To make shadowmapped point lights, just make light entities as normal. Optionally you can control the shadowing properties of the light using attribute 5: 0 = shadows, 1 = no shadows, 2 = static shadows - world and mapmodels only (no playermodels or pickups). Shadowmaps are cached from frame to frame if no dynamic entities such as playermodels are rendered into them, so static lights (2) will generally be much faster than normal lights (0) during gameplay and should be used where possible. Unshadowed lights (1) are even faster as they further reduce shading costs, so they should also be used where possible.
To make cascaded shadowmapped sunlight, just use the normal sunlight commands: sunlight sunlightyaw sunlightpitch You can also set sunlightyaw and sunlightpitch from your current direction with the following command: getsundir
You can control the diffuse global illumination of sunlight using the following parameters: giscale - scales the contribution of indirect light gidist - limits the distance which indirect light travels (smaller values are more intense, but higher values allow farther travel) giaoscale - controls the contribution of atmospheric light skylight - controls the color of atmospheric light
Screen-space ambient occlusion affects mostly ambient light and to a lesser degree sunlight, but it does not affect point lights. If you want to make use of SSAO in your map, just use the ambient command to set an appropriate ambient light color/intensity.
To make refractive alpha cubes: First mark the cubes with the alpha material. Use valpha or texalpha to set the transparency level as normal. Then use either of the following commands: vrefract K [R G B] K is the strength of the refraction, on a scale of 0 to 1, 1 meaning distortion spanning the entire screen, 0.5 spanning half the screen, etc. The direction of the distortion is taken from the normal-map of the texture. R G B are optional and specify a color for the refraction, with each component being on a scale of 0 to 1 as well.
After editing operations your map may be full of small cubes and triangles, and you will notice that your map looks faceted. To fix this you still need to use the calclight command, however, it no longer generates lightmaps anymore. It just does a remip optimization pass as well as calculates smoothed normals to make things look better. Eventually this may be done differently using some sort of background optimization while editing.
newent decal SLOT YAW PITCH ROLL SIZE
If you don't specify the yaw, pitch, and roll, or leave them all 0, then newent will fill them with current direction you are looking at. The slot refers to a decal slot in the map configuration, starting at offset 0. The size is specified in cube units.
decelreset // functions like texture reset, clears all decal texture slots
setshader bumpspecmapdecal // shaders work like for world shaders, but with the -decal suffix instead of -world texture decal "diffuse.png" // all decal slots start with the "decal" sub-slot instead of "0", and this texture must have an alpha-channel texture n "normals.png" texture s "spec.png"
Set attribute 5 of a light entity to 4.
The intensity of the volumetric lighting medium can be controlled by volscale and the color can by controlled by volcolour.