just looked inside mati` maps bsp .. minlight 130... uh oh
no wonder it looks almost fullbright

dear mati, hope you hear me : dont use high minlight values pleas (higher than 30 I`d say). The bland lighting totaly lacking shadows killed what otherwise could`v been cool map. 

dunno if anyone cares, but NOLF2 tools are finally out, check:

http://www.sierra.com/downloadfile.do?mediaid=6450 

Well I liked them, and I was working on a DM map with them before I lost mapping interest again. 

What kind of settings should I be using to test the lighting on my map? Right now I'm using GLQuake with brightness all the way up and the original pallette. A lot of maps look really dark that way though. What's the gold standard? 

I use -gamma 1 to start the game and use the idgamma patch on frib`s page. http://www.planetquake.com/frib 

...because it`s the One True Renderer. 

R_FULLBRIGHT 1! IT IS THE WAY! 

r_drawflat 1! 

you may need the gamma patch that nitin mentioned. What graphics card do you have? 

Novalogic`s job page has been updated, mentioning that the company behind the Delta Force games is looking to hire level designers for future projects.

(blatantly ripped from thuh shack)

urls:
http://www.novalogic.com/corpjobs.asp 

"What`s the gold standard?"

room_light 0 

I have a geforce2mx.

I was aware of idgamma, but there's a lot of paramteres to play with in there. Are the settings Frib recommends good? 

they are the best ones for my GF2 ti200. 

u many try engines with built-in gamma control, like fitzquake, MHquake, darkplaces and some others

to test the lightlevel of your map, load some original quake maps with proper lighting (like e3m3) and adjust your gamma settings to it

I dont recomend u test the light in software only, cause it works significantly different from GL and I recon most people play GL 

I was looking for this a while back but couldn't find it and I couldn't remember who wrote it. Anyway, I found it today (too late) and just wanted to say again that I thought it was nice. Next time I update my web site I'm planning to link to your site because I think this and XeNoN's articles on detailing levels are very useful for beginners.

http://www.notthisway.com/writing/counterpoint.shtml 

E3M3 looks pretty good with the new settings. But now TyrLight is giving me a bad surface extent when I have any one of a set of six or so brushes in the map. I rebuilt each brush and repositioned them a little and I'm still getting the error. It's frustrated the hell out of me. 

Thanks. Glad it could be of some use. 

Just done a new mix (dark NRG) and uploaded it to my site, cool tunes, mixing dodgy at times...

http://www.dazv3.co.uk/thisisnrg.html 

That means qbsp is leaving a face in the bsp that is larger that 256 pixels in one dimension. If you're using treeqbsp, try playing with the "-subdivide" option and see if that helps. 

Im using dubsp -subdivide 256 and yet I get a bad surface extents runtime error in WINQUAKE (but only in winquake) when I load the map.

Would you have any ideas as to why, and how to avoid it?

Ive had a bit of a look around on the web, but it seems that that error is a bit vague and can have a few different causes, and nobody has a definitive list of all of them... 

this board is a bit fragile, not only does it not like apostophes, it wouldnt let me make a backslash smiley either! 

I think you'll find it does :-\ 

/me feels debased by my own smugness - I might have well as said please flame me ;) 

post your problem in the "mapping help" thread as well, to make sure everyone sees it. 

The engine error message "Bad surface extents" is commonly caused by having a non-solid (i.e. liquid/sky) texture in the map that is also missing from the wad (i.e. you get the compiler warning "Missing texture ...").

This is probably due to the fact that such a missing texture (that might be on a very large undivided brush face) will create problems for the engine when it silently replaces the missing texture with some other pattern (e.g. the character map) and this pattern is considered a solid texture.

The solid textured faces may not have any size (something about surface caches in the engine). This issue might be related to the one mentioned above.

Also in TreeQBSP/DuBSP, you can enable the option "-splitspecial" that will treat liquid/sky as normal solid brushes, i.e. subdivide them into smaller pieces.