Lightmap Problems

[Suiadan42]

I have a rather irritating issue with lightmaps; they ran, and they look purdy, the problem? new dynamic lights don't work.

I set the banshee bolt's light tag to be dynamic for this test, and as you can see in the vid, they show up on vehicles, scenery items, and metal on the bases. The problem? they do not show up on the ground. All I did was run the lightmaps, first in sapien, then in tool, both had the same problem. I am at a loss, any help would be greatly appreciated.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IYIkyrxIJc

Additional tags and map file:
Tags (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2003247/tuckershit/tags.zip)
Map (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2003247/tuckershit/deathisland.zip)

[Maniac]

Well the only thing that i can think of thats vastly different about the ground and the cliff shaders compared to most others, are that they have no reflective properties and no bump map.
Its maybe something to do with that?

[Tucker933]

The only thing showing up is the specular reflection, not the dynamic light itself. If you have specular off nothing shows up at all, anywhere but on scenery, vehicles etc, anything not BSP.
The weirdest thing is dynamic lighting works fine with select light tags like the plasma grenade flyby and explosion, rocket explosion, vehicle headlights and flashlight. Though things that don't show up include the fragmentation grenade flyby and any dynamic lighting that wasn't stock. For instance making the light tag attached to plasma projectile dynamic wont allow them to show up, only their specular properties will if any. This problem is occurring with lightmaps generated with both Tool and Sapien.

[teh lag]

All the potential solutions I'm thinking of have to do with the shader_environment. Did you alter it at all from the stock one? I don't remember lightmaps alone being able to magically kill dynamic lights, and given that the lights are able to show up on some shaders and not others it would seem to me that's where your problem is.

There's an assload of specular properties in environment shader tags - in particular, the uh, "specular properties" section. I'd mess around with that. There's also the "material color" variable in the bitmaps section, which I've known to cause some funky effects if not properly set. And you can always save over the existing shader with another one to see if the problem goes away.

...But if you didn't touch the shader_environment I'm stumped.

[Tucker933]

Shaders haven't been touched. =\

[teh lag]

I guess... see if it's a problem on other maps for which you re-make lightmaps? I'd also consider the possibility that it's your lighting settings themselves (the map seems pretty orange) that are causing this.

[Tucker933]

Well I'm not burning the actual lightmaps, Suiadan is, and he's always had this problem with his lightmaps, on different maps and different themes... so it's not jsut the map, it has to be something about how hes doing it but we've discussed it with other CE mappers we know whom have done lightmaps in the past though they don't see a problem with his procedure. I would try doing them myself, but I don't work with CE.

[Tucker933]

...so could anyone layout the exact procedure they use when they get functioning lightmaps? Because were getting the right result lightmaps wise, but the BSP is being messed with somehow.

[Inferno]

What are your ground textures compressed at. 32bit color causes that problem I believe.

[Tucker933]

They're all the default textures, the map is stock other than the lightmaps. I just verified it's not the actual lightmaps causing this, it's the BSP. Putting the lightmaps on the stock BSP yields no dynamic lighting issue, but doing the reverse, putting stock lightmaps on the BSP that went through the light mapping process has this issue. So whatever is happening, it's happening to the BSP when its going through the burn. And as I said, all the references aside from the new lightmaps are completely stock tags, I don't understand what could be broken about the BSP though... again, I don't do CE. That's Suiadan and you guys. I hope this helps.

[Tucker933]

Guys, it's been a month, and we've tried everything. No one knows what's wrong, and no change in results.

I'm going to do the last thing I can. I know it may be asking a lot for some of you, but if one of you guys have pulled off working lightmaps so that all dynamic lights still work, can you please, please help us out by running these for us as no one we know doesn't get this issue with maps of their own.

If you want something in return, I have a program or two that aren't public which I could give you. I'm desperate...