Good morning from the mountains.

And here is my next possibly obvious question. I have this lampmodel with currently one skin. Now I want the orange parts representing the glass that emits light to do exactly that - emit light. I figure I need a second skin for the glass only and then acivate the lightrange-setting via script.

- Where do I put the second skin with the orange parts only?
- Will I need a skin that also covers the vertices of the metal part (and what color woulg that have) or can the second skin just leave them blank?
- How Do I address a skin in a model (keyword to look up in the helpfile suffices)?

(And finally a question of polite behaviour in this board: Do I link to screenshots or do I pack them into my post?).

Do you mean emit light (affects the models around, too) or do you just want to make the orange parts brighter?

you can post screenshots here, of course. if they're big they get scaled down automatically.
And if you post a lot of screenshots you can just put them into a [spoiler] to keep the post shorter.

Well both variants are useful, I think. For just being brighter I figure a second skin with the orange parts should be addressed by ambient (my.ambient).

The second version would be: Four skins, one for each glass pane, addressing lightrange and setting SPOTLIGHT via script. In both cases I would give the model an action in which the ambient or other parameters are set for a speficic skin.

How do I address a specific skin in script, say, attach "my.ambient" to skin #2 of lamp.mdl? Can't find it in the reference.

lightrange, ambient and all these parameters are per entity, not per skin. So you cannot say skin1 should have an ambient of 30 and skin2 should be 10.

Don't make it too complicated.

You could:

1. Create two models, one for the glass and one for the metal part. Make the glass one BRIGHT, TRANSLUCENT and LIGHT and set its lightrange > 0. Leave the metal part as it is.

2. Just color the skin part that represents the glass brighter.

3. Create a sprite or a particle as a corona at the lanterns position and set it's BRIGHT flag.

As Uhrwerk pointed out this is normally not possible. However, you can use ent_mtlset to apply different materials to different skins which is quite useful.

UhrwerK: Ah. A pity. I will go with solution #1. That sounds the most convincing.
SUperku: Nifty. Will definetely keep that in mind. Doesn't solve the current problem though.

As always thanks to all.

Please keep in mind that the solution also depends on the type of game you want to create. If you have a top down view and the lantern is only visible from above and a greater distance a corona sprite hovering over it might to the job just perfectly well. For an ego shooter where you can approach the lantern from all sides and get really close to it you might want to prefer a more sophisticated approach.

Hm? It does solve your problem, at least it enables you to only change the brightness of the second skin with ambient where the rest of the model stays the same (apply a material to the model that ignores ambient and use ent_mtlset to apply one that uses ambient to the second skin).

Oooh. I see. Mmmh. We'll decide what looks better and test both approaches.