Wraithverge and dynamic lights

[Lars]

When using the Wraithverge in Hexen with dynamic lights enabled, is it intentional that the ghosts as well as the shadows are completely black? Or is it a bug in the lights definition? The effect is kind of neat, but it neither fits with the trail that is shot from the weapon until the ghosts spawn nor with the death animation of the ghosts, where you simply see the original gray sprites without any touch of black.

[NeuralStunner]

They have subtractive (darkening) lights attached, deliberately yes.

A lot of the provided lights could use improvement (such as less bold colors, which really make things look washed out). I've considered working on such a thing but never got around to it.

[Enjay]

You could try the dontlightself option in the light definition. That feature, as the name implies, means that the light does not affect the actor that it is bound to. However, I'm not sure how good a pale grey ghost would look surrounded by a dark shadow.

[zwiki]GLDEFS#Dynamic_light_definitions[/zwiki]

[Lars]

You could try the dontlightself option in the light definition. That feature, as the name implies, means that the light does not affect the actor that it is bound to. However, I'm not sure how good a pale grey ghost would look surrounded by a dark shadow.

Yes, that indeed works, only partly however. Now the ghosts are grey again when flying around but have strange black artifacts attached to their backs (see picture). Obviously the wraithverge code adds another sprite to the ghosts which is then not affected by the "dontlightself" option. This actually makes them look even weirder than being completely black.

I have now modified the definition as follows:
// Wraithverge
flickerlight GHOST
{
color 0.2 0.2 0.2
size 56
secondarySize 52
chance 0.7
}

This produces a grey shadow instead of a black one but does not negatively affect the sprites. So I guess I'll stick with that for the moment.