; from what I've seen Valve always leave them at default - they have no discernable effect.

[DD]

ooo, dm_lockdown is open source in the SDK? That's a great way to understand how valve employees generally do their lighting. I've been struggling to find a nice settings, and compiling and recompiling is ass.

Seriously, valve stinks for not putting lighting preview in the editor, WELCOME TO THREE YEARS AGO VALVE. Although lots of new hammer features are awesome.. :\

[Defrag]

Yeah, they changed the directory structure and also added sdk_dm_lockdown.vmf when HL2DM was released. It's currently located in the sdk_content/hl2dm/srcmaps/ folder iirc.

And yeah, the lighting is a bit of a damp squibb in source after having a poke through the Doom3 editor. The integration of Doom3 Ed is astounding, though anything less would've made editing extremely tedious given that lighting is basically the most important part of the game. With Hammer, it's still possible to get by without a lighting preview, but it does the process no favours really. Hammer's encapsulation in steam also slows things down quite a bit and hogs more RAM. I'll be quite interested to see how editors progress from here.

[DD]

Doom 3 has real-time light preview... I don't want that. When I said light-preview I meant something more like UnrealEd where you hit a light-compile button (and you can adjust settings) and see the changes. Compiling light in hl2 is so much faster than hl1 thanks to all point based lights adding a features like this would be pretty easy.

As for you RAM problem with steam, and working with hammer through steam does blow ass, what I do is quit the editor/steam and compile with bat files to make it that much faster.

Yes they can get away with it, and have, and will but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been done. Maybe hl2 wouldn't have taken 5 years. D:

[Defrag]

Perhaps they will release an update to Hammer with a lighting preview in future. We can but dream.

[Tequila]

We can. But it isn't going to happen.

Also: DD, can you help me out in regards to .bat files? I really want to be able to compile outside of Hammer, but don't have a clue where to start.

[DD]

Sure... I'll post the file when I get back to Texas. It's pretty simple though, you just CD to your tools directory, type the name of the build programs and then the address of your map.vmf. You could try to figure it out in the mean time but I'll post it later.

[Defrag]

In days gone by I would use the TBCC (Tool Box Compilation Controller) for compiles. It was a sweet tool that would output a .bat file according to the specifications you set using the GUI. There were loads of options for each stage of compilation set by using checkboxes / fields and whatnot. Great little tool. Unfortunately it got abandoned

[OL]

guys nems batch compiler has been updated for source if i remember correctly

[Defrag]

Cool, I'll check it out when his site actually works again, thanks.

[Tequila]

Yeah, I'll check it out.

[DD]

cd "**YOUR STEAM DIRECTORY**\steamapps\your@email.com\sourcesdk\bin"




vbsp.exe "**YOUR STEAM DIRECTORY**\steamapps\your@email.com\sourcesdk\cstrike_sample_content\maps\**MAPFILE**"




vvis.exe "**YOUR STEAM DIRECTORY**\steamapps\your@email.com\sourcesdk\cstrike_sample_content\maps\**MAPFILE**"




vrad.exe -smooth 85 "**YOUR STEAM DIRECTORY**\steamapps\your@email.com\sourcesdk\cstrike_sample_content\maps\**MAPFILE**"




pause

Fill in ** **

smooth 85 increases the smoothing group angle to 85 degrees... since the default is like... 0.000000000892731 degrees of wtf?