Just for the sake of my own interest I edited the editor items to allow this item to be copied and deleted and to my surprise I found that PTI maps still work perfectly both with multiple copies of this room, and without this room in the map at all, so it led me to wonder why this room is mandatory and why they have decided not to allow it to be used multiple times by default

Any theories or insight?

So you can at least have 1 lighting source in your map, so it's not completely dark.

Just tried it with the largest room I could possibly make, removed the observation room and it seems to apply some level of lighting automatically

Mat_fullbright 1

Huh? I didn't set it to fullbright :/

That obs room has an env_projected_texture inside for those fancy shadow effects. The problem is that you can only have one of those textures active at a time.

portal2tenacious wrote:
Mat_fullbright 1

Notice the chamber have some dark areas that are not lit. Fullbright makes the whole chamber bright. So its definitely not fullbright.

zivi7 wrote:
That obs room has an env_projected_texture inside for those fancy shadow effects. The problem is that you can only have one of those textures active at a time.

I'm not sure I follow? I've tried it within a map of mine and all of the observation rooms seem to cast shadows, what is the difference between the fancy and normal ones?

Shane wrote:
zivi7 wrote:

That obs room has an env_projected_texture inside for those fancy shadow effects. The problem is that you can only have one of those textures active at a time.

I'm not sure I follow? I've tried it within a map of mine and all of the observation rooms seem to cast shadows, what is the difference between the fancy and normal ones?

The PTI maps do have some default lighting, lights just scattered around the level that illuminate the level somewhat. The lights you place manually and the small observation rooms give a strong light effect in a somwhat realistic way.

The observation room has a projected texture: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... ed_texture for more info.
Having multiple of these rooms will cancel one of the projected textures because portal 2 only allows one of them.

The reason your observation room free map is lit is because the PTI auto places point_lights.

And when you have multiple, do the shadows from one look different than the others?

I hate how the large room is mandatory, can't figure out how to change the light's color so it clashes with my light strips (which do have a colored light)

That makes sense

I presume that even without this projected texture working on all rooms you still get the lighting benefit from the observation room? It does seem to light the scenery better than the smaller room even when used multiple times

Alexander Bell wrote:
The reason your observation room free map is lit is because the PTI auto places point_lights.

And when you have multiple, do the shadows from one look different than the others?

I hate how the large room is mandatory, can't figure out how to change the light's color so it clashes with my light strips (which do have a colored light)

Can't you just edit the light stip and observation room instances to make them the same colour? I tested mine with a reddish colour and it seemed to work

I love that room because if I place it well my PetI maps look like as if they have fancy lightning. Which is probably why it is mandatory. To have some actual lightning with shadows and such. I don't think I've noticed the small observation room making shadows.

If you're bothered by it, just place it in some room that's not connected to the map.

I think many ppl who only map with the puzzle creator have a certain lack of aknowledgement regarding some elements such as for example the observations room the puzzle maker automatically places into the maps, or more precisely, about the entity that's inside, the env_projectedtexture. Is an observation room mandatory or not? As Shane already pointed out in the first post one month ago, looks like they are not mandatory, not even just one, as the map will run without any or with several of them.

Normally the observation rooms the PTI places in the maps, have an env_projectedtexture inside which is an entity that apart from projecting light, it also projects dynamic shadows. Portal2 only allows 1 of this entities at a time, what doesn't mean that you cannot have several into your map. You can even have several of them into the same room. Ofc, when you have several into 1 room, only one of them will project shadows, only one env_proj_text will be active; the other obs-room will only emit light, not shadows (well, it could emit shadows, but static ones, not dynamic... but only making use of other entities different than the env_proj_tex such as light / light_spot / etc... I'm not sure whether if the PTI makes use of the light_dynamic entity at all...

There can be several of them placed into different rooms and I guess the PTI will set everything up as we all do in hammer, the way that only one of them is active at a time, switching them on/off by triggers as the player moves across the map, across the rooms.

The could be not mandatory, but ofc bvery recommendable to cast dynamic shadows the easiest way. There are also some other ways to cast shadows from the (static) objects other than using the env_projtex entity... but I'm not sure if the PTI puzzle creator would do this as well...