Very Urgent: Deactivating specular reflections by default?

[Mr. Calhoun]

Very Urgent: Deactivating Specular Reflections / Cubemaps by default?

Short story:
I changed the light settings of my map from day to night. Now every
reflective surface is messed up (shiny like a robot's ass; something
I've never seen in TF2 at all) and requires a
cubemap (which they didn't before in the daylight version for weird reasons). Since I would need tons of env_cubemaps now and promised a release of my map for today (October 31st) I dont want to have this ugly specular reflections in
my map at all. So is there any way of deactivating the specular reflections on my map by default for all players?

Im very thankful for every answer.

 

[PL-7764]

The reason you suddenly require cubemaps when you didn't before is likely that the skybox you used before had default cubemaps associated with it, but the night one you are using now does not. Some TF2 skyboxes have default cubemaps, others don't. It's an inconsistency that's annoying, but not too hard to overcome.

I don't know the way to force mat_specular to 0 for all clients, and if there is a way then I doubt people playing the map would appreciate it doing so. Those kinds of things are a tad annoying for players. If you really don't want to put in all the needed cubemaps (you should though for best results!), my only idea might be to have one cubemap somewhere in the map that everything ends up using. It'll look odd, but it would at least kill the purple-and-black reflections. Of course you'd have to run buildcubemaps in the console and all that stuff before it'd do anything.

 

[Mr. Happy]

It takes no time to add cubemaps.

However, yes it is possible, you put a point_clientcommand in the map and trigger it with mat_specular 0

 

[Grim Tuesday]

To add cubemaps, just throw them down whereevery you want. It literaly takes less that 40 seconds for a whole map.

 

[Terr]

To follow on Grim Tuesday's comment, there are two processes you need to follow. One is placing env_cubemap entities on your map, and the other is building cubemap images when you want to play/distribute your map.

For placing cubemaps, generally put them in the middle of significant rooms. Whatever cubemap a player is closest to, that cubemap is the one which determines the reflections on things in the map and on their shiny weapons. You'll need to spent a bit of extra time placing them if traveling from a brightly-lit area into a darkened one or vice-versa, or you'll have bright reflections in dark areas and vice-versa.