I followed a tutorial on putting in cube droppers, but for some reason it made the entire map go pitch black. Deleting the thing made it light up again, but I wanted it in the map

is this guy right? or am i doing something wrong?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StbZY8d4 ... wrEe311Qdv

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Did you have any lights in your map? Put some in and see if it stil is dark. What happens is that if there is no lights, everything goes 'fullbright' which means every surface recieves the same amount of light. But if you use the cube dropper instance, it has a light in it, so portal 2 uses the lights in your map, rather than fullbright. You can togle fullbright by typing mat_fullbright 1 or mat_fullbright 0 in the console.

You don't have other lights in your map. As long as you don't have any lights in your map, portal 2 will add a lot of light to everything. This doesn't really good in game.

What you just did with the instance is add ONE light to it. Portal 2 thinks: "Hey! There's light, I don't have add a lot of light to everything". Result: A very dark map with a tiny bit of light near the cube dropper. To fix this you should add lights to the rest of your map. The best way to do this is use the instances/lights instances. They look nice and give good light. Which lights you want to use depends on the style you want of course.

Switching to mat_fullbright 1 as Spam Nugget said can be very useful during map development but "fullbright" really makes a map look a lot less interesting (and they might be deleted on these boards). So propper lighting is a must.

okay, I got a lot of stuff going on in this map, and even with just one light in the whole damn thing, I get a warning of too many light styles on faces all over the place, something something something, whatever error.

How can i prevent this?

You get that error if you have too many named lights shining on a surface. This is because vvis assumes that named lights can be turned on and off, and as such has to make multiple lightmaps for that face. (1 for light on, 1 for light off. with 2 lights you need 4 lightmaps, for 3 lights tou need 8, etc etc etc. ) so vvis has a limit of how many named lights can shine on a face. You can generally just ignore this error, it mostly chanes nothing noticeable, but if lights arent turning on and off properly then this error could be why.
Now youre probaby thinking what? i dont have named lights? but do you have cube droppers? because each cube dropper has two named lights in its instance! so if you have too many in a room together, youll get this error. so, like i said, unless youre noticing lighting problems just ignore the error, i know i certainly do.

curse you droppers with all your dropping goodness.

Well if it doesn't remotely effect anything, then i guess i will leave it alone.

okay a new problem came up, my fog is all over the map, and not isolated to where i wanted it, whats the way to control that?

Thats what I would reccommend. If your eally want you could edit the dropper instance to get rid of the lights, but I doubt it would be worth the effort. Also, while I said vvis before, I actually meant vrad.

oooooooooookay. thanks