Missing: Crisp shadows from surface lights and flick dlights

(Chruker) #1

Hey

I must have missed the lighting 101 course. I have this flame light, which is made from two surface lights. But I want it to cast some crisp shadows. I have tried func_group with _lightmapscale 0.1, but it still creates some jagged edge shadows. Any hints on making it cast crisp shadows?

Second problem is that I want the flame to flicker. I have tried with the dlight entity, but the flickering was very very faint. I have read something about the dlight requires additional lighting from the map, to flicker properly.

I have browsed through the sticky ET ressources, but didn’t find much on lighting. But I guess most of those links are to things where ET differs from other games (Command Post etc). But does anybody have some good tutorials?

(nUllSkillZ) #2

To achieve “flickering” you should look for lightstyles.

(As far as I remember add a key: _style value: 1 to your light entity.
There are some more style No.'s but I cannot remember the No. and the effects.)

(Shaderman) #3

nUllSkillZ, guess who postet this list of lightstyles :smiley:

(Chruker) #4

I have the style key set to 6.

Anyway the place where I read the thing about dlight is here: http://kos.spot.com.au/forum_pics/dlight/dlight.html

(Chruker) #5

Ahh, a slight improvement on the dlight issue. While reading lightning bolt tutorial it hit me, that the reason for the faint flicker could be the style string I was using. I had a look at it, and the lowest letter was o and the highest q. So when I changed the style to 8, which is just aaaaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzzz, the light flickers a lot more. However the result is still only visible on the metal of the flame fixture, and on the marble floor.

However there is no flicker on the stone face. So I guess its a shader/texture thing. But then again both shaders are very simple.


textures/chruker/et_olympic/marble_black_1
{
	qer_editorimage textures/chruker/et_olympic/marble_black_1.jpg
	implicitMap textures/chruker/et_olympic/marble_black_1.jpg
} 

textures/chruker/et_olympic/sandstone_1
{
//	qer_editorimage textures/chruker/et_olympic/sandstone_1.jpg
//	implicitMap textures/chruker/et_olympic/sandstone_1.jpg
	qer_editorimage textures/chruker/et_olympic/sandstone_half_1.jpg
	implicitMap textures/chruker/et_olympic/sandstone_half_1.jpg
}
(Chruker) #6

Ok, range and over-illumination cause the result to not be visible on the stone texture. So after moving the dlight a bit (its centered over the marble floor) I get the result I want with the dlight.

However I’m still looking for a way to get some nice shadows on the wall.