Lighting Trick for Fullbright Player Models

From Red Faction Wiki


This tutorial will walk you through how to apply "the lighting trick" to your multiplayer maps. This trick makes all meshes appear with a fullbright (255, 255, 255) level of static lighting. This trick is very common especially among competitive maps, since it makes it much easier to see other players and pickups.

The tradeoff however, is that since it applies to all meshes in a level, it will also affect clutter meshes, which may affect the mood or atmosphere of your level.

Steps:

  1. Calculate lighting and lightmaps in your level.
  2. Go to Level Properties and change the "Ambient Light" property to pure white (255, 255, 255).
  3. Save your level.

NOTE: You must follow these steps every time you save your level. Additionally, since this results in the removal from the saved level file of the ambient light level/color you set for your level when calculating lighting, you may wish to make a note of your ambient light setting before doing this.

How you do this is up to you, but this is the method I use (before following the steps above):

  1. Hit "Home" to go to your player start, then press A briefly to move forward a little.
  2. Create a Delay event.
  3. Open Level Properties and copy the light value for "Ambient Light" (it should be in this format: "<40, 40, 40>")
  4. Open the new Delay event you just made, and paste the light value from your level properties ambient light into the "Script Name" field of your Delay event, then hit OK.
  5. Now proceed with the steps above. Whenever you wish to modify your map and resave with the lighting trick, simply find this Delay event, copy the value from the script name field and paste it into the level properties window. Then, calculate lights and do the lighting trick again before saving.