Talk:Glowing textures (Source)

Hope I'm right about the .rad stuff. This is done from memory and I had no way to test and all my forums i woulda checked are blocked at work. Can someone see if its right? Angry Beaver 06:37, 12 Jun 2006 (PDT)

I've been fiddling with it for the last couple days, and everything mostly seems right. I did notice that when I use the lights.rad method, the texture doesn't self-illuminate. So to have realistic-looking texture lights, I had to use both the lights.rad method and the $selfillum method. Furthermore, if my alpha channel was pure white, my texture didn't self-illuminate. Making an alpha channel that had an rgb value of 253,253,253, however, did work. Greeze 18:52, 29 Jun 2006 (PDT)

Are you sure your image editor doesn't cull pure white alpha channels? It may also be that vtex just assumes it's for transparency and culls it.—ts2do 19:53, 29 Jun 2006 (PDT)

Photoshop is my image editor, and I would assume it retains alpha channels as shown. Re-opening the .tga restores the alpha channel exactly as it was. So I'm guessing it's either vtex or the game engine that doesn't like the pure-white alpha channel. It's all academic anyway, since if one really wanted a fullbright texture, one would use the UnlitGeneric shader. For me, the full white alpha was a temporary step for testing purposes only. Greeze 19:56, 2 Jul 2006 (PDT)

Another quick note... it seems that having a single non-pure-white pixel anywhere in the alpha channel fixes the problem. Greeze 20:00, 2 Jul 2006 (PDT)

Another thing I noticed is that detail brushes don't cast light. They will self-illuminate, however. Greeze 19:58, 2 Jul 2006 (PDT)

"Supported for legacy purposes"

Texture lighting generally looks a lot better, is a lot more easier to do, and therefore a lot more practical. I don't think it's appropriate to say it's an "old method supported for legacy purposes", however that could be applied to light entities. Light entities are clumsy when compared to texture lighting. JJ45 12:38, 2 Mar 2007 (PST)