best compile settings for light mapped terrain?

(pazur) #1

somewhere here in this forum i read that -filter is not good for light mapped terrain. could someone give me a hint what light settings are best for lmt?

(hummer) #2

Try simply ommiting -filter from the compile stage.

From ydnar on another forum:

If you use -filter (or -extrawide, which is equivalent to -super 2 -filter), then your milage may vary on lightmapped terrain.
The problem is that the filtering algorithm only looks at a single lightmap when filtering. This is OK with normal adjacent brush faces lying in the same plane because they will usually be on the same lightmap.

However, lightmapped terrain is a special case of non-planar lightmap projection, and thus suffers from all the potential weirdness that np projecion brings with it. Adjacent meshes will not be put into a seamless lightmap. This is to avoid erroneous lightmap projection on cyclical-overlapped cases.

An example would be a continuous mesh of a spiral ramp. Higher portions of the ramp would shadow lower portions of the ramp, giving improper shadowing.

I hope this sort of makes sense. It was something I wrestled with a while ago for a couple weeks trying to get right. When I have time and access to my development machine, I plan on revisiting this problem.

In the meantime, you can work around it by adjusting the terrain a bit (including the indexmap/alphamap) and/or omitting -filter from the lighting phase.

(pazur) #3

thanks :slight_smile: gonna kick -filter from compile settings… another question: is -samples N or super/extra better for lmt?

(hummer) #4

I thougt samples was faster… I would try both and see which looks better, and which takes more time.