How do you use that lamp thingerdoodle properly? Can someone walk me through it.
Whenever I use a lamp I find it impossible to hide the lamp light casting image thing.
You need to change the ragdoll's lighting origin by spawning any kind of prop, putting it in a dark area and type into the console 'ent_setname [name]' while looking at it and go back to your ragdoll and type into the console 'ent_fire !picker setlightingorigin [name of the prop]' while looking at the ragdoll
Then spawn a lamp, and if your computer supports dynamic shadows, you can then point the lamp at the ragdoll, and now it will be lit up, if the shadow is too dark or the character is too dark, you'll have to find a less darker area to put the prop
— Introduction to dynamic shadows
As we’ve seen before, the entity that manages this stuff, env_projectedtexture, is, to the extent of my knowledge, (badly) duplicated in Gmod, under the name gmod_lamp.
env_projectedtexture obviously supports all of the original inputs, such as lightworld, fov, but it’s not easily movable around (unless you parent it or something) and it may have errors if you’ve got more than one on at a time (this does not seem to happen anymore, though). gmod_lamp doesn’t, which kind of sucks considering you’ll be stuck with a fov of 45. However, I’ve been able to have, like, ten of those at a time.
Since the resolution improvements, it’s possible to have a very high fov for your dynamic light sources — EBF2′s loghouse ceiling lamp is set at ~168. That said, the question you’re probably asking yourself is, how to improve the shadows?
Ever since the env_projectedtexture patches (here and here) were submitted to the Gmod source tree, you may have noticed the “default” quality has drastically improved, mostly because the old Valve default for the filter size was waaaaay too high for resolution changes to make any real difference past 512×512, but Garry reduced it — a lot.
r_flashlightdepthres used to be set by default to “the nearest power of 2 of the smallest side of your framebuffer size”. If your video resolution was 1920×1200, it would be set to 1024²; 1920×800 would result in 512², and 640×480 in 256². But things have changed, as you can now change the ConVar without it resetting itself as soon as the change is pushed. I do not recommend changing the resolution while a map is loaded unless you have enough RAM & VRAM (or else many things will be pushed to the swap file until your computer goes to BSOD land).
r_projectedtexture_filter updates the filter size (i.e. how blurred the shadow is) of any projectedtexture which is not currently locked (the player’s flashlight can be locked via the ConVar r_flashlight_lock_position — maybe someone will exploit that one day, but I most likely won’t.) The filter size is not relative to the resolution, which means it should be reduced as the projectedtexture’s resolution goes up (and vice versa). A 4096²’s filter size will be around 0.3.
You should put these ConVars in your autoexec as they are not archived. There are two more of them to increase the accuracy, which is pretty low by default:
mat_depthbias_shadowmap 0.0000005
mat_slopescaledepthbias_shado wmap 2
Depending on your graphics card (and the driver settings — don’t forget to disable any “performance optimizations”), this might cause artefacts to appear. In that case, simply raise the values! These work perfectly in almost all cases on my nVidia GeForce 9600GT.
Also, thanks to watching MaxOfS2D's livestream, i A) remembered how to change the skin of something via console ('ent_fire !picker/[entity name] skin [0 and up]') and B) i learned that props spawned via prop_dynamic create are affected by the setlightingorigin command!
