The Importance of _minGridLight for Competitive Play

This is a setting which has largely gone unnoticed by the 3rd party map community, but I must stress its importance for competitive play and why I firmly believe that all level designers should use this setting. It is a value set in the worldspawn and must be included before the -light compile phase. Modifying this value with an -onlyents compile will have no effect.

This sets the minimum lightgrid (dynamic entity lighting) levelwide. Dynamic entities refer to players, weapons and items. This includes first person hand models and guns.

There is a subtle difference in ambient lighting in the 2 screenshots because of different compile settings between these two tests(one has -bounce while the other does not), but the first image has a _mingridlight value of 0 while the second image is 185.

As a result, the player models are now much more visible when you set the minimum lightGrid value to a higher number.

Tohunga_b8 has a _mingridlight value of 100. However for my more recent maps I have increased this value between 125-185 depending on the ambiance of the map. Values above 200 are quite ugly and depending on your lighting values below 100 still create visibility issues.

Most stock Urban Terror maps have values between 0-60 which I personally still think is low for competitive play, but feel free to experiment and find a value you think is balanced for your level..