For some reason it just won't light properly, but maybe I'm not using the correct entities. As I said I'm a total noob when it comes to Source/Hammer. (Though I'm a game developer so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the concepts. I must say I find the whole Hammer edit / compile / play cycle to be a drag. I'm used to wysiwyg editing and press play to play in less than a second. But I'm hoping I can get used to it.)

Player1 wrote:
For some reason it just won't light properly, but maybe I'm not using the correct entities. As I said I'm a total noob when it comes to Source/Hammer. (Though I'm a game developer so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the concepts. I must say I find the whole Hammer edit / compile / play cycle to be a drag. I'm used to wysiwyg editing and press play to play in less than a second. But I'm hoping I can get used to it.)

Is the lighting not working whatsoever or are the shadows just bad? There are multiple reasons for each, so I think you should create a new thread so we can troubleshoot.

Nightgunner5 wrote:
Is the lighting not working whatsoever or are the shadows just bad? There are multiple reasons for each, so I think you should create a new thread so we can troubleshoot.

I had used a "light_spot" which I couldn't make work. Then I tried just a basic "light" which works fine (makes lightmaps and does HDR in engine) the only "problem" being that the Hammer "3d lighting preview" looks much darker than it does in-game. I've also tried "light_dynamic" without success. But no real need to troubleshoot yet since I'm not serious about mapping quite yet

I think the troubleshooting I need is a link to a good "ok so you've never used Hammer before, so here's what's what"-guide and a "ok so you absolutely need to know about these entities"-guide

(I haven't done anything in UDK, but most of my development experience comes from Unity3D and earlier proprietary editor/engines that were pretty similar.)

msleeper wrote:
Unity is rad as shit. But same thing really, neither engine has precalculated lighting like Source does.

Okay going slightly off-topic but Unity does have lightmapping. (That it's buggy as shit is another thing entirely.)

Beer-Me wrote:
I concur with Player1, any tips of making decent lighting (right now I have whacked a light entity in the world along with an env_cubemap entity), it looks pretty crappy.

Play around with env_projectedtexture. You can only have one active at a time, but it allows you to have really good shadows and a dynamic spotlight. Make sure you enable shadows on it, though!

msleeper wrote:
Personally I try to use light_spot more than just a normal light entity. You get more realistic lighting I think.

Unless your map is lit entirely by floating light bulbs with no shades, light_spot usually produces a more realistic lighting pattern.

light reminds me of my attempts to get a bullet spread of 360 degrees. IT SHOOTS EVERYTHING!