Lighting

[RealDope]

Is there no way to lower ambient lighting beyond the "a" style of light_environment?

[LUA]
ent:Fire("SetPattern", "a")
[/LUA]

On a light_environment entity does not make the world as dark as I want.

[LUA]
ent:SetKeyValue("_ambient", "255 255 255 10")
ent:SetKeyValue("_light", "255 255 255 10")
[/LUA]
Modifying the 4th argument for these keys seems to have no effect at all.

[Acecool]

You can use black fog to make the world darker. Set the intensity to 0.5 - 0.99 and it'll make things dark.

[RealDope]

[QUOTE=Acecool;46889341]You can use black fog to make the world darker. Set the intensity to 0.5 - 0.99 and it'll make things dark.[/QUOTE]

Thanks loads, I was beginning to think it wasn't possible and this worked really well for me.

EDIT:

I seem to have run into another lighting problem; I'm rotating an env_sun around the map, and at a certain point it ducks below the horizon and stops casting shadows on prop_statics. Unfortunately, this cutoff seems to be at a very specific time, (the whole model just goes from entirely lit up to entirely dark, also ignoring other objects in the way, only accounting for horizon), and once it has been shadowed once, it will not light up again. Rejoining fixes this problem for a client until the sun reaches the same point again and the prop is shadowed.

I thought it might be a lightmaps thing, but forcing the redownload of them does not seem to fix the problem. Even disabling shadows entirely on shadow_control does not stop them from being de-illuminated.

[Acecool]

It depends how everything is set up.. I'd recommend having a decent light setting ( m / n ) for sun up high, then using Lerp as it approaches the horizon to cause the system to fade to darkness ( using the light system, then when at a dark level using fog to get darker ).. I should have an example of my system on youtube but if not I can record another soon.

[RealDope]

[QUOTE=Acecool;46896591]It depends how everything is set up.. I'd recommend having a decent light setting ( m / n ) for sun up high, then using Lerp as it approaches the horizon to cause the system to fade to darkness ( using the light system, then when at a dark level using fog to get darker ).. I should have an example of my system on youtube but if not I can record another soon.[/QUOTE]

Yea, that's exactly how I'm doing it. I lerp the lighting style as the sun rotates. The map world lights up properly, but not any of the prop_statics. They all remain as if the lighting style was "a".

[Acecool]

I've encountered that problem too except slightly different. Basically if I joined the server and the lighting was m, then I changed it to a they stay at m unless I retry, then they're at a.

Some have claimed to have a fix but I haven't seen it yet ( even calling render.RedownloadAllLightMaps on the client only causes a stutter and isn't necessary for maps that have a built in light environment like evocity v33x... Although with V33 the lighting updates properly ).

Which map are you using?

[RealDope]

[QUOTE=Acecool;46899838]I've encountered that problem too except slightly different. Basically if I joined the server and the lighting was m, then I changed it to a they stay at m unless I retry, then they're at a.

Some have claimed to have a fix but I haven't seen it yet ( even calling render.RedownloadAllLightMaps on the client only causes a stutter and isn't necessary for maps that have a built in light environment like evocity v33x... Although with V33 the lighting updates properly ).

Which map are you using?[/QUOTE]

v4b1, which is in most cases identical to v33x. It seems to have more lighting problems though, most notably the trees.

EDIT:
It also doesn't seem to be a style problem, the trees slowly dim as the style lerps down, but once the env_sun goes below the horizon, they suddenly become almost solid black (a poor attempt at being shadowed..) and then the style has no effect. I disabled dynamic shadows entirely with the shadow_control and it didn't stop this.

[editline]10th January 2015[/editline]

I also can't understand why I can't change light color..

According to the wiki, returning a value in EntityKeyValue is supposed to override the value no? So why does this not make all lights an extremely bright red?

[LUA]
hook.Add("EntityKeyValue", "check_keys", function(ent, key, val)
if ent:GetClass() == "light" or ent:GetClass() == "light_spot" then
if key == "_light" then
return "255 0 0 1000"
end
end
end)
[/LUA]

[editline]10th January 2015[/editline]

Tested on v33x, same issues with all the static props (trees mostly).