bright light, displacement, respawn ?s

[TCfromBN]

ok got 3 questions for you guys

in the picture below the env light acts as if the bottom of the displacement were not touching the ground, is there a fix?

the light on the wall in the building is very bright near the origin, how do i get it to be softer?

now in dod:s the gamestyle is usualy respawn, is there a way to make this not happen; the round would be over once one team killed off the other team

 

[Raeven0]

1) I didn't understand that.

2) Either manipulate the Quadratic, Linear, and Constant (this is not easy), or use the beta SDK and lower the light's brightness while increasing its falloff distances (they seem to work all right...).

3) Most likely no, not without a server-side mod.

 

[UltraProAnti]

i THINK i understand the first question, if you're referring to the bright light 'leaks' in your displacements. this happens because the light_environment in your map is angled in such a way that environmental light is falling on part of the sand/ground displacement that is stuck through the cliff displacement, and because it is brighter than the shadowy area (and the lightmap scale is probably the default 16), it is leaking through a little

there are three ways to fix this:

1. make sure all your displacements meet at the edges and none are embedded into another displacements. this is by far the most effective but you need to plan your terrain carefully in advance to make this work

2. use a blocklight brush behind the terrain to prevent environmental light from falling on the part of the ground displacement that's poking through (i've not tried this so it may not work)

3. make sure you only embed displacements into other displacements on the sunny side of your terrain slopes/cliffs etc. the light will still leak through, but it will leak through into bits of displacement you can't see so it doesn't matter

 

[UltraProAnti]

btw, Call of Duty radiant had an 'overbrightbits' flag that automatically softened the light when it was close to a wall so as to avoid overbright splotches like that

something like that would be damn useful in hammer

 

[Raeven0]

something like that would be damn useful in hammer

The VRAD source code is available for anyone who wants to fix it up.

 

[TCfromBN]

thanks guys

 

[Rof]

For question 3, you might try playing around with the info_doddetect entity. It has "axis respawn factor" and "allied respawn factor" properties that are usually set to 1.0, but if you change them I believe it alters how fast each team repawns. Setting them both to 0 might turn off respawning, though I don't know if DoD will handle that correctly.

 

[TCfromBN]

ill give it a try, however my next question would be if all players are dead and not respawning would there be a server command to start the next round?

 

[Raeven0]

For question 3, you might try playing around with the info_doddetect entity. It has "axis respawn factor" and "allied respawn factor" properties that are usually set to 1.0, but if you change them I believe it alters how fast each team repawns. Setting them both to 0 might turn off respawning, though I don't know if DoD will handle that correctly.

I had forgotten about that. It works quite nicely.

 

[TCfromBN]

i tried that in a test map and when i died i still respawned it didnt seem to end a round or anything.