Better shadows? Created 5 years ago2019-03-09 14:53:50 UTC by AK47NATOR

Hellooo. Is there any way of making shadows (lightmaps) better looking, without scaling textures. Maybe something like this: one scales the textures, so he can get the better lightmaps, and then somehow makes so the compiler will scale the texs, but no the lightmaps.

I know all the compiler commands, but can't get it to make some great realistic looking shadows, without the need of scaling texs. Is there any way to scale lightmaps without the texs. I don't know. HELP ME PLEASE.

BTW thanks in advance for those who help. 😁

Xash3D supports the scaling for lightmaps. Unkle Mike created a special version of map compilers for this. But such maps will not work correctly under GoldSrc (ligthmaps will be broken).

Texture to lightmap scale ratio is permanently locked in HL. The only options are to use larger textures and then scale them down, if you want to preserve even quality throughout your textures you could scale small textures up, let's say 128x128 to 512x12, for specific areas where you need detailed shadows, but that would still eat up memory very quickly. Sometimes people use workarounds like transparent textures or sprites or even draw the shadows directly on the texture.

You simply can't get more high-res lightmaps without altering the scale.

As Bruce said, take a, for example, 128x128 texture and upscale it to 512x512, then apply that and scale it to 0.25 and 0.25.

Well, it seems I can't manipulate the lightmaps without touching the texs. Because, you know, halflife.wad is really big on, and there are so many texs. For CS is diffrent. There are more texs that are 128 but should be great at 64 brush. Also for CS I am using condition zero wads. In them most of the textures are for scaling to 50% of the normal size. Thanks though.