VRAD++

VBSP++ ▶ VVIS++ ▶ VRAD++ ▶ BSPZIP++

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 VRAD++

Developer(s)

ficool2

Initial release

Jul 10, 2025

Stable release

May 4, 2026

Operating system

Type

Map compiler

Target engine(s)

Distribution

Freeware

Download

Official website
GitHub repository

 VRAD++ is a community-made modification of Source's VRAD developed by ficool2.

Differences

• Scales up to 64 threads
• Small performance optimizations
• Shared LDR/HDR compiling:
  • When using -both, LDR lighting data will be redirected to HDR at no extra file size cost
  • This means you don't need to compile VRAD twice for LDR and HDR users anymore (compatible with both)
  • Passing in -ldr or -hdr will still explicitly compile in LDR or HDR mode only, respectively
  • HDR data will not be remapped if LDR data is already present
  • Therefore if you need different LDR and HDR lighting, compile with -ldr and -hdr separately
• Bypassed "numplanes + fakeplanes >= MAX_MAP_PLANES" limit
• Light count is now unlimited instead of capped at 8192
• Added AppID mounting in gameinfo.txt
• Added shadow casting for dynamic props
  • Set vrad_model_cast_shadows to 1 in the entity to enable this
  • This is intended for props that won't move and can't be a static prop, for example resupply lockers in TF2
  • Uses the first frame of sequence 0, or uses the animation set by DefaultAnim (like on prop_dynamic)
  • Modelscale is supported
• Added new light_projected light type
  • Behaves like a env_projectedtexture but applied at compile time to lightmaps
  • Same properties as light_spot, with an additional texturename key (path to VTF)
  • Outer angle controls "size" of projected angle
  • Alpha channel is multiplied with the output light (black - no light contribution)
  • Non-square aspect ratios and roll angle are supported
  • Renamed to light_spot after compilation so it can be toggled in-game
• Added support for light_directional light type
  • Renamed to light_spot after compilation so it can be toggled in-game
• Added ambient occlusion baking
  • Custom implementation that is an order of magnitude faster than AO in Slammin /  CS:GO (!)
  • Set -ambientocclusion or -ao to enable this
  • Customize with -aoradius, -aoscale, -aopropsamples, -aofacesamples
  • Samples are automatically adjusted for -fast and -final mode
  • Default AO radius and scale is 32 units and 0.5 respectively
  • Radius in 3D sky is correctly scaled (every other VRAD AO implementation has this bug)
  • Use -aodebug to visualize ambient occlusion
• Added new QMC sampler for ambient, sunlight and ambient occlusion
  • This allows lighting to converage to the ground truth faster
  • Same sampler as used by modern raytracers, such as in  Blender
  • Less samples are required for a good result
  • Since less samples are required, -final has now been reduced to -extrasky 8 by default (from 16)
• Added soft lights
  • When _light_radius keyvalue on a light is set, the light is treated as a sphere/disk
  • Allows for casting softer shadows
  • Note that soft lights will take longer to compile than hard lights
  • Added -extrasoft parameter to control sample multiplier for soft lights
    • Defaults are 1, 0.25 on -fast, 4 on -final
  • Currently only supports light and light_spot
• Added -StaticPropSampleScale
  • Controls sample multiplier for prop vertex lighting (default is 1)
  • Defaults to 4 with -final, which will slightly increase compile times
  • However this will improve quality of prop lighting in areas starved of sunlight or bounced surfaces
• Added -reflectivityscale
• Added -worldtextureshadows
  • Allows $alphatest brush textures to cast proper shadows like props
  • Requires -textureshadows
• Added -translucentshadows
  • Similar to -worldtextureshadows but for $translucent brush textures
  • Requires -textureshadows and -worldtextureshadows
• Added -forcetextureshadows
  • Forces texture shadows to be enabled on all props
• Added DXT3 format support for texture shadows
• Added support for %alphatexture
  • Allows overriding texture used for texture shadows on geometry
• Added geometric edge pairing for brush entities
  • This helps reduce seams where they touch world geometry or other entities
  • Added -nopairgeometricedges option to disable this behavior
  • vrad_brush_pair_edges keyvalue can be used to disable this on a per-entity basis
  • Also added -nopairedges to disable edge pairing on the same entity
• Added Light Culling
  • Significantly improves performance for open maps that use a lot of lights
  • Greatly reduces lightmap filesize of the map when using named lights
  • Comparison on an open map:
    • 4 minutes 23 seconds -> 3 minutes 1 second
    • File size: 62 MB -> 52 MB
  • -nolightcull can be used to disable this if it causes problems
  • minlightcullintensity can be used to adjust the intensity cutoff threshold
  • Default is 1 which is negligible levels of lighting
• Added experimental support for static props to shadow ambient cubes
  • Disabled by default, use -propambient to enable
  • Uses collision model of the static prop as the approximation
  • Ambient cubes won't be generated inside solid static props
  • Vertex lighting from the props will contribute to the ambient cubes
  • -StaticPropLighting does not need to be enabled
  • Note that this won't solve sunlight applying to entities shadowed by static props, as the engine ignores prop visiblity at runtime
  • See this page for detailed info about this issue
• Added experimental support for named light_environment and light_directional
  • Fixes static props having black lighting
  • To use: you must "jail" the light entity by itself inside a nodraw cube in the void
  • Not doing so will potentially lead to bad performance
  • Named light environment still has engine bugs, mainly that props may have broken light after toggling the sunlight
  • This can be workarounded by flipping the value of r_radiosity in console
  • In  Garry's Mod, Lua can be used for this
  • In singleplayer games, you can issue a command with point_clientcommand or VScript
• Added support for Patch materials for loading texture shadows
  • Added support for processing  Left 4 Dead 2,  Portal 2 and  Half-Life 2 () BSP formats
• Added -patchlightmapsize to set minimum lightmap size for patches (default is 16)
  • This controls how faces with lower lightmap scales get subdivided for bounced lighting
  • Lower values will subdivide more, at the cost of increased compile time and memory usage
  • This may sometimes solve issues with thin surfaces obstructed by geometry not receiving light
• Added -choptexlights
  • Allows subdivision of faces that have texlights
  • Can create more smoother-looking lights from faces but may take longer to compute
• Added -fastradial for using fast radiosity gathering like in -fast mode
• Added support for -LargeDispSampleRadius
• Added -dispsamplefactor
  • Controls radius of lighting influence multiplier for displacements. Default is 1
  • Higher values such as 2.5 or 3 may fix black splotches on very large stretched displacements
• Added -disppatchsamplefactor
  • Controls radius of bounced lighting influence multiplier for displacements. Default is 1
  • Higher values may fix splotches of dark lighting on large, stretched displacements
  • -LargeDispSampleRadius is the same as -disppatchsamplefactor 2.2
• Added -indirectonly to only bake indirect light
• Added support for using decimals in lightmap scales
• Added support for reading static prop formats v7 to v14
• Added -report_search_paths to list current search paths for debugging
• Added -propdebug for tracking down what props take a long time to compile
• Significantly improved performance and memory usage of bounced lighting on faces with low lightmap scales
• Slightly improved displacement bounced lighting to be more granular
  • Benefits thin/small displacements the most
  • Added -DisplacementLightingOld to use old calculations
• Improved vertex lighting for props
  • Added -StaticPropIndirectMode to use old behavior if desired
• Improved performance of static prop loading when using -StaticPropPolys
  • This also fixes hangs on very large and sparse props
• Fixed maps with more than 13 million triangles taking a very, very long time to compile
• Fixed black seams appearing on displacements in -fast mode
• Fixed rays missing exact diagonal corner intersections
  • Both of these bug exists in all other versions of VRAD
• Fixed prop lightmaps being dumped into wrong color space with -dumppropmaps
  • Prop lightmaps are also now dumped into sp_lightmaps directory of the game
• Fixed prop lightmaps always using fast lighting samples and ignoring -extrasky
  • As a result, prop lightmaps will take slightly longer to compile, but will look significantly better
• Fixed maps with radial vis (FarZ set in env_fog_controller) drawing 3D sky in 2Dsky-only areas
• Fixed light_environment SunSpreadAngle not using more samples under -final
  • Maps using a spread angle greather than 0 will take slightly longer to compile with -extrasky as a result, but the result looks better compared to stock
• Fixed prop lightmaps causing very, very long compile times on models with invalid UVs
• Fixed -OnlyStaticProps crashing
• Redundant vertex lighting is skipped for lightmapped props (saves compile time and file size)
• .dx90.vtx data is loaded for vertex lighting instead of .dx80.vtx
• Broken vertex data for props will now be skipped over when compiling
• VPhysics is now an optional dependency (will compile successfully if its missing)
• Fixed bug where broken vertex data in props skipped vertex lighting for other props
• Fixed oversight where indirect lighting wasn't blended correctly with non-bump vs bump neighboring faces
• Fixed textureshadows defined in the .rad file not working if slashes were different
• Fixed rare crash related to surfaceprop parsing
• Fixed multiple light_environment or light_directional entities stomping over leaf sky flags
• Removed memory column from BSP statistics as its useless
• Named or styled lights are now sorted by brightness priority for faces
  • Reduces occurence of bad lighting from overlapping named/styled lights
• Static prop lighting is no longer skipped on -fast mode
• Added -scale, -ambient, -dlight, -sky, -notexscale, -coring debug options
• Unlimited texlight support in RAD files
• Comments in RAD files are now skipped
• Cleaned up formatting of some messages and warnings

Supported games

VRAD++ is currently available for all games on Team Fortress 2 branch, as well as Garry's Mod (64-bit only).

The older BSP format used by Source 2013 Singleplayer games is also supported, but the compilers need to be installed to a supported 64-bit game such as Source SDK Base 2013 - Multiplayer or Garry's Mod.

Note:For Source 2013 Singleplayer games, you can create a folder named x64 in engine (bin) folder, then copy filesystem_stdio.dll, tier0.dll, vphysics.dll and vstdlib.dll from other games that have 64-bit support into it. drag and drop VBSP++ to the x64 folder you create and it should work as normal

Note:Any features which require Static prop flags greater than 0xFF are unavailable when compiling for the singleplayer format, as the static prop lump used by the older format only supports 8 bits of flags, instead of 32.

Todo: Guide on setting up Tools++ for Source 2013 Singleplayer.

External links

• Download from the official website (Tip: expand VRAD++ and scroll down to the bottom of the changelog)
• Download from the official GitHub repository (Tip: find the tools_plusplus.zip file in the Assets section of the latest release)