The Ugly Flashlight Problem

taleden

I've noticed in my maps that the circle illuminated by the flashlight is stretched according to the texture it's aimed at - this is incredibly ugly, especially at edges where, say, a 2x texture is next to a 1x texture - as the flashlight circle suddenly gets half a big. I use -notexchop, but this doesn't seem to help. Is there any way to fix this?

KungFuSquirrel

The correct parameter is -notexscale. This will keep your patches at uniform size across faces (rather than being scaled with the textures), but cause a slight variance in the number depending on whether you have a lot of textures scaled to greater or less than 1. In most cases it won't be too notable a difference, though.

taleden

Whoops, yeah, wrong paramater. However I just double checked my compile script and it is correct there: -notexscale .. I just misremembered it while posting. Is there some other paramater that might be overriding this?

KungFuSquirrel

Just double-checked the ZHLT documentation. Says it takes a parameter of #, so try -notexscale 1 instead.

taleden

hlrad doesn't like that one bit.. if I add a 1, it spits out "unknown option d:\games\halflife\hammer\maps\blah"; remove the 1, it runs fine, just with crappy flashlights. but hlrad with no args does list "-notexscale #" as an option.. typo, perhaps.

KungFuSquirrel

Try a comparison with non-dynamic lights, i.e. spotlights or point lights across different texture-scaled faces. My guess is that the flashlight is still painted over at the original texture scale, much like how decals are dependent on texture scale and orientation. Best answer I think I can give you. You're probably better off keeping texture scale constant across faces, at least those adjacent enough to have issues with lighting across them.

RPGreg2600

LOL, yeah one time I accidentally "fit" a 256X256 texture to a 32X32 square in a dark corner that could be broken to get to the easter egg in the map, and when I shened (shone?) the flashlight on it there was a little flashlight circle surrounded by a bigger one on the 1X scale walls.