Mrs. Lappy has recently decided that she likes all of the shooters I play through Steam, and would like to play on her laptop with me.
"Great!" I said, until I saw that her computer runs the dreaded Intel 945GM chipset.

Now I wasn't realistically expecting her to have a gaming rig, but to make a long story short the games I have work wonders on her laptop with one minor shortcoming - all the player models are more or less unlit unless standing 'outside' in skybox light.

Since this is the only thing keeping DoD:S and TF2 and the like playable on her computer (for her) I figure there has to be something I can do to the existing models (within VAC limits, of course) or some cvar I can edit so that these models aren't greyed out everywhere they go.

I was reading up on VMTs and saw that for "VertexLitGeneric" VMTs there's an option called "$selfillum"... if I added a "$selfillum" line to the VMTs for the models that are too dark would that help brighten them up? Is that illegal? - I'm not trying to break any VAC rules here. Is there a cvar that could help me?

You folks are a lot smarter than I in these things. :)

$selfillum, as far as I know, is blocked by consistency (sv_pure or whatever it is?) and won't let you join any servers.

Now, is there anyway you could get a screenshot? From what I can gather, unless you touched the models, it's probably a problem on the laptop. If possible, update drivers? Maybe bring the brightness up all the way in options?

Hope this helps a bit.