Real-time lights in 3D view

[LDAsh]

These have never worked for me, but I installed TDM 2.0.9 and DR 2.11 and was looking at maps and all the lights work.

I've done a lot of experiments with my own materials, and nothing ever worked so far, so I wonder if it's because Quake 4 is the set game?

Is this only for TDM or should it work for all supported games?

Or maybe it's my materials or my lights?

Edited March 3, 2021 by LDAsh

[greebo]

5 minutes ago, LDAsh said:

These have never worked for me, but I installed TDM 2.0.9 and DR 2.11 and was looking at maps and all the lights work.

You mean the lights are working for or they are not working for you?

Generally, the DR renderer doesn't distinguish between games.

[OrbWeaver]

As Greebo says, the renderer does not care (or even know) about the specific type of game, but the correct rendering of lights will depend on the presence of a working "light" entityDef along with the falloff textures that are applied to the light.

If your game is set up in a way whose light setup differs considerably from Doom 3 or TDM, it is possible that the assumptions made by DarkRadiant no longer hold and the lights will not work, but we'd need to see more details of the game assets in order to fully diagnose the issue.

[LDAsh]

I set my game to TDM in DR and project as custom mod.  Originally all of the textures are JPG but where needed I have been converting files, TGA/DDS.  AFAIK, they all should work, even with the basic MTRs they have.

The folder has the game exe and the defs pack.  Perhaps it needs more than that but I don't know.  If it does support Quake 4, I should have lights already, because they do work in QuakeEDIT in the Quake4.exe and defs.

Something from TDM I'm missing?

 

 

 

[OrbWeaver]

You shouldn't need anything specifically from TDM, all of the light stuff should be in the original id Tech game assets which it sounds like your game is based off.

Do the light entities appear as light volumes, i.e. with rectangular radii and light_center points etc? If so this means that the entityDef is located correctly and DarkRadiant is using it to construct lights, so the problem is specific to rendering. If the lights appear only as generic entities and do not have visible and resizeable light volumes, then there is something wrong with the entity def — you might just need to set the "editor_light" spawnarg to get DR to recognise it as a light.

If the light volumes themselves appear correctly but do not render anything in the lighting preview mode, my guess is that it is something to do with light textures. If you use the light inspector to change the light shader, does it make any difference? If you examine the MTR file for the light shader you have chosen, it will point to one or two falloff textures (e.g. "lights/biground1a.tga"): do these textures exist in the specified location and have appropriate contents?

[LDAsh]

Ah, it was missing a material for the defaultPointLight, so the projection was essentially black and so maybe the lights were working all along.

 

Thanks!