Light Problem Created 8 years ago2016-04-14 14:26:42 UTC by keevlicious

Hello,

I have a problem with some lights... I made a disco with some light. When I press a button, it will flicker. As soon as i place light_spot, light and point_spotlight, the room and some textures will be black somehow... If i remove the light_spot, light and point_spotlight, the room is fine but then i cant make the light flicker because i removed the light... Did i miss something? heres a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKolxmfZdJo

Well, i figured it out. As soon as i give the entity light, light spot OR spot light a targetname, the room will go black...

EDIT: Just realized this is in the Source forums. I don't know if the below still applies in Source.

---

Make sure to check your compile logs. If you have an area with many different styles of lights / lights that turn on/off independently, it may not compile correctly due to the exponential amount of light data required. Adding a targetname would factor into this because it means the light can then be triggered on/off.

Taken from the VDC:

Giving a light entity a targetname makes VRAD compile a second lightmap "page" for the surfaces that its emitted light touches. This won't harm in-game performance, but it will increase compile time and BSP filesize, regardless of whether the light ever receives input to change its state.

However, the system can be overloaded if you try to make it handle a large number of overlapping named lights (since the number of pages needed increases exponentially). When this happens performance can be harmed and you may well see lighting anomalies.

VRAD attempts to avoid this with its hard-coded limits of two switchable lights affecting a brush face and 32 pages in total. More than this causes VRAD to throw a warning such as "Too many light styles on a face" and refuse to compute the lightmaps for those lights; this will make those areas appear as if they are not lit. You can help too by giving lights that will always change state at the same time a shared targetname, which makes VRAD merge their pages together.

Oh yeah.. thanks for the answer. so its not possible to make light flicker with a normal button... that sucks... ruined my disco

I mean, a disco, with as many lights as one would expect... would probably be pretty hard to pull off under the above limits. Maybe not impossible... but tricky.

Use dynamic lights. They're calculated real time and not baked.

I will try it with dynamic light, yeah. I hope it will work with input and output.

they do but they're a pain to set up properly. just keep playing with it.