Too many named lights.... Created 19 years ago2005-01-18 22:09:22 UTC by coldfeet

Hey, I'm trying to make a hallway where the lights turn on when you get inside a certain proximity, and turn off when you leave the area - kind of like "smart lights" that only turn on when you are near them.

Problem is, the method I'm using isn't working. Apparently, you can only have 4-5 named lights on the same brush, and I get some crazy errors. I have triggers that turn lights on when you come near, and turn them off when you leave the radius, but I have to name all my lights, and I want more than 3 lights.

Is there anyway to turn lighted textures on and off other than using a wall toggle? I don't want the lighted wall to disappear, that just doesn't make sense. Any ideas?

What error is this exactly?

(taken from an error reference at the Snark Pit)

WARNING: Too many light styles on a face (X,X,X)
As the error suggests, there are either too many named lights lighting an area, or too many different light appearance types. Reduce the complexity of your lighting in the area of the co-ordinates given.

Try namin' all of them with teh same name so you don't have to have multiple lights?

Maybe I didn't explain what I'm trying to do well enough.

You have a hallway, we'll divide the hallway into sections - A,B,C,D.

The hallway is straight. Kind of looks like this:

| | --> section A
| | --> section B
| | --> section C
| | --> section D

When player is in section A, only the light in section A is lit up, all the rest are dark. When player advances into section B, the lights in section A turn off and only the light in section B turns on. Same goes for C and D.

I'm not sure this is possible to do. Do your lights all have the same properties (eg. colour, style, etc)?

This just means that you hafve more than 4 lights shining on a face - get the ZHLT Beta 4 and it will give you the co-ords of the error.

Didn't get anough time to write this up fully:

Too many lightstyles on face errors are usually caused by having too many dynamic lights in one area - Dynamic meaning thay do something, pulsate, switch on /off flicker etc..

Texture lights also count as dynamic lights - but i've noticed that this can vary with the compile tools.

try having less unique lights in an area - that's the only thing.

You could fake this effect very easily with toggling textures, (taking screenshots of lighted walls and turning them into toggling textures)

This was done very well in Poke646 to produce a scrolling floor where the light remained in one spot. (train sequence)

You could do the same on a simpler scale by just having the room lit up normally, with ordinary lights, and having the walls covered with a toggle texture. One Black, other lit up.

I hope you understand what i'm getting at.

If you don't then i'll try to make an example map when i get home.

Reminds me of Half-Life's intro. It happened when your train came near that lights went on.

However, since you can only have 3 different light-styles on a wall (Think about why: rad generates lightmaps that in fact are a sort of layer over your normal textures, so they look lit. For an animated light, one that turns on and off, you need two lightmaps. Therefor you want to limit the amount of different light-styles, as with each animated light you're rapidly increasing the amount of lightmaps you have to generate.) you should either increase the distance between the lights, or count several lights as one (naming them the same causes them to have the same style, thus it lowers your change of hitting the limit). Also breaking up the wall, floor and ceiling into more, smaller faces can help (as lights may be out of reach for them, where they wouldn't have been when the wall was one large face.

Kol, your texture-toggling idea in fact happens with lightmaps, but that has a limit somewhere. And so would texture toggling have its limits in that you can't get the light effect to reach too far on a wall, or you would have to toggle between a whole lot more textures...

Hmmm, ok I understand why I can't do it. Perhaps I don't quite grasp how "light" works in maps. It's just an illusion, right? If something is dark, then the textures in the area are darkened. So I could just create some toggling textures (like how switches toggle, the ones with the ones that start with +) that cycle?

I'm not so sure how to do that, or how I would create shadows and whatnot so that things look realistic. That's one thing I always go for when mapping - things must make sense, and look real.

HL doesn't have dynamic lighting so shadows wouldn't be created anyway

Kol, your texture-toggling idea in fact happens with lightmaps, but that has a limit somewhere.

Yes a fake is a fake - its hard and it looks kinda crap in game (depends on a lot of things). However, Poke646 pulled it off very well - but that was different - and its hard to compare that with this.

Well thanks for the suggestions. I'm downloading Poke646 (this is the first I've heard of it) just to see what you are talking about kol, and I'm going to keep trying to get this to work.

I've got an idea! Since all lights would be facing the same face, make a tons of clocks for the ground instead! Then you would have multiple faces for multiple lights!

If the error is caused by 4 lights on a face, can you just divide the hallway into 3 lighted sections instead of 4?

But he wants it to be more than 3 lights, thats what we're trying to figure out.

funnili engouh i made a map wiv a shitloada toggleable lighting,

an that worked fine had some bits lik coldfeets map wiv the corridoor of lights...

wy not try to do two of the lights a togglin textures an the other two as standard togglable lights

then maybe u won't execed the light map limits for each?

I think I have to modify my idea, rather than having individual lights light up each small section, I'm grouping the lights into each room / hallway.

The logic behind the lights is that there's pressure sensors in the floors so only an area with people in it are on. But as I was thinking, if I were to design something like this (in real life), I wouldn't divide the system up into each light - I would group them into main areas, such as a stretch of hallway, or an entire room. (Like I said, I go for realism.)

>>> GIVING LIFE TO A REALLY OLD POST<<<

Well... I was in the forum, looking for a old posts and found this...

I tried make this hallway... I placed 12 lights and many triggers_multiple to activate the lights, and notice the same error...
"Too many light styles on a face "
I just reduced the brightness of the lights (of 200 for 75) and the error disappeared... I made other tests and noticed the same...

Funny and Strange...

E=mc?
Albert Einstein

I know little about lights, but a little more 'bout triggers. This may be related, or may not, but you might want to make sure you've 'triggered off' the preceeding light before 'triggering on' the next. Otherwise, they sometimes toggle each other somehow, and you'll find the sequence gets messed up--lights will be left off, instead of triggered on. Hope this helps somehow.

Yeah, all that matters is their radii crossing over. If they don't intersect, there're fewer light styles on a face :).

Less brightness, less intersections of lights, less lights styles on a face...
Best in this it is that it functions...

I made another test with 37 lights and 74 triggers_multiple and I noticed one error, just one error "Too many light styles on a face"...

The problem is the illumination on the hallway, it is too dark... So, I put some little emergency lights to make a little illumination...

E=mc?
Albert Einstein

Fewer, not less, for the second two.

Yes, though.