Texture Light Last edited 11 months ago2023-12-17 05:16:40 UTC

Texture lights (also known as "texlights") are textures that emit light. They are often recommended over light entities for general lighting as they suggest a more natural source of light than a point in space. Note, however, that this not necessarily true of Source mapping, where they are generally discouraged.

Texture lighting is not a property inherent to certain textures, and thus any texture can be a texture light. There are a couple of ways of telling the compile tools that you want a texture to act as a texture light. Firstly, texture lights can be defined in a file called lights.rad and <mapname>.rad. Secondly, texture lights can be defined in an info_texlights entity. Thirdly, and the best-in-class method, is to use VHLT's light_surface.

Texture lights, by default, only emit a fixed light that cannot be turned on/off or have any special effects applied to them. However, these properties are possible to achieve. See this tutorial for details. Or again, just use light_surface.