Proper skyboxing. Radiance (radiant?) light compiling time.

chris_in_cali · Post by **chris_in_cali** » Sat Jun 28, 2003 5:57 am

Ok, just a little help on lighting. First off, maybe seperate from the main questions, is why are my map surfaces pitch black dark when I'm laying brushes in MohRadiant? It wasn't like this before, now suddenly it is. I have to add super bright light entities to move about while I work and then remember to remove them before I compile.

Next, on making sky and such. I read the tutorial on sunlight but ran into a few problems. My first understanding was that I should grab the sky surfaces, texture them, and then give them the three listed sunlight entity properties under worldspawn. I did this, but my level was pitch black dark when I went to play it.

I resurfaced the sky as sky caulk with the same suggested worldspawn properties and tried again... I got plenty of light, but still the caulk effect (I'm thinking I need to place sky textured brushes behind the sky caulk, but I haven't done that just yet).

My final concern here is the compiling time for the lighting effects. I compile with a very simple batch file, feeling I don't need any special commands right now. I put pauses between each of the three sections. The lighting part takes FOREVER though. I'd like to know if this is normal or not. The level I made has nothing in it but a ground surface and the sky, for now, but the radiant light compile still takes ten minutes or more, while making the .bsp and doing that other thing only take 1-2 seconds. Would this be due to map size? (I made the world a 300-foot cube, roughly. I suppose there may be a chance that having a single texture over one enormous surface may also be causing trouble).

I know that's a lot to read, but I thank you for any insight you can give me. I guess my questioned recaped are such:
- Why would my MohRadiant surfaces be pitch black?
- Do I need sky caulk and a sky textured brush to make sky correctly?
- What's normal for mohlight radiant light compile times? (BTW, a majority of the fields for this are 0.00 seconds, but three or four take one to four minutes).

Thanks for any help, and kudos to you.

Alcoholic · Post by **Alcoholic** » Sat Jun 28, 2003 6:19 am

i think the 0 second things are bounces. as for pitch black mapping, go to teh bottom of the view menu, and make sure everything relating to light is unchecked. (open gl lighting, real lighting, etc). a simple map compiles in the blink of an eye. the more complex your map gets, the longer it gets.

i think a full well done map takes a few hours to compile.

chris_in_cali · Post by **chris_in_cali** » Sat Jun 28, 2003 6:31 am

Alcoholic wrote:i think a full well done map takes a few hours to compile.

Wow. No more "compile, play, change" every five minutes then, I guess.

tltrude · Post by **tltrude** » Sat Jun 28, 2003 7:48 am

Sky caulk requires the you set a "farplane_color" in worldspawn. This is a gray color:

Key: farplane_color
value: 0.7 0.7 0.55

And, if you want fog in your map, you can set the farplane (distance the player can see):

Key: farplane
Value: 3000

The player's view will be cut off (culled) at 3000 units in the above example, but anything closer will be foggy.

chris_in_cali · Post by **chris_in_cali** » Sat Jun 28, 2003 8:49 am

Ok, I still don't know what to do to properly make outdoors with sunlight. When I tried putting a textured sky and applying attributes to it, I got darkness. Now, I have a skycaulk box with a texture around it, but here I only get the normal repeating, smearing looking out your world through caulk effect. Can you tell me what's going wrong and what I should be doing?