Suggestion Title: Improved Day & Night Cycle Suggestion Description: This changes the day & night cycle so the map's lightmaps actually change to those of a nighttime version.
Why should this be added?:
- Night should actually look like night instead of day with a night skybox
What negatives could this have?:
- Development time
- Performance degradation
What problem would this suggestion solve?: Night looks like mat_fullbright 1
This is just not possible. Paralake uses many many static props, including whole buildings which are made entirely of models.
Changing the lightmaps from a light_environment requires naming the entity, and doing so disables static prop lighting, which is required to create any sort of decent looking lighting, especially when there are many many large props. The script that is being used in the video is designed to work with maps that use dynamic props for the majority of its decoration. This is not only bad on performance, it also means, once again we cannot use static prop lighting.
As for manually baking, this is not only wildly impractical given the sheer number of models the map uses, it would also mean downloading multiple versions of each model, all with different textures for different lightmaps. Static prop lighting doesn't just mean the colour of a model, it bakes actual shadows into it. Take the slums warehouse under the highway as a great example. It is entirely a model, and uses vertex shading baked at map compile to add the shadow of it being under the highway. Every prop would need a texture for every location it is used with the correct shadow for that area. It's just not a feasable task, especially considering that any update to the map would then require redoing many light maps all over again. Not to mention it would mean the map would look terrible for anyone not using it on our server.
The fog method we have been using for the past decade is just the best method to simulate a day/night cycle that has no impact on performance and doesn't cause the map to look completely terrible. Source uses a baked lighting method. Which means high quality lighting and great performance. But it just isn't designed for dynamic cycles.
