The negative offset is very useful. You can sink the lava lights down below the surface and eliminate much of the spotty appearance, doesn't help much with default delay lights though. Those just basically paint the walls/shores up to a point then stop, which looks pretty bad, I've decided default delay is mostly useless for lava lights. 

I'm working on a map for Jam 6, like so many others, and in experimenting with surface lighting using the beta Tyrutils posted earlier, I've run into a problem.

As far as I can tell, 'samples' on a light entity is being used whether 'deviance' is set or not. Even in a simple box test map, making one light and setting its texture name to the floor texture, with the deviance key either unset or set to 0, I get a certain number of total lights reported. Lowering the samples value down from its default 16 to 1 reduces the total count. With the total light count being a new addition, I can't confirm whether this is new behavior or not.

I've had one other problem, where light exits with no errors after reporting "X entities, Y are lights" but before actually computing any lightmaps, but I'm still trying to find a minimal repro for that one. The deviance/samples thing is either more pressing, or just me being an idiot, so I thought I should speak up now. Am I just misunderstanding how to use these features? 

If you are using that fgd I created for JH I strongly suggest getting the latest version at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33279452/quake4ericwTools.fgd as an old version set _samples 16 (which is default, but doesn't need to be set by the fgd) which caused some lights to use deviance automatically.

With the new fgd this doesn't happen (but you will still need to remove the _samples key from any lights that had it assigned before you got the new fgd).

And err, if you aren't using that fgd, then ignore all of this post. YAY! 

Yes, I was indeed using an outdated version of your FGD. The new one fixes it, thanks! If I may, I'd humbly suggest the tool docs and FGD be updated to clarify the _samples description, which says "Default 16 (only used if "_deviance" is set)." I didn't understand that any value of _samples activates the feature regardless of the _deviance value.

Thanks, Wiiki! (Can you guess where my username comes from? :P)

Now I just need to figure out why the beta tools are producing maps missing some textures. I'm using ID1, lavacity1a, and mapjam666 wads, and a few textures from each are missing. Others load just fine. Switch back to 0.15.1 with no other changes and all the textures show up. Any ideas? 

...as soon as I post I realize the problem isn't exactly as I describe. It looks like the texture thing I mentioned isn't spotty, I mistook a few textures as belonging to a different set. The problem looks like two of the three wads aren't being loaded at all, with only mapjam666 (the last one listed in worldspawn's 'wad' string) being used. 

The _samples thing iirc was a bug in the tools, the description was copied directly from Eric's site! It may already be fixed in his latest version of the tools.

Making that fgd has certainly upped my appreciation for programmers, and how they make stuff compatible across different apps/versions! What a pain in the arse :D 

http://i.imgur.com/jUcJ0Jn.png

I'm not really sure why the Lighting FGD just adds these unnecessary entity keys to all the light entities in my map, and It's just tedious to remove all of these different keys. 

Are they actually in the .map file when you save it? 

That's why they are called "default". :) 

I didn't understand that any value of _samples activates the feature regardless of the _deviance value.
Crap, I forgot to fix that :-(. Will fix it and put it in the next beta.

re: textures not loading with the beta, but working with 0.15.1, that is messed! Any chance you could send me the wads and map so I can double check what is going on? I don't think I changed anything that should affect texture loading. 

Eric, I just sent you an email, thanks for the offer! You'll get the map, wads, and a readme with details. Hopefully I'm just doing something dumb. :) 

If I don't select every single light entity in my map, the lighting would end up like this: http://i.imgur.com/37pGUH0.png

Honestly, I'm getting tired of being forced to select all the light entities and removing all the unnecessary entity keys for each light. Are there any workarounds for all this crap> 

are you using the latest fgd I made? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33279452/quake4ericwTools.fgd

You don't have to use this fgd, there is a default one provided with Jackhammer. I made it for myself and thought others might find it useful! 

Yeah, I'm using the latest fgd. 

Is it possible to changing the defaults to 0? 

Looking at this screenshot (also had a similar thing myself playing around with mapping recently) http://i.imgur.com/81RoXoQ.png You can see that there is AO applied at very shallow angles. Maybe something like -dirtangle [degrees] would be a good setting to add. Where of course stuff under that angle would not be dirtmapped or something like that. 

All the values selected on the lights when you create them are the defaults. 

state for any light entity is 300 light.

This is how it has always been. 

I guess not all of that stuff is from dirtmapping but just how light works. So maybe something that makes faces with angles under a certain threshold have averaged normals, basically like angle threshold controlled smoothing groups. 

you can reduce _anglesense below 0.5 to help alleviate the shading problem in that tube. it may make the light look a little odd because it won't attenuate based on face normal as much. might take some tweaking to look good. 

Is anglesense something you set per light? 

Yes you can set it per light with _anglescale. The default is 0.5 

Thanks :) Will play around with that when I got time. 

you can set "_anglesense" per-light.

When I get a chance I'll try playing with normal smoothing again. The first time I tried it I was still getting hard edges, e.g. with sunlight shining on an octagonal pillar. 

It's too bad you can not assign any values to brushes, that way it could be controlled on a brush basis, which would make more sense from a user perspective. But having it as a global variable with an angle threshold should be enough I think. Maybe additional value for func_walls, func_detail and such might make sense.