Too many light styles on a face

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Spam Nugget
492 Posts
Posted Nov 16, 2011
I know this error happens if there are too many named lights shining on a face, but what does this actually do? does it result in inferior lighting or something? im only asking because i cant stop it happening, because there are too many cube droppers (which have named light) in my room. and quite frankly, if all its going to do is spam my log i dont care.
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MasterLagger
1,695 Posts
Posted Nov 16, 2011
Replied 3 minutes later
I occasionally have this problem sometimes also, but I could never figure out if it caused anything or not (aside from log spamming).
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Brainstatic
219 Posts
Posted Nov 16, 2011
Replied 2 hours later
From the VDC's page on naming lights:

Quote:
However, the system can be overloaded if you try to make it handle a large number of overlapping named lights (since the number of pages needed increases exponentially). When this happens performance can be harmed and you may well see lighting anomalies.

VRAD attempts to avoid this with its hard-coded limits of two switchable lights affecting a brush face and 32 pages in total. More than this causes VRAD to throw a warning such as "Too many light styles on a face" and refuse to compute the lightmaps for those lights; this will make those areas appear as if they are not lit. You can help too by giving lights that will always change state at the same time a shared targetname, which makes VRAD merge their pages together.

Your answer is in bold. It's probably not that much of a problem in well-lit rooms.

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Spam Nugget
492 Posts
Posted Nov 16, 2011
Replied 1 hour later
thanks muchly for that. as i havent noticed any problems with my lighting im going to go ahead and ignore it then. if vrad doesnt bother with lightmaps for the lights under the cube droppers then so be it.
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YM_Industries
67 Posts
Posted Nov 17, 2011
Replied 2 hours later

BOB74j wrote:
From the VDC's page on naming lights:
Quote:

However, the system can be overloaded if you try to make it handle a large number of overlapping named lights (since the number of pages needed increases exponentially). When this happens performance can be harmed and you may well see lighting anomalies.

VRAD attempts to avoid this with its hard-coded limits of two switchable lights affecting a brush face and 32 pages in total. More than this causes VRAD to throw a warning such as "Too many light styles on a face" and refuse to compute the lightmaps for those lights; this will make those areas appear as if they are not lit. You can help too by giving lights that will always change state at the same time a shared targetname, which makes VRAD merge their pages together.

Your answer is in bold. It's probably not that much of a problem in well-lit rooms.

Keep in mind that the VDC is run by the community and the information there may be outdated or incorrect. I often have faces with this error, but they always work perfectly in-game. This is possibly a remnant from an older version of Source.