light_environment tricks Created 11 years ago2013-02-24 11:20:01 UTC by Stojke

Can any one explain all the tricks considering this entity?
I forgot most of them...

For example, how to i set the shadow angle, darker light emission, shadow color? And so on.

Ive uncovered the shadow position / angle mistery. Still wondering on lighter / darker issue.

Read ZHLT and VHLT docus, it's all there my friend..

I am having a brightness issue in a map I'm making. I've set the light_environment to 1 brightness, yet the map is lit like it's summer time.

Is there anything I can do to make it darker? I'm not finding anything in ZHLT documentation.

The light_environment entity only counts if there is sky anywhere in your map. If your map doesn't have sky anywhere, it's considered lightless and defaults to fullbright. Try adding a dim point light somewhere you can't see.

For real dude, this is not my first day of mapping, just look at this picture with light_environment brightness 1.

http://postimg.org/image/jes4d2x03/

This picture without it:

http://postimg.org/image/yeierz6c1/

I want something in the middle.

Light_environment ignores brightness, IIRC.
Use lower color values for darker lighting.

It doesn't ignore brightness per se, what I understand is that it adjusts the colour with the brightness value. The environment lighting result with 1 brightness for a bright and a dark colour is exactly the same. But you can see a difference from brightness 100 - 20 or 10 - 5.

For example, I set a bright red or let's say 255 200 200 with brightness 1, the weapon is coloured in a dark red which is almost or exactly the same as if I use 255 20 20 with brightness 1.

It seems there is no way to make the ambient light darker.

OK that's a great example. Now compare the lighting result of the night image with my first screenshot. Mine seems like it's lit with brightness 20 or something.

Use a lesser color value. Tone down RGB while keeping the RGB ratio the same, and jack the brightness back up
I'm telling you this is exactly what you are trying to do, but you're more than welcome to just ignore it a second time.

You're telling me this is exactly what I need to do?

http://postimg.org/image/9uspeok3x/
RGB 80 0 0 brightness 200
http://postimg.org/image/vnz740vyl/
RGB 64 0 0 brightness 20

I don't see anything getting darker, just redder.
Now allow me to post what I found to actually be working.
It seems like Shade is playing a big ass role in the final result.

http://postimg.org/image/x81bastsn/
Brightness 255 174 174 0
Shade 64 0 0 200

I am gonna play a bit with Shade brightness value and post results.

Wait wait, let me get this straight.

This whole time, you were confused about your shadows being too bright? What the fuck, did you just ignore the shade property all together?

Christ, man, I was under the impression you were asking about direct light.

I'll admit I was wrong about brightness and light_environment, but you'll also want to get in the habit of changing things one at a time if you want to properly compare anything. You can't change both RGB and brightness if you're trying to see what happens when they change. You'll also see little to no difference between 80 and 64; I would expect any mapper to know better.

Awesome, this helped me understand what i wanted, thanks guys.

If you take a closer look, I am changing one thing at a time. My point with the first two pictures is that RGB doesnt change (80 - 64 is no change), while I "jack up brightness" like you told me which doesn't bring me the darker result I want. This is why I tried both 20 and 200 brightness.

What happens here is not just my shadows being too bright, it's the whole room being overlit.

Now that we're onto something here, I will edit this post with some results about shade brightness so we can better understand this, unless someone knows it beforehand.

Brightness 200 130 130 50
Shade 64 0 0 10
http://postimg.org/image/d38hxund1/

Brightness 200 130 130 50
Shade 64 0 0 200
http://postimg.org/image/kxdowzkjp/

Brightness 200 130 130 0
Shade 64 0 0 200/10
http://postimg.org/image/8r290wzzd/
(lighting result was identical for shade brightness of 200/10, probably because of light brightness 0 producing no shade (?) )

I'm going to take a step back here because I've had the whole day to cool off.
I've clearly misunderstood the issue you're having.

Playing with the number of light bounces (it's a RAD option if you use ZHLT or similar) can help with overlit or underlit maps. This will affect every light, though, so you would probably have to edit each of your point lights or texlights accordingly.
Reducing bounces won't affect direct light at all, but it will generally make your map darker.

I'm not sure exactly how shade interacts with direct light, if it interacts at all.

Dont listen to me

this is where 8bit starts to suck, when it comes to real dark, ur only left with a few levels of brightness plus some stupid bugs in our shitty rad and ur left with even less, btw, 128 is 256 actually or something

Anyway, try fuckin around with _diffuse_light

I don't think light_environment is bounced during rad calculations. I have no idea how rad works, but from testing with 1 and 8 bounces, I don't see any difference. My testing scale is limited though, anyone with more information could help a lot here.

Therefore, diffuse_light will only make sense if there is an actual diffuse component for ambient light from the light_environment entity.

holy smokes! what a madness

ofc its bounced its just that VHLT is now using a new more correct method for calculating bounces so theres little difference between 1 and 1337 bounces

_diffuse_light R G B BRIGHTNESS uder smart edit in light_env specifies the light coming from sky, not sun

and read the VHLT topic in svencoop forums, its all there

This is all very correct. What this means is that you can control the result of your lighting by adjusting both the Shade component and the bounces which gives you a lot of flexibility (turns out _diffuse_light is just an inside name for Shade).

There should be Shade values that can give you variation between 1-8 bounces so you can play a bit with the bounce number if it's needed for the rest of your lighting.

Thanks for the input from everyone, I think this topic is quite covered for me at least