Is there a way to preview what the lighting will look like in your map without running the game in the beta? I saw something about it in the release notes but it didn't say how to do it.

Did you even look? in the top left of one of your four views it has some lighting options. Do some research before you post topics like this.

to be fair the lighting preview is about as usefull as a fly with only one leg.

the light from each entity travels about 1/100 the distance it should and its just really really pathetic. and the ray traced one just crashes hammer

youme wrote:
to be fair the lighting preview is about as usefull as a fly with only one leg.

Terrible analogy. Flies don't need legs, and they are useless anyway.

if they are useless anyway then its a great anaolgy. a one legged fly IS as useless as the lighting previews.

Lol, thanks, I see what ya mean...

youme wrote:
the light from each entity travels about 1/100 the distance it should and its just really really pathetic. and the ray traced one just crashes hammer

Both works fine here.

Weird, mine shows up extremely dark and Ray-Traced crashes me..

NykO18 wrote:
Both works fine here.
http://tmp.logout.fr/bordelique/lighting_preview.jpg
http://tmp.logout.fr/bordelique/ray_traced_preview.jpg

whoa I hate you! what are your system specs? its probably some sort of gfx card driver that makes it work

I dunno, it work on my two computers.
Home PC : Athlon 64 4000+ / Radeon X1950 / 2 GB DDRAM
Laptop : Intel T2300 2x1.66Ghz / Radeon X1600 / 2 GB DDRAM (with 2 years old graphics drivers [asus, I hate you])
But you're partially right, it doesn't work in every situation. That map works very well with the lighting preview while others don't seem to work at all. That's a bit strange.

I've yet to find a single situation where it works, the really annoying thing is it doesnt use the light_environment so anything outdoors is doomed to look pitch black.

You have to have the Beta SDK installed to use the lighting previews.