Global

Controlling global lighting

There are several new options in ArghRad which can be used to modify the overall behavior of map lighting.

-nosplotchfix

By default, ArghRad tries to reduce the "splotchy" surface lighting often seen near light-emitting surfaces. This can really improve the appearance of sky/warping surface lights, but might cause undesirable results with normal surface lights. This option disables the fix for normal surface lights. Note that the fix is still always applied to sky/warping surfaces.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -nosplotchfix mymap.bsp
-nostopbleed

ArghRad takes extra measures to eliminate qrad3's problem of light "bleeding" through solid walls. This sometimes causes occasional "fractures" in what should be smoothly-lit faces. -nostopbleed can be used to turn off ArghRad's extra anti-bleed measures, making it work like the original qrad3.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -nostopbleed mymap.bsp
-nocolor

You may decide that your level looks better with only white lights, but do not want to go and change all of your lights individually. You can use the command line option -nocolor to accomplish this. ArghRad will run as normal, then convert your color information into white light before saving it to the bsp.

-nocolor uses a color-weighted formula similar to a black and white TV. Imagine you have a red light, a green light, and a blue light all the same brightness. When converted, the green light will shine brighter than the red light, and the red light will shine brighter than the blue one.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -nocolor mymap.bsp
-nocoloru

-nocoloru works the same as -nocolor, except the colors are unweighted. This means that if you have a red light, a green light, and a blue light of the same brightness, they will all convert to the same brightness.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -nocoloru mymap.bsp
-minlighta #, -ambienta #

Sometimes you cannot cover the entire level with lights, but still want to maintain a minimum light level. This can be done with ambient lighting. Ambient lighting, also called minlighting, works by adding light to every surface in a map.

The old Qrad3 -ambient option works on a confusing 0-2 scale. To use an ambient light brightness of 32, you had to set -ambient to 0.25. ArghRad adds the options -minlighta and -ambienta (both options are identical) which work on a much more logical absolute scale. This means to set an ambient light brightness of 32, you simply use the number 32.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -minlighta 20 mymap.bsp
-minlight #

-Minlight is just a synonym of old Qrad3's -ambient command-line option. It works on the same 0-2 scale.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -minlight 0.15 mymap.bsp
"_ambient" "#", "light" "#"

The ambient light value can also be specified within the map file itself. Add a key called "light" or "_ambient" to the worldspawn entity, and set its value to the desired ambient brightness.

Example:

   {
   "classname" "worldspawn"
   "light" "25"
"_ambient" "# # #", "light" "# # #"

This special alternate form allows adding colored ambient light in the worldspawn. Instead of specifying one number, specify three. These are for the red, green, and blue ambient brightnesses, respectively. This is NOT an RGB color value, it is three separate brightness values.

Example:

   {
   "classname" "worldspawn"
   "light" "30 15 10"
-maxlighta #

You can define a global maximum brightness value. This can be used to keep the the lighting from becoming too bright. After all the light calculations are done, any light shining on a surface that is brighter than this value is scaled down to match it.

The original Qrad3's -maxlight option used the same confusing 0-2 scale as its -ambient did. ArghRad adds -maxlighta, which uses an absolute scale just like -ambienta. In other words, to limit the brightness to 200, you specify the number 200. The default value is 196.

Example:

   arghrad.exe -maxlighta 150 mymap.bsp