Editor and game lighting settings

[cannonf0dder]

I've always had issues with is getting the game to match the editor, in terms of lighting.
Something I've always struggled with is getting lighting correct, so now I'm reaching out.
More like getting the game to match the editor really.

Essentialy the problem is as above, the editor lighting never looks like the games lighting.
The editor looks great, cones, shafts, shadows, point lights... everything looks spot on, but when I play in editor or play via the game, everything is overly bright.

I've tinkered with the indirect and number of bounces in the world properties, and found setting bounces to 0 makes the game look quite like the editor, but still lacks proper shadows and saturation.

Have any of you ( or devs ) managed to get the editor and game to look exactly alike.
It's quite difficult (read annoying) to build a scene perfectly, then have to rebuild over and over and over bacuse the lights are completely different to how you've built them in editor.

Example being in my current level, I have a few lights dotted around a large-ish room to provide a sort of ambiance of colour, setting the radius to only about 300/400 ish and the brightness to 0.5, but in the game they appear pretty bright and even with low radius they seem to cover the whole room in light instead of having a low grade ambiant light.

Side by side of room http://imgur.com/a/ubwfc

[A JANITOR]

is it a dark map that is darker than the darkest setting?
maybe try t;bkering with environment intensiry\brightness i did that so i could make night maps like planet x
maybw give that setting a gi in world properties just type env in search box will see the setting
find the right ballance
will have to rebild lighting a few times before it look the way you want it ti look
also emissive objects or materials may stand out more
esp skydome
after lower environment intensity one can make it night and can achieve a black sky with stars etc
set it too dark then if set a lights brightness to 0.000001 it almost pitch black

[CarThief]

Hm, i find the lighting is most altered when built in a lightmassimportance volume, without it, it seems to mimic the editor's lighting more, but who knows if that would be any bit stable...

Though then again, there's always been a minor change in lighting after it's been built into the map, might be a compensation factor of sorts to reduce in-game lag, because high-quality movable/toggleable lights are quite a powerful producer of lag, and the game just seems to 'burn' the lighting into the static meshes and surfaces during the light building process. Kinda like tanning.

Maybe you'll have better luck not adding a lightmassimportance volume or using togglable or even movable lights which get processed differently? Though expect building lighting to be a real pain with enough of those. It was not particularly cooperative when i was building the Derelict Station map which had tons of toggleable lights. Also, curious idea, you could add a spinning object and attach movable lights to it for a disco floor or something, should it suit that arcade-esque level. Or so i'm thinking the editor's capable of that anyway.

[cannonf0dder]

I'll have a tinker with both the environmental levels and removing my importance volume.
I don't mind minor changes but like you see in the pic, I'm going from spots of light to big bright areas.

Bloody kid's nicked my pc for now, so testing will have to wait.
Also disco ball sounds mint, however it's a 1:1 of another postal 2 map.

[A JANITOR]

cool also if make a new map from one of the sample maps delete the lightmas importance volume
i usually copy one from a vanilla map and paste it in mine then tinker with a few settings in it
the template maps have crap lightmass volumes
also if theres no lightmass volume the welder wont show scorches properly or if walk from one end of map to other things outside a lightmass volume can disappear usually its dynamic decals like scortches or broken lantern scorches or goo jar splats or eggnog splats
while i was making planet x i did see that happen so yeah a good idea to have lightmass volume covering all playable areas of ya map

[cannonf0dder]

Right so, for whatever reason, copying over the lightmass from gravity drive made the lighting a tad more similar. Not quite 100% maybe about 80% the same, still some brightness issues, evnironment settings did nothing, or at least appeared to do nothing.
Gunna try messing with a post proccessing volume, see if that helps any

[BlackEagle]

Yeah, the biggest factor is usually bounce lighting(ie: lightmass). It ruins sharp shadows and small lighting.

The thing the editor doesn't show so easily is static shadowing, some objects that look clean and sharp in the editor might actually have no shadows at all once built. Though that's probably not the case here.

Post process volumes help a lot to improve contrast and colour balance(with a lot of tinkering), so that may be your next best bet.
And of course messing with the lightmass settings and ambient lighting settings.