A while ago I had a leaf portals saw into visleaf error, and I couldn't for the life of me find the solution to it. As it turned out, it didn't affect my r speeds in the map any, but it did cause HLRAD to reach it's max patches limit (why this is I have no idea), since I couldn't find the problem, I decided to just turn on sparse and wait longer for my compiles. Everything was going fine, but now when I look back at some of the original parts of my map, the lighting is messed up. It looks like certain light entities are shifted, and weird shadows are across walls where there should be none. Some entities just don't show up all together. I checked all of them in my map, and they are all where they should be.

I don't know a whole lot about how the compile tools work, but I think that when it's compressing the vismatrix, it is shifting some of the lightmaps? I really don't know. What I would prefer is to just find my original problem with the leaf portals and get that fixed, but I've torn up half my map to no avail. Does anyone know whats going on?

If you need screenshots, I can post some.

recompile with -full vis

that _should_ fix the problem

no, I am using full vis


With fast vis, it gives me even more vis leaf errors.

I think error 404 name not found means vis run with the "-full" parameter, nut just vis run without the "-fast" parameter.

If adding -full to the vis compile line I'm afraid this is one of those cases where you can't ignore the leafportal saw into leaf error. Just do a search on this forum, various methods that might help fixing them have been mentioned before.

Leaf saw into Leaf errors can definitely cause Rad errors later. I didn't think so at first, and just ignored them. But after Rad rebooted my computer 3 times, I decided to go and fix the errors but making all the wonky geometry around the error into a func_wall. Then Rad ran perfectly.

yes, as I said before I am running FULL vis

and I've made half my map funcwalls, and still have the error.

Leaf saw into leaf normaly happens when you have a complex shaped world brush. Entity based brushes shouldn't have this problem, but you can't turn the brushes on the edge of the void into entities (du!) so turning a bunch of stuff may not fix the error. I have had this error a few times myself and the compile log should give you a pair of points in each plane. Find these points in your map and see if you can figure out what is the offending brush(es).

As for -sparce messing with your lighting, that's what -sparce does. It makes things simpler by reducing quality. The only way to fix the odd things it does is to not run it.

Anyway, good luck with your map, I hope this helped. I know what you are going through, I'm fighting clip nodes myself right now.

-sparse does not effect lighting quality whatsoever. AFAIK it simply makes hlrad use a (lossless) compression method on the vismatrix to greatly reduce memory usage at the expense of an increase of processing time. You can even toss the vismatrix out alltogether with -nomatrix, but this requires hlrad to use some pretty brute power when calculating the lighting, though again the result should be the same.
This lighting problem almost certainly comes from the leafportal error, and these can be very hard to fix.

thanks, guys

I guess it's back to hunting down misbehaving vertexes

My problems with the lighting have gotten worse.

Now it's over almost all of my map, and it looks like a huge brush is just over part of it, but I've made all hidden things visible, and there is nothing there. Here's some screenshots of it. I didn't want to post screens of my map until I was almost done, but here are some of my map ns_incursion with very very bad lighting.

All of the texture lights should be giving off light. As you can see they are lit up, but they are not projecting anything. This is only in some areas, others they work fine. Also my Visportal saw in to visleaf error is only down to 2 errors now, when there used to be 6.

here's a nother

and another.

As you can see in this last one, it's like there is a line where the lighting just ends. My vis leaf errors aren't even in this part of the map they are on the other side, and the lighting there is just fine.