Apparently its the case to keep an object lit up as seen from a large distance it's necessary to put a separate spot light at the distance you view it near each location you need to view it from, separating them by 30 degrees or so like spokes on a wheel such that the beam is mostly parallel to your line of sight. At least that's the only solution I've been able to find that works so far. But the light stays present after cubemaps are loaded.

That's an odd suuse. Baked lights shouldn't be able to fade out. It kind of sounds like the light is not baking the direct component, and is toggling the direct lighting when you get to far.

I seem to remember there is an issue with lights not fully baking unless the settings were just right, but I can't remember what those settings was.

Yes, I was thinking baked is baked and should not disappear. But the baked component is definitely there until cube maps are loaded.

I'm also seeing a difficulty with cube maps loading into this map, The only way I can get that to happen is if I build them on one full compile and then run a second time with only the Build box and last three boxes checked and then on that second "empty" build they don't build but do show up in the map. This is a very large open map using about 1/3 of the entire mapping space so maybe that is having an impact. I'm just treating it as a single room with one light probe box but lots of cube map entities sprinkled about.

Also, I'm doing some other odd things. I have a sky texture but leave it disabled and in the skybox I'm using very large cylinders that represent the night sky that exceed the box limits. It seems as long as you have those items with their center still in the box it works as intended. But maybe I have too many anomalies to expect not to see anomalies coming back at me.

You should be able to build the cubemaps manaually as well, by typing buildcubemaps in the console with the map running.

Yes, same thing happens when I build cube maps in console. They don't actually load into the map until I do a build with the BUILD World box check and the last three boxes checked.

Are you building with lightmaps, or the vertex lighting that's baked from the "Preview Baked Lighting" menu in Hammer? I think the cubemap build option is only for when building with lightmaps. Otherwise it should build the cubmeps along with the vertex lighting.

Hmmm, that's an option I've never used before. I see it on the menu bar but I've never touched it. So I assume I'm building with lightmaps.

This map is dramatically lit for reasons you'll understand if you see it. So I don't think if subtle lighting details are lost that it will make much difference. The extra spotlights in the distance might actually be improving the drama as I look at the result more.

Interesting! I just did a quicker build at only 512 resolution and the cube maps loaded right after building. All the times they didn't load right after building were at a resolution of 4096. I have 64GB of memory in my system but maybe I need more.

I happen to have two 32GB sims to swap out to get 96GB on that machine but it made no difference. I couldn't even reproduce the autoload of cube maps on a 512 resolution build. Nor did it make any difference on the baked lighting with those extra spotlights disabled.

Using so many spot lights to "patch up" the bad lighting is proving unsatisfactory. So I did a simple test map consisting of 4 gray 16 sided cylinders about 10 times taller than the player on a white surface inside a env_light_probe_volume inside a lightmap_player_space texture box. The length of the box (a rectangle) is about 1/4 the mapping space (as long as half of it). The cylinders at one end of the box are large enough to see from across that long dimension from inside the box. There are two bright spot lights illuminating the cylinders from both sides at an angle from in front of the group, the front pointing perpendicular to one side of the long dimension of the box. An env_cubemap sits between the lights and another one sits at the far end of the box.

Case 1: Building the map with all the usual boxes and the added "Build Cubemaps on Load" checked results in seeing indications in text that cubemaps do indeed build. However, in the players view at the closer env_cubemap I'm still seeing sharp corners of the cylinders. At the env_cubemap at the far end of the box, the cylinders are still clearly visible from the baked lighting

Case 2: Building the map again with only the "Build World" box checked and all three boxes in the "Load Map in Engine" section checked results in the other problem I'm seeing. There is no time spent building cubemaps but it appears previously built cubemaps are loaded into the map at that time. So then at the env_cubemap closest to the cylinders there are no cylinder corners visible (i.e cubemaps are loaded and worked) but at the far end of the space near that remote env_cubemap no cylinders can be seen at the other end of the box (i.e Baked lighting is no longer visible at this large angle to the source of the light at this large distance).



I tried this test map on two different computers using the option to run without a VR Headset so I only viewed the results in a "VR Box" on the monitor and got the same bad result on both. Also, I get the same bad result for cubemaps (i.e. no cubemap results visible) using the Buildcubemaps command in the console as using the checkboxes for a full build with a cubemap build/load at the end. So cubemap results are only visible if I build them first then do a build with only the "Build World" check box and the three boxes in the "Load Map in Engine" section set. Then I get cubemap effects but baked lit surfaces disappear (go dark) when viewed at both significant distances (almost quarter mapping space scale) and a few 10's of degrees from the direction of the baking source light.

Can light probe volumes be turned on/off such that the baked lighting returns for viewing at a distance? I've never used them this way because up close you'd always want to have the better lighting effects.

Yeah, it is possible to toggle them. The volumes should only affect dynamicly lit objects though, not anything lightmapped.