The 'Baked Lighting Complexity' visualization mode will show you how things are looking in terms of rendering cost The clip plane now uses the texture on existing faces of the brush you're clipping when it adds a face to a brush. It used to add whatever texture you currently had selected, which was a pain if that texture was water or slime or whatever. Many new modders have been reporting that when they try to create new levels for their mod, Hammer will load, but it won't display the grid, and they can't add new entities to the map, and if it was a loaded map, they can't see anything except through the main camera. If you're having this problem, you probably also aren't able to launch your mod from Steam (even if you can launch it from your compiler). If this is the case, the problem probably lies in your mod's gameinfo file.

ignorenormals - Ignores normals of vertex data to calculate lighting. This is extremely useful for foliage and other thin types of vertex meshes.

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Fixed a lot of Direct3D crashing bugs. I hope this helps some people. Unfortunately, it won't help people with Matrox cards.

For instance, in the first map of Half-Life 2 there is a corridor that a civil protection guard will escort the player through when he is being brought in for interrogation (or what-not). Examination of the lighting will reveal that Valve has kept the psychological effects in mind while setting it. The corridor starts off with a standard tungsten lamp (with a warm glow), directly followed by a fluorescent light (with an uneasy glow). This combination is at most very rare in real life, because it would require that the architect would suddenly change his mind while designing the corridor, or the electrician running out of light fixtures. It is more likely that Valve (or the Combine) wanted to achieve the effect that one would be walking from a safe environment to an unsafe one. Per-face Lightmap controls. Lightmap density can be controlled on a per-face basis for more control over the balance of visual quality and rendering performance.Effect flags !FGD Most entities with a parent can have various effect flags applied to them to regulate many of the same effects as the aforementioned keyvalues, even if they don't have those keyvalues in your version of Source. Tyndall Effects Another preview option is the new GPU Path Tracing preview (Ctrl+Alt+F6 by default), this utilizes the RT cores inside of a users GPU to compute lighting in real time and is a BEST CASE scenario of how your maps lighting may currently look. Due to the expensive nature of Path Tracing, this view is not usable for in-game purposes but the compiler will utilize the RT cores in your GPU to compute the lighting more accurately than older CPU based compiles did. This mode also correctly accounts for "Bounce" lighting, which we will go over further down in this article. Tip: Debug light probe volumes with r_light_probe_volume_debug_colors and r_cubemap_debug_colors ConVars Lightmap Density

Entity Helpers. New user interface controls that make editing parameters on entities such as spotlights and doors easier and clearer. Why You Should Get It: If you simply want a no-frills spotlight, this solar light set provides great value for its features. Fixed pasting & object creation. New objects are now created in the current 2D view (of course), and are centered in the next most recently used view.

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Entity keyvalues were removed if Smartedit didn't know about them - this wasn't part of the original design, but uh - someone slipped the code in there. Or something. Anyway, that's fixed.

Tools) options - the options dialogs have almost all been modified in some way. As well, there are two new dialogs - game configurations and build programs. For those unaware (for some reason), Hammer++ is a HUGE Hammer upgrade; more stability, rope physics, prop physics for placements, lighting preview, better color selection, and many, many more quality of life improvements to the editor regarding usability. So big thanks to Ficool2, the developer, for making this tool! View) hide paths - this acts much like the hide items command. It will hide any path made with the Path map tool. As stated before, the resolution will determine the amount of total space your lightmap materials have to fill while the Quality will determine the accuracy of the lightmap itself. Note: Cascade shadow maps from light_environment take up the majority of the shadow map atlas, however, more space will be freed when the sun is occluded in indoor areas.Pay attention to how much sunlight your yard gets during the day, and use that to manage your expectations for how bright the lights will be and how long they'll last into the evening. A set of buttons control the loading and saving of independant window configurations. Independant window configurations allow you to customize the views of worldcraft to your liking. mat_fullbright 2. The bright white physics props seem to be a bug; they are lit correctly when in motion. mat_fullbright<0-2> 0 is normal lighting. 1 is 'full bright' lighting, where everything is 100% lit. 2 has been introduced with the Orange Box and is 'lighting only'. It replaces all textures' images with a colourless monotone, allowing you to see exactly what is lit, where, and probably how. See Also Testers also found that lights with larger solar panels can sometimes have a less aesthetically pleasing look, so make sure you feel good about the size and location of the panel before purchasing.