Problems with HDR lighting. Pictures inside!

[ToMoBoBo]

Hello, I'm porting my CS:S map to CS:GO and giving it a facelift in the process. I'm having a lot of weird problems with hdr lighting however, it seems to generally mess up everything. The compile is fine and shows no problems, and vrad runs twice and seems to work, but when I go to play, the HDR shadows look horrible, and make the map very very dark and splotchy. Here let me grab a screen shot:



This first image shows the floor with the unwanted splotchy shadows. The wall up in the distance is looking correctly lit, but is beyond the HDR rendering distance I suspect because as you get closer:



Gross.

So yeah, I don't know where to start looking for what I've done wrong, but I suspect it's something fundamental. LDR lighting runs great, and shadows are properly displayed but when HDR fires up it's balls to the wall crazy. I have a 3d Skybox and it is not enclosed or separated from the world with anything but a nodraw texture. But it doesn't seem to mater if I box it in or what. I have a light_env in both the map and in the 3d skybox area. My HDR brightness settings in my world lights read -1 -1 -1 1, and my HDR ratio is 1. My skybox is _hdr. Can anyone offer a suggestion for which direction to look?

Here's my compile... And this is with -final preset in advanced.


Update!

Found the problem, it's because the light is on a switch to be turned on and off. I guess CS:GO is doing something different with lighting. If there's no i/o for the light it looks great! Now, how should I properly make the light on/off-able?

[ToMoBoBo]

Just giving this a bump cause I still only know of one way to get a light to be switchable. I guess cs:go version of vrad is lazy or different, because I didn't have this problem before with the CS:S sdk...

P.S. what happened to the VDC irc chatroom?