[HL2] Rainbow colored lighting

[SpotEnemyBoats]

I believe this light map artifact/glitch has been there because of the mac update back in 2010, but it never has gotten fixed. This along with HDR not showing up on most maps, has been a recurring issue.

Basically it shows up in dark corridors, vents and where shadows are (notice the shadows by the pipes). It has this green, blue and some times purple shading to it.

[svein]

I saw something similar after exiting the mines (ravenholm). The railroad tracks became blue when light hit them and changed with the camera angle

[BenLubar]

This existed in the Windows version when I first played it as well.

[SpotEnemyBoats]

^This, as a Windows 7 user. It appears to be on all platforms.

[stevethepocket]

Yep. These are present in the Windows version as well. Oddly enough, though, according to my cousin, they're not in the Xbox 360 version. I may have to borrow his Xbox and see for myself, because I'm not sure I buy it.

[Freeman-AM]

d1_trainstation_03

you can't beat this one in water hazard, about blue colored thing.

[DarthRazdor]

Same here. These coloderd shadows is so annoying. I have Windows version (Win7 x64, GTX570 with 320.18 Driver).

[JenniferPylko]

Hmm, I never noticed this on windows, but it is extremely annoying on the linux version (tested on nVidia with proprietary drivers, Intel with FOSS, and AMD with FOSS). I'll have to go test it on the windows version now.

[stevethepocket]

Shoot! I mistook the delete button for a cancel button and erased all my screenshots. Well, I guess I'll just repost them with the status coordinates.

map: d2_coast_10 at: -875 x, -5350 y, 1472 z

map: d3_c17_02 at: -10422 x, -5328 y, 18 z

There's another one at -5176 x, -4614 y, 106 z, just before you enter the next map, and at the starting coordinates for that map.

map: d3_c17_05 at: 1434 x, -6181 y, 256 z

map: d3_c17_06a at: 3393 x, -848 y, -259 z

More to come later. I recommend that everyone else hunt down the ones they found and add the coordinates to their posts as well, for easy reference. Though really, the solution is to just replace all the lightmaps in the entire game with the ones from the Xbox 360 version.

[stevethepocket]

Here's one from Follow Freeman, just after you unlock the last gate in the Overwatch Nexus.

map: d3_c17_10b at: 2656 x, -85 y, 320 z

Now compare it to the 360 version. I don't have a capture card, so I had to just take a photo of the screen, but I think you can see the difference anyway.

And here's another spot, in Nova Prospekt.

map: d2_prison_04 at: -813 x, 208 y, -63 z

And on the 360:

[DarthRazdor]

I must say this is not a NEW bug. There is screenshot from old version of HL2 (before Episode One was released)

[tealsuki]

I can confirm this as well, after checking several tunnels and dark zones in Water Hazard.

(I also have a copy for the original xbox, which uses directx8 I believe, I wonder how it looks there LOL)

[ghost]

-final has no effect. Newly compiled maps still exhibit the same issue. The reason you don't see don't see it in newer maps is you're using HDR, and this only effects LDR.

[tealsuki]

I'm using HDR. Or as HDR as Half-Life 2 gets.

[VioletGiraffe]

Why is it closed? Is there a known solution? I always get these awful shadows in HL2. It started suddenly in 2004 or 2005, back when I had a Radeon 9600. I started playing in 2004 and I think it was fine, and then suddenly the bug appeared. Possibly when I switched between different builds of the game. And I've had the bug ever since on a number of different PCs with different gfx cards, all the way until now (current non-beta Steam version as of the time of writing).

[stevethepocket]

It's not closed, it's just a "we can't be bothered to fix this" situation. And no, it's not specific to any configuration; this is baked-in lighting, so it will be visible to everyone unless you're using a ray-tracing mod or something that completely disables lightmaps.

This is a solved problem, by the way; the Half-Life: Update mod has much better lighting. If Valve had just made that mod an official update to the game (maybe minus the new particle effects and the community commentary) instead of tossing it up on Steam, all of the visual issues introduced with the 2010 update would be dealt with for good.

[VioletGiraffe]

Thanks for the comment, I see! Are you saying this bug was introduced in 2010? Any idea what causes it, how it could happen? Just curious. Yeah, I know the Update fixes it. I just played it for the first time and it's awesome, can recommend to everyone

[stevethepocket]

It could be any number of things, but it comes down to the baked lighting either getting crushed down to too little color information, or not generating it correctly in the first place, at low light levels. @ghost's comment, if it is to be believed, sounds like a big clue: the maps that are affected by this might have simply never been recompiled for HDR. Compare that to the console versions, where probably every map was recompiled with only HDR mode since you can't turn HDR off and it cuts down on load times to keep redundant data to a minimum.

There are a couple of things we can try if we're really dedicated to narrowing this down. One is to play through Episode One with HDR turned off to see if we can find any of these splotches there, and then turning HDR back on and seeing if they go away. We can also try to find out if there are any tools that can analyze a BSP file and report back whether it contains HDR or LDR lighting data. The community has reverse-engineered the heck out of Source and created all kinds of tools with really obscure purposes—including one that lets you extract lightmaps and edit them by hand—so it's not out of the question. Heck, maybe that very tool would do what we need if it returns errors when you try to load lightmaps that are missing.