Problems with light_spot in half life Created 10 months ago2023-06-12 19:24:17 UTC by oofnack

Basically, I have been using the leaked vfm of the map c1a3 for lights, and I've run into a problem. I used the spotlights in about the same manner as the maps do but when I run the game, they are too dark accept in the areas they are meant to be. is there any way to find out what the light should be.

Try with normal light entities, or try changing the brightness to a higher value.

thank you, tbh i tried it the ladder first and it still looked weird. but i changed it to other light entities and it worked. but i kind of still wanna use the spotlight entities because that's what the vmf's used, but idk if mi missing something or not.

The compilers used for Half-Life 1 had a bug that doubled the intensity of direct lighting and might be the cause of the discrepancy you're seeing. You could try out using the -dlight # option on the RAD compiler. I don't remember if 1 corresponded to that original qrad lighting, or if you need to use 2. Just try out both and see which helps you replicate the lighting best

sadly, it didn't work. my main problem was the fact that it would only light the spot that it was meant to light and not everything other things.

It's probably because you are using vluzacn's compilers (VHLT), they produce very different lighting compared to the original tools. The only way a light_spot can light up surroundings is by reflected light. VHLT takes into account the color of the texture, if your light_spot is shining on a dark texture, it's going to reflect very little light. You can probably mitigate this by just increasing the light_spot brightness value to something very big.

If the keyvalues of the light_spot are the same as in the leaked map you many want to experiment with the _fade and _falloff ZHLT keyvalues. The best likeness would be using the same qrad compiler that Valve originally used.