StrataSource
Enhancement: brush entities compiled lighting fade
Currently, when a moving brush entity is compiled, its lighting takes up the form of whatever lighting it had where it spawned. This looks fine for static brushes or brushes which move very little, but becomes very noticeable if the brush moves any significant distance.
I'd love for there to be a system through which moving brushes could have their lighting information baked at various individual steps – for example, the start and end positions of a func_door, or the specific track points of a func_tracktrain – and then have those baked textures faded whenever the brush moves.
I understand that a linear fade between two discrete steps won't always look good or even make sense, but it would still look better than the current unchanging lighting information for most cases, especially if the mapper can manually define specific positions to interpolate. It'd also still look appropriate when interacting with dynamic/real-time lights.
One possible mechanism would be for the entity to use a given set of info_lighting, then render a linear/bilinear average of the nearest points. Alternatively, it could be done through a flag or keyvalue where only the start/end positions (or given track points) are accounted for, and any changes made to the brushes in-game (like parenting or repositioned tracks) are ignored.
Yes, PLEASE do this! Anything which helps the lighting appear more natural in-game is a boon!
