Some Questions

[Dario D.]

1: How do you get a light_environment entity to act like a sunlight? I cant get it working...

2: How do you adjust the brightness of a light? Do you just make the light color dark?

3: Isnt there a way to have a dim light with a large radius? An *omni* light with a large radius, regardless of brightness.

4: How do you see your lighting in the editor?

5: How do you setup sound zones, like in the game? Example, while you're in the building you hear the sirens, and while you're outside you hear birds and wind AND sirens...

6: How do you open the original HL2 missions in Hammer? I want to make some prefabs and see how some things were done... but I cant find them.

...

 

[Exavior]

1:
to get the light_env to act like sunlight, set the color to a light yellow, have the brightness around 300, set a good pitch and rotation so it casts shadows in the direction you would like, and that's all. To get the "dazzle" effect in the sky (like you are looking into the sun) you need to use a env_sun. There is a quick tutorial on that here: http://www.snarkpit.com/editing.php?page=tutorials&game=HL2&id=116

2:
Lights have 4 numerical properties under the "brightness" field. The first 3 are color values in RGB, the fourth is the lights brightness.

3:
Yes. Normal lights don't let you define an area to effect with ambient light. The brighter the light, the larger the area it will effect. To have the appearance that the light covers a larger area you can try a couple things. First you can have one brighter light as your main source, then place multiple dim lights around the room to provide extra light. But this is costly for render time, and you can only have a limited number of lights per world face. The best way to create ambient light is to use the "Ambient" field in your light_environment entity. But this is a global property and will effect your entire map.

One final option would be to use a dynamic light, but they require a lot of setup and can be tricky to use.

4:
You don't see lighting in the editor. Lighting is rendered when you compile your map, and "baked" into the surfaces. You don't get to see real-time lighting in the editor.

5:
That is done using something called "soundscapes." Look up "env_soundscape" or do a forum search to learn more about this entity.

6:
You can not open any of the original HL2 maps in hammer. The game maps have all been compiled, and you do not have access to the source files for editing them. For learning purposes they did include the prison map for hl2 deathmatch. It is a good map for learning about cube maps, soundscapes, lighting, etc.

Good luck.

 

[Dario D.]

Thanks.

I had little hope about some of those things...