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. 

ericw: normal smoothing?? so like phong shading? that would be insane. 

phong shading would be sweet... how will it be implemented though? Quake 2 allows surface flags to be set but there's nothing like that in Quake 1. 

might be to do it via textures. Basically have a version of the level which you just use to generate smoothing group data and compile before the other stuff or something. You could just have it be a bunch of textures that correspond to SG01, SG02, SG03..

That would probably be a pain in the ass to do though. Just plopping out dumb ideas here.

Or it could be integrated into the editor somehow, which just generates some file based on which faces the user has combined into a smoothing group. 

HL's light compiler uses Phong to shade smooth curves. You can also setup "smooth groups" in hammer that can tell the compiler what brushes to perform smooth lighting on. A good place to start! 

I think I remember playing around with WC and you could assign a value(-1?) to a brush face(I used an octagon) and then when you compiled the map you could not see any hard edges? If you looked at the floor you could tell it was an octagon but otherwise no.

Am I crazy or does anyone else remember this? 

Are you thinking of Quake2 mapping? because ArghRad added a feature for phong shading via that method. Quake2 let you specify surface properties per face, so you could stick values into properties to set up smoothing groups for the compiler. (IIRC, you set a brightness value for the face as the smoothing group number, but didn't turn on the face's 'emits light' flag and ArghRad would look for that pattern)

Quake's .map format doesn't support any per face values, so there's no place to store any values for the compiler to know which faces to smooth. 

That's it! Now I remember, it was When I was teaching a friend Quake2 mapping. Thanks. 

Trying to use your fgd with Hammer (not Jackhammer) causes it to crash. Any idea why this occurs? The standard fgd by czg works fine. 

I haven't tested it with Hammer at all, I imagine there some syntax craziness going on! 

*** WARNING 12: New portal was clipped away in CutNodePortals_r

*** WARNING 16: Texture __TB_empty not found

I got them while compiling a TB2-made map using qbsp from this branch. I've been compiling every so often to test things out and I mostly do not get any errors. Would just like to know what I could have changed that would have resulted in these errors (and hence what I should avoid doing in future). 

CutNodePortals_r is usually caused by complex brushwork, often occurs where several planes meet at one point and/or there are brushes with vertexes off the grid. If it gave coordinates, look there in your map to see what could be the cause.

Example, txqbsp_xt will report it like this:

WARNING:CutNodePortals_r: new portal was clipped away near (2592 -518 -40)

Texture TB_empty sounds like some kind of missing texture error where TB substituted "Texture __TB_empty" in it's place of its name.