Extrememly annoying lighting problem

[deathlemon637]

I am aware that I am not the only one with this problem, except I decided I woudl start my own thread for it, since all the solutions suggested in other threads didn't work for me.

This started out with my arrival at Black Mesa East and that odd little sky problem.
After this came Ravenholm which was normal, but then I got to Highway 17.
The insides of buildings and Tunnels were shining bright! Also normally white objects appeared to be intensely luminous, as if they were made of floodlights. This was tolerable, even though it did take away from that zombie fight in the tunnels. But by the time I reached Nova Prospekt, its just plain annoying. Outside, the buildings appear to be in broad daylight despite the night sky. Inside, everything seems to be... glowing... its odd.
Anyways, there are pictures here in this thread:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=170455

Its exactly the same problem I'm having.
Things I've tried that didn't work:
mat_fullbright 0 (it automatically reverts to mat_fullbright 1)
Playing with HDR settings (though I really had no clue what I was doing)

Yes I have it on Dx9 as was mentioned on some other forum in my quest for the answer. So any other suggestions of what to do?

 

[Dinnesch]

First of all, update your video card drivers to the latest version(btw, what kind of video card do you have?)
Turning off Anti-Aliasing might also solve your problem, tends to get buggy on older cards.

I assume you have a legit version on Steam?

 

[deathlemon637]

Yup completely legit. Also, I'll probably sound stupid, but how do I check what video card I have? I do remember recently downloading the latest driver to play portal. Also anti-aliasing is off.

 

[JUL3]

Run > 'dxdiag'

Without quotation marks, obviously.

 

[Revere]

I had the same problem.. I think I fixed it by typing:
"matfullbright 0" (Without quotation marks)
I know you tried "mat_fullbright" but try "matfullbright"..

 

[justsomeguy]

Hi, sorry to bump an old thread, but I'm hoping a solution for this problem was finally found? From what I've read, the issue started when Valve issued the Half-life update in May; I just started playing through again and am running into this problem in what appear to be the usual places (Ravenholm, Highway 17, etc.). mat_fullbright cannot be set to 0, and will also begin to default to 1 even on levels that have lightmaps available. Opening the console shows a host of error messages, including "Redownloading all lightmaps," but it seems this download is never successful. I've played with HDR on/off, I've played with anti-aliasing, but it seems the info for shadows just isn't there. I've also tried random things I've seen posted on other message boards, including using "matfullbright," using "sv_cheats 1."

I'm really hoping someone has a solution, or that Steam is going to provide an update. Playing through the fullbright 1 levels really isn't any fun at all. Thanks.

 

[hakojo]

My brother had this problem on our laptop, which is not exactly built for gaming, so I'm assuming it is indeed a video card thing. Uninstalling and reinstalling the game seemed to fix it for him, though.